Last night, I decided to break out of my woke bubble and challenge myself by attending Free Inquiry’s panel on comedy and cancel culture, located in the Salomon Center for ~Teaching~
As I stood in the freezing cold outside the auditorium, surrounded by representatives of every sports team as well as the entire incel community of Brown, I wondered if perhaps I was being unfair. Maybe these Title IX cases waiting to happen really wanted to learn about the nuances of comedy and cancel culture. Who was I – a woman – to judge? After all, we’ve only just acquired the right to vote.
My dreams of nuance and respectful conversation, however, were dashed as soon as Andrew Schulz (a stand-up ‘comedian’) said ‘titties’ and the crowd roared with laughter, baseball caps bobbing on their sturdy, square-shaped heads.
Worse than the huge groups guffawing were the men who decided to attend this event…alone? How very Harry Styles in Don’t Worry Darling of you. You are even more terrifying than the women woke police you claim to be scared of.
For the duration of the 90-minute panel, Andrew Schulz appeared to be in competition with himself for the title of most unlikeable person ever. To think that, last night, he was splayed out on the very same chair that Jennette McCurdy occupied not four months ago. How low we have sunk.
Indeed, when Schulz said that ‘white people don’t say the n-word anymore…when other people are around. Or they’re being recorded’, I was beginning to suspect that we wouldn’t have much in common. However, when he moved on to abortion and said he was worried that ‘the whole abortion thing’ would ‘be over’ before he got to release his podcast episode on it, I knew we’d found common ground. When the abortion ban was announced, I, too, was worried about all the abortion jokes that would soon go out of style!
Schulz then moved on to the topic of money. ‘Once someone gives you money’, he declared, ‘there are fucking rules. Once you take 20 mil and they say “spread those cheeks,” you better spread them cheeks!’ A bold statement to be making at an event funded by the Koch brothers. I wonder what they all get up to in the bedroom.
There were other very intelligent panelists at the event, but Schulz was funnier and more important than them, so they mostly stayed silent.
We then moved on to the Q&A portion of the evening, which consisted of white man after white man standing up and trying to be funny and/or interesting. So, a Noser meeting.
Things quickly turned sour when a Brown student named Jack dubbed safe spaces, trigger warnings, and microaggressions ‘methods to suppress free speech’. Someone in the audience then piped up that ‘the whole school is a safe space’. Imagine feeling safe on a university campus! Christina Paxson will hear about this!
Next, Henry – a Junior – got up and spoke his truth. ‘I have friends pull me into their dorm rooms when they have a hot take’, he complained, because they’re too nervous to say them in public. Oh dear. Henry and his friends feel like they can’t share their opinions! How sad! Thankfully, one of the panelists came to the rescue and urged Henry to keep speaking up for his beliefs. I second that. Please, Henry, share your thoughts! This is, after all, a safe space for those who think safe spaces are stupid.
Having just learned the term ‘microaggression’, Schulz wrapped up by saying that he planned to ‘microaggress all day’.
And so, it appears that free inquiry is – after all – just an excuse to be awful in the name of the 1st Amendment. But hey. What do I know about free speech or comedy? I’m only a woman! If the Koch brothers FIRE want to spend $30k for Andrew Schulz to refer to Ted Bundy’s victims as ‘those fucking loser bitches’, what’s a silly little girl like me to do?