“Cancel culture” has been a mainstream talking point since the mid-2010s, though its meaning has never been murkier. Is cancel culture when someone faces backlash for racist, sexist, or homophobic language (or even actual crimes, like sexual harassment and assault)? Or is cancel culture when someone gets actually canceled, like late night hosts Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel, who used their platforms to criticize and make fun of the right-wing government? Whichever way you lean, the culture wars have become a veritable minefield, and Steve Harvey has no interest in navigating it.
Asked on The Pivot Podcast (via Complex) about making “acceptable” jokes amid “cancel culture,” Harvey admitted it’s “very hard,” adding, “But that’s why I left stand-up in 2012, 2015, one of them. I left stand-up then because I had so many shows. I had built such a catalog of work. I was making money. I had to let something go. And if I tour on the weekends, I wouldn’t even have a family.” Of all his endeavors he chose to drop stand-up “because I saw the change coming,” he claimed.
Change is inevitable, Harvey argued. “You got to react or participate. So my participation was to get away from it because the cancel culture started becoming everywhere,” he said. “Comedy is too hard to do right now. And all you got to do is look now the way the cancel culture works.”
Comedians have been debating among themselves about whether comedy is “too hard,” whether it’s true that you can’t make certain jokes anymore. The empirical evidence suggests neither is true. There are still a lot of working comedians on the stand-up circuit. And many of them have specifically crafted their personas around saying things you’re supposedly “not allowed” to say. The entire Kill Tony comedy ecosystem has sprung up around the ethos that anything goes as long as it’s funny (or at least as long as Tony Hinchcliffe thinks it’s funny). Maybe cancel culture was more intimidating in the mid-2010s, but the last few years have proven that a lot of sins can be forgiven if you’re funny enough (and even if you’re not). But Steve Harvey’s still got a lot of jobs, so maybe he was too busy to notice that the pendulum has swung back in the other direction.
