The New York Times has gone along with most of the media in strolling past comedian Jerry Seinfeld's provocative comments calling the younger generation too politically correct for comedy. Seinfeld told ESPN “I don't play colleges, but a lot of people tell me, ‘Don't go near colleges. They're so PC.’ They just want to use these words. ‘That's racist. That's sexist. That’s prejudice.’ They don’t even know what they’re talking about.”
The first New York Times mention appears to come in an odd, condescending criticism from culture reporter Dave Itzkoff, in a short piece in Friday's edition on comedian Colin Quinn's new stage show, to be directed by Seinfeld:
With an accent that’s as emblematically Brooklyn as the Coney Island Cyclone or an artisanal pickle store, the comedian Colin Quinn is preparing for a return to the New York stage in a new show that takes a satirical look at his hometown and its history.
The show, “Colin Quinn The New York Story,” will be presented Off Broadway at the Cherry Lane Theater next month, its representatives said Thursday, and will be directed by the comedian Jerry Seinfeld.
Itzkoff later made the extraneous, puzzling, tone-deaf aside that Seinfeld's honest comments would hurt his "man-of-the-people" bona fides.
(Perhaps some of Mr. Quinn’s working-class bona fides will rub off on Mr. Seinfeld, whose recent remarks on political correctness have seen his man-of-the-people status called into question.)
A couple of commenters wondered when Seinfeld was ever considered a "man of the people" as opposed to a very specific type of Manhattanite, and what his rejection of political correctness would have to do with his purported "man of the people" status anyway.
Itzkoff is also behind the news; as Newsbusters' Randy Hall reported, Quinn agreed with Seinfeld's assessment of political correctness on Fox & Friends Wednesday.
