Milan Kudera’s The Joke & Cancel Culture – Tablet Magazine
Years ago, a popular student at a university with a fondness for leftist politics cracked a joke to a girl he was interested in. She was taking a course with a characteristically progressive bent, and she was so engrossed in her work that she d seemingly forgotten he existed so he offhandedly poked a bit of fun at her progressive politics, hoping to at least elicit a reaction.
When he returned to school, he was instantly summoned for meetings with university officials. She d relayed his little wisecrack, and while he maintained his benign intentions, the officials dourly insisted that his words were offensive. Though he hoped that at least one of his fellow students would defend him after the incident became public, not a single person spoke up on his behalf.
You might find the contours of this story reminiscent of humorless dispatches from college campuses across the country, or the latest cancel culture mob churning out a tsunami of tweets aimed at transforming some anonymous person s awkward moment into a career-ending debacle. For me, this story brought me back to my senior year at Columbia University, where in the span of eight months, a girl who wrote a satirical essay titled Venmo Me For My Emotional Labor about being fed up with clueless oversharers was cruelly attacked across social media for her lack of basic human empathy (without a shred of irony, I might add), and the university s 116-year-old marching band, which had performed irreverent performance-slash-comedy shows to enliven campus spirits during finals season, voted to disband in the name of providing relief to the present suffering of the Columbia community.
That particular narrative, however, was not taken from Yale or Amherst, but from the pages of The Joke, a Czech novel published in 1967 by the writer Milan Kundera. The unlucky jokester, a man named Ludvik, is the novel s protagonist, and the university officials are campus representatives of the Czech Communist Party.