‘PC’ used to be good for a laugh, but not anymore

Back in the early ’90s it would have been hard to imagine a time would come when people would long for double denim, the glumness of grunge and Ethan Hawke’s patchy Reality Bites facial hair. Even more unfathomable: that there would be any affection for anything about that era’s nascent political correctness with its penchant for words like “womyn” and other idealistic but often ill-conceived efforts to reimagine the dictionary.

And yet! In the wake of my 30th college reunion last month at Brown University, a notorious locus for politically correct thought back in the day, those emergent PC exactitudes feel almost cute in their relative innocuousness. At that time, word purification rituals were experienced all in good fun or at least, in good fun-making. Thatch,

the most popular comic strip in The Brown Daily Herald, offered readers its absurdist antihero, Politically Correct Man — immediately amended to Politically Correct Person — because “the world needs someone to guide it through these role-changin’, gender-conflict-in,’ Berlin Wall-crumblin’ times.” (His archnemesis: Insensitive Man.)

Even at its peak, ’90s-style political correctness was at least as much self-satire as a movement to be reckoned with. With the exception of its most earnest practitioners — strategically isolated within semiotics departments and grad school dormitories — undergrads from across the political spectrum considered political correctness a passing fad or an attempt at academic esotericism rather than an actual recommendation for how to comport yourself in public. You could commit acts of linguistic gymnastics (denouncing, say, “capitalist patriarchal hegemonic discourse”) if the spirit moved you, but hardly anyone thought you had to.

Off campus, the culture seemed to agree. Carefree people of all ages walked around brashly declaring whatever mildly contrarian thing they were about to say as “obviously politically incorrect,” strictly for giggles and without fear of harassment by the verbal police. Few would have bothered reporting an untoward term, in part because social media did not yet exist, in part because they were too busy coming up with their own un-PC retort.

In 1992, two Harvard Lampoon

alums, Henry Beard and Christopher Cerf, published The Official Politically Correct Dictionary and Handbook, which mixed together actual terms of PC orthodoxy with fictional ones in a way that left you unsure which was which. Real or fake: assimilationism, carbo-centricism, chemically inconvenienced, heterosexually celibate, humyn, chair?

Thirty years later, on Amazon, a customer gave the book a worried one-star review, noting, “You’ll get in more trouble using this book than you were before.” These sensitivities are no longer a laughing matter. They are the stuff of moralizing retribution.

But back in benighted 1993, the year I graduated from college, we couldn’t fathom such censoriousness. That was the year Comedy Central introduced the political talk show Politically Incorrect, hosted by Bill Maher. Four years later, the show crossed over to network television — network television! — where ABC aired it until advertisers balked over comments Maher made about Sept. 11. The concern? Insufficient patriotism.

Expressing the opposite sentiment today — when merely referring to yourself as “American” is enough to be deemed “imperialist” — is what might get you in trouble. People have clearly lost their sense of humor.

In an angry and deeply polarized world, some people apparently mistake the ability to mock themselves with providing ammunition to the opposition. Human laughter is a great unifier, which may be another reason the broader culture seems so strenuously eager to avoid it.

Even in the ’90s, you could sense the country’s darkening mood as PC advocates became increasingly joyless in their messianic determination. In one

Thatch strip, PC Person wields his latest “book-o’-dogma, ‘How to Argue the PC Way,’” which he then smacks across Insensitive Man’s head. “Chapter 1,” PC Person explains. “If you don’t like what someone has to say, don’t let them say it!”

In the semi-serious preface to

The Politically Correct Guide and Handbook, the authors noted, “Language is not merely the mirror of our society; it is the major force in ‘constructing’ what we perceive as ‘reality.’ ” A focus on words as they “should” be, they observed, meant avoiding the world as it is, and what the authors referred to as “distracting side issues” such as equal pay for equal work, eliminating unemployment, poverty and homelessness, improving education and reining in the influence of money in electoral politics.

Yes, by calling these urgent concerns “distracting,” they were being ironic. And yes, we have been effectively distracted. But not, alas, by comedy.

Pamela Paul is a columnist for The New York Times.