The Muppet Show: Disney+ adds content warning of negative depictions of cultures

Did you watch it? It's actually not bad. It's different—and honestly, the parts where it holds too closely to the original are probably the weakest bits. When it does its own thing, it ends up being fun to watch. I still miss Gilbert Gottfried, though.

(Can you tell I've been watching these with the kids this weekend?)

And I had to look up this one:

> Beverly Sills: Most likely for the Chinese Gorillla Muppet.

Yeah, that one was pretty bad. I think a disclaimer is appropriate.

I get what you're saying. There are casualties in this effort to contextualize or remove the humor of previous decades. I totally agree about the Fawlty Tower episode. But I think it's easier to have simple rules than to try to evaluate these things on a case-by-case basis. Humor is subjective after all.

> Literally the only people actually being offended are - who...?

It's not really about being offended though is it? The ones being offended and actually complaining is just the tip of the iceberg.

This kind of humor can create attitudes that can be a constant pain in the side for certain groups of people. I mean, you've still got shit like this going on today : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cc1GhI1Dwyc

How would you approach this problem?

> probably the vast majority

Ugh, naw, not at that time if you ask me. Most comedians are not as smart and tactful as John Cleese. He was ahead of his time in many ways.

You can still get away with quite stereotypical humor today if you frame it correctly, and I think most comedians today are more clever about it. They're not all smarter now, there's just a better culture around it.

There was a show in Norway that was pulled from streaming because an actor was using "blackface". But that comedian/actor has a thing about playing lots of different characters (men, women, older, younger, etc), and in that case he just happened to portray a vaguely middle-eastern character. There was a big counter-reaction, particularly from immigrants saying that this wasn't offensive to them. And the show was put back online, with a disclaimer. So I think it shows that there is course-correction when the humor isn't actually in bad taste.

In other words, if the Muppets doesn't get "cancelled," is that evidence that "cancel culture" is a hoax, or is it evidence that "cancel culture" doesn't actually care about things like Swedish chefs, it only cares about conformity to a progressive worldview, which the Muppets arguably conform to?