On "Fox & Friends" Tuesday morning, co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck invited three white comedians -- Ryan Reiss, Cory Kahaney, and DC Benny -- to discuss the place of political correctness in comedy. Not surprisingly, all three agreed that it has no standing there, and that only liberals incapable of laughing at themselves would think otherwise.
Reiss began by telling Hasselbeck that he was doing a show at a Rhode Island college when a student left his show four minutes in, then hand-wrote a letter to the dean claiming that Reiss had "created an unsafe environment with my words." (Which is not an uncommon complaint, as I can testify, having taught at a very liberal university for a decade -- but it's a ubiquitous one, doled out to liberals and conservatives alike.)
Hasselbeck asked Kahaney whether "comedy is going down a road where it will be dead soon," to which she replied that "I don't think you can kill comedy...but you can suppress it, and that's what we're worried about."
Kahaney added that "a conservative audience is a better crowd," because "conservatives are able to laugh at themselves, [but] liberals are so afraid to be like, 'Oh yeah, that is funny, we do do that."
Hasselbeck turned to DC Benny, and asked him what he thought about comedians losing their livelihoods because they're "creating unsafe environments with their words."
"I'm a half-Jewish, half-German comedian married to a black woman with a Ph.D. who looks like an Indian, [and] we live in an Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn where everybody thinks I'm Puerto Rican," he said. "I'd have no act if I couldn't talk about my life. No act!"
"It used to be you would go to a college," Benny added, "and all the kids wanted to hear about reckless intercourse or drugs, the stuff that people laugh at -- putting things in your butt."
Hasselback wanted to know what "the lesson for liberals who aren't able to laugh at themselves" is, and Kahaney said "it doesn't do them any favors," explaining that while she supports Hillary Clinton, she can still laugh "at a good Hillary joke."
Watch the entire segment below via Fox News.
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