Humor is often the first casualty of repression.

Comedians were among the first victims of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Castro, and Kim Jong-un, in particular those who mocked the tyrants and their political cronies and programs. In fact, the concept of “political correctness” developed under Stalin as a rigid test for “acceptable” humor, art, and even music.

Now political correctness is running amok in American universities, and its first casualty is college humor. Today’s repressives are not the right-wing McCarthyites or religious fundamentalists who tried to censor the humor of my college generation; rather, they are the self-proclaimed “progressives” of the hard left — the new Stalinists on campus who shape the terrain of permissible speech in general, and humor in... Read More