Interesting point made by John Cleese in a video about comedy becoming politically correct. Specifically he contends that, "When people can't control their own emotions, they have to control someone else's behavior".
It's a fairly interesting point that helps clarify some of the Crybully antics on campuses, the cries of Trigger Warning and the demand that administrators cater to their emotional tantrums through politically correct censorship.
"And when you're around supersensitive people, you can't relax and be spontaneous because you have no idea what's going to upset them next. And that's why I've been warned recently, don't go to most university campuses."
"All humor is critical. If you start to say, 'We mustn't; we mustn't criticize or offend them," then humor is gone. With humor goes a sense of proportion. And then as far as I'm concerned, you're living in 1984,"
But of course the fanatical crybully has no sense of proportion. That's why they are the way they are.
The left is responding to these comments with the usual clamor of, "old white men should all die" and also "it's intolerance of crimethink, not Orwellian at all". A perfect example comes from TV Guide, which declares that, "Comedians only feel under attack because they keep digging in their heels and saying "you can't say anything anymore" instead of listening to the offended parties' objections, which causes the offended parties to intensify their rhetoric." Which is typical SJWish for "Shut up and stop complaining and listen to our complaints or we'll yell some more at you".
Meanwhile here's a little reminder of just how bad things have become on campuses.
As I listened to the kids hash out whom to invite, it became clear that to get work, a comic had to be at once funny—genuinely funny—and also deeply respectful of a particular set of beliefs. These beliefs included, but were in no way limited to, the following: women, as a group, should never be made to feel uncomfortable; people whose sexual orientation falls beyond the spectrum of heterosexuality must be reassured of their special value; racial injustice is best addressed in tones of bitter anguish or inspirational calls to action; Muslims are friendly helpers whom we should cherish; and belonging to any potentially “marginalized” community involves a crippling hypersensitivity that must always be respected...
When you talk with college students outside of formal settings, many reveal nuanced opinions on the issues that NACA was so anxious to police. But almost all of them have internalized the code that you don’t laugh at politically incorrect statements; you complain about them. In part, this is because they are the inheritors of three decades of identity politics, which have come to be a central driver of attitudes on college campuses. But there’s more to it than that. These kids aren’t dummies; they look around their colleges and see that there are huge incentives to join the ideological bandwagon and harsh penalties for questioning the platform’s core ideas.
Meanwhile—as obvious reaction to all of this—frat boys and other campus punksters regularly flout the thought police by staging events along elaborately racist themes, events that, while patently vile, are beginning to constitute the free-speech movement of our time. The closest you’re going to get to Mario Savio—sick at heart about the operation of the machine and willing to throw himself upon its gears and levers—is less the campus president of Human Rights Watch than the moron over at Phi Sigma Kappa who plans the Colonial Bros and Nava-Hos mixer...
There's plenty there worth mocking. But the first thing totalitarian states do is outlaw mockery of their own system.