Andrew Sullivan | The Daily Dish: Post-PC

Andrew Sullivan | Post-PC:

The scenes weren't regurgitating the warmed over prejudices of the past, like a Jay Leno monologue or Adam Sandler's appalling "The Longest Yard." They were playing with them. The writers and actors trusted the audience to be in on the joke, and to realize that the fun they were poking was sharp but not designed to wound. I'd put "South Park" firmly in the post-PC category, as well as Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Dan Savage. When Colbert asked me in all seriousness on his show last Tuesday, "When did you choose to be gay?" no one believed for a second that he was anti-gay. Everyone in the twenty-something audience laughed. This is all a great development, and a generational one - a sign that the humor-free PC '90s have melted into something much funnier, much more honest, and yet also inclusive. The other key figure, I think, is Dave Chapelle, a comic genius who has somehow managed to create comedy that is ferociously close to the edge politically and in clumsier hands could be discounted as bigoted or dealing in the crudest of stereotypes.