British Comedian Stephen Merchant: Comedy Now ‘Policed by the Left’

British comedian Stephen Merchant, who famously co-created the original U.K. version of “The Office” alongside Ricky Gervais, has taken aim at the left for enforcing cancel culture.

During an interview with The Guardian, Merchant likened the situation to putting a “straitjacket” around comedians.

“But you do feel like there’s a sensitivity to the words before they’ve even heard the joke or the context,” he said. “And that is inevitably a straitjacket of sorts — it quashes experimentation.”

Commenting on cancel culture, Merchant argued there have always been limitations on comedy but there has been a notable flip in terms of which side of the aisle has enforced it.

“It seems to me that there’s always been policing of comedy, of there being … guardrails,” he said. “I think the difference is that it used to feel like it was the right that was policing it. It feels like it’s the left that’s doing it now, and it’s allowed the right to become the arbiters of free speech. Which does feel like quite a significant shift.”

Merchant pointed out the online reaction to a comedian’s joke can often be out of “proportion” to the joke itself. He noted stand-up comedians have grown more cautious because they “don’t want to spend weeks on Twitter trying to justify a joke.”

That being said, Merchant said he was aware “sensitivities shift over time and that people are allowed to criticize and query things” and that “we do look back at old comedy and think we wouldn’t do that anymore.”

“I have no objection to the sands shifting,” he added. “I think that makes sense, and I’m loath to become a kind of ‘old man of comedy,’ railing against the younger generation.”

Merchant emphasized the “freedom” of comedy in previous generations.

“And that’s easy for me to say as a white, heterosexual middle-class bloke, but it used to feel like the things you weren’t allowed to joke about were the very things you should,” he said.

“So for the older generation like me, you do feel a bit like there was a freedom there. And that it was your own conscience and judgment that meant you were the arbiter of your own taste,” he continued.

“But now it does feel like there’s a danger, that there’s a prescriptive list of things you can joke about,” he said. “Everything else is off limits, which is a hard thing to navigate when you’re trying to be creative.”