Yahoo Lifestyle Seth Rogen Says the ‘Complaint That Comedy’s Harder Than It Used to Be Is Not Valid’ and Asks: ‘Why Shouldn’t It Be Hard?’
Seth Rogen gave an interview to Esquire magazine as part of a new cover story and pushed back against the notion that comedy is now harder to pull off. Jerry Seinfeld went viral last year for saying TV comedy had been killed by the extreme left and P.C. culture, although he later said he regretted making such a claim and called it “not true.”
“The complaint that comedy’s harder than it used to be is not a valid complaint,” Rogen said. “Maybe it was too easy before. And why should it be? Why shouldn’t it be hard? I like that my job is hard, because I’m trying to do something that requires a huge amount of resources and people’s time and energy.”
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While Rogen acknowledged the line between acceptable and offensive is moving, he argued that’s always been the case and it’s nothing new for comedians to have to navigate this fine line.
“What do you wish you could say?” he asked. “What do you feel has been taken from you? It’s always funny when people are like: Oh, they could never make the Diversity Day episode of ‘The Office’ today. You can still watch it…I’m constantly meeting teenagers who love ‘Superbad’ and who think it holds up, and none of them are like: How fucking dare you have said that?”
Not even Donald Trump becoming president again has Rogen worried about the state of comedy, at least from his perspective. “It’s not like we sit down like, all right, new president, what movie do we write?” he said. “I assume that’s what Adam McKay is doing, but it’s not how we choose what we’re going to work on next.”
After Seinfeld’s comment last year about comedy being hard to do now because of P.C. culture, many other comics were asked to weigh in on the debate. His longtime “Seinfeld” co-star Julia Louis-Dreyfus appeared on the “On With Kara Swisher” podcast around the same time and pushed back against the idea that comedy has in any way suffered due to a changing social landscape.
“There’s a lot of talk about how comics can’t be funny now,” said Louis-Dreyfus. “I think that’s bullshit. Physical comedy and intellectual comedy and political comedy, I think, has never been more interesting, because there’s so much to do.”
Head over to Esquire’s website to read Rogen’s latest cover story in its entirety.
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