Tim Allen has worked as a comic for three decades, and he recently said that PC culture has never been more dangerous for comedians than it is right now.
Speaking during a PaleyFest panel for “Last Man Standing” in Beverly Hills, Calif., on Thursday, Allen lamented, “You don’t know what you’re going to say to offend people. It is really like dancing on the thinnest ice. I’ve been in the comedy world for 30 years as a comic and there’s nothing more dangerous right now for all of the comics I know, what we can and cannot say.”
‘Last Man Standing’ star Tim Allen on the difficulty of trying not to offend people: ‘It’s like dancing on the thinnest of ice’https://t.co/uEkt9aiVOt
— Fox News (@FoxNews) September 14, 2018
Of course, the line of offense varies wildly depending on the topic/target. Making fun of someone for identifying as an attack helicopter is liable to get you blackballed, but personally attacking a member of the Trump administration gets you a Netflix deal (at least until the ratings tank because no one wants to watch you parade around praising the murder of unborn babies).
Allen has addressed this blatant double standard many times in the past, saying in September 2017 that he believes his character’s conservative values were behind ABC’s decision to cancel “Last Man Standing.” He also defended Roseanne Barr after she was fired over a controversial tweet, and has compared being a conservative in Hollywood to living in Nazi Germany.
And Allen isn’t the only one. On Jerry Seinfeld’s Netflix series, “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee,” Seinfeld and fellow comic Zach Galifianakis opined how they can no longer play colleges because they’ve become places of “restricted thought”:
Jerry: It’s so weird that colleges have become these places where, of restricted thought, as opposed to thought freedom.
Zach: Well, there’s nothing liberal about shutting someone up.
Jerry: The problem with not allowing intolerant talk is now you’re intolerant.
Zach: Well, how do you judge what’s intolerant?
Jerry: Exactly.
Thankfully, Allen said at the PaleyFest panel that he doesn’t “like being told what I can and cannot say and who’s telling me what I can’t do” – and he’s going to bring “a little of that” attitude to the writer’s room of the new “Last Man Standing” series. “I really appreciate where these guys go because our writers are all over the map and with writing and just the stuff you do in your life,” he said.
For conservative audiences, the September 28th premiere can’t come soon enough.
