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Political Correctness Gone Mad
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Don't you mean "Northern-Hemisphere-temperate-climate winter solstice"?
"And in a gutless act of political correctness, 'Pizza Day' will now be known as 'Italian-American Sauced Bread Day.'"
Bleat, bleat, creature of non-specific colour and species, have you any home-spun fabric? Yes sir or madam, yes sir or madam, enough to share, but not in a communist way. One is for the titled person of non-specific gender, one is for the other titled person of non-specific gender, and one is for the child of non-specific age, height and gender, who co-exists in harmony with the lane, but not in a gay way.
This title, taken from an infamous Catch Phrase of the Daily Mail, a British tabloid, can refer to one of two things.
In some cases, this might be literally about political correctness taken too far, presented through a Granola Girl or Soapbox Sadie who embodies the negative aspects of the PC movement.
Alternatively, along the same lines, a governmental authority (often a local council) is accused of being over-zealous to the point of parody in trying to avoid offense to minority groups - not unlike the Culture Police but in the other direction. Certain words or phrases are said to have been "banned", as if Chipping Sodbury Borough Council has any power over the English Language. In particularly severe cases, what is being 'banned' in order to spare the offense of minority groups are things which even the minority groups openly state that they are not offended by, as no reasonable person would be. Often, the body in question are not only being overly cautious, they're also naively playing right into the hands of the kind of bullying bigots who object to any kind of tolerant treatment of these groups by giving them a platform to complain about how 'oppressed' they are.
Usually, a range of urban myths are presented as examples of Political Correctness Gone Mad, such as ...
- Blackboards in school being renamed "Chalkboards" to avoid offending black people.
- Some schools having a "holiday tree" every "Winter Holiday Season," or even more drastic ...
- City councils "banning" Christmas to avoid offending Jews, Muslims, pagans, and other religious/non-religious folk.
- Manhole covers being renamed "Personnel Access Units" to avoid offending women.
Though cries of this are also raised from appropriate Real Life examples, such as...
- The taking down of decades old nativity scenes from public property.
- The IRS attempting to revoke a Church's tax-exempt status due to its political activity (a violation of the regulations governing tax-exemption).
- Affirmative action "quotas" in college admissions.
Probably better not to argue over those ones though.
There's also a rather pervasive tendency for some commentators to cite instances of over-the-top health and safety legislation. Because it is politically correct (as in the best move) to be seen as doing something. Not strictly this trope however.
All of this is especially ironic, considering that Political Correctness took on its contemporary meaning when the radical left began using it as a self-aware joke about the intrusion of Academic feminist and socialist argot into their everyday lives.
On the other hand, the satire may be pointed in the other direction; the characters using the phrase may be the kind of far-right-wing conservative who sees the iron maiden as a soft punishment for shoplifting, in the way that Daily Mail readers are generally seen. On a linguistic level, these people can often be heard bemoaning the loss of the word "gay" to the English Language, or that the British national dish is now chicken tikka masala instead of fish and chips or roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, despite the fact that chicken tikka masala was invented in Glasgow. The subtext (or text) of these characters is usually that they're the type of bigots and racists who are seething about the fact that their N Word Privileges have been revoked.
For more censorship-related hilarity see also Scunthorpe Problem.
Examples of actual political correctness
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Comic Books
- Marvel Comics' Black Panther once changed his name to "Black Leopard" to avoid association with the actual Black Panthers
 . Of course, this was in 1972, when the latter were active, but still...
- It was changed back very quickly because in the Marvel Universe the Black Panther is a name that goes back centuries and BP pointed out that he wasn't going to let himself be defined by a group of people he disagreed with anyway.
- After Infinite Crisis, the DC Comics Christmas one shot was going to be named "Infinite Christmas". It was solicited and advertised as such, but when it actually came out it was called "Infinite Holiday", pretty much eradicating the original pun.
- For a brief period in X-Factor, mutants were known as "genetically challenged" or "geecees" for short. The character who coined the phrase was being funny, but it still caught on . . .
Film
- The movie PCU is a Wacky Fratboy Hijinx film set against the backdrop of an I-can't-believe-it's-not-Berkeley college where everybody protests everything. The movie's climax actually had the students protest that they were not going to protest.
- Parodied in Undercover Brother; the predominately black B.R.O.T.H.E.R.H.O.O.D organisation has exactly one white employee, Lance (who is stereotypically 'white' — i.e nerdy, uncool and lame), who only has his job there because of affirmative action. He's often heard complaining about their politically incorrect attitudes towards him.
Lance: Always trying to shut the white man down.
Conspiracy Brother: THAT'S RIGHT! That's Right!... Oh, ain't right
- At the beginning of Zack and Miri Make a Porno, Zack's Black Best Friend accuses his boss (who is Asian) of racism because he wants him to work on "Black Friday". Later, we learn that he successfully filed a lawsuit over this.
- In the remake of the film The Ladykillers, one of the characters (a foul-mouthed, "gangsta" black teen) is fired for hitting on a female customer. When he hears he's fired, he says his boss is doing it because he's black. The entire cleaning staff is black, and the guy doesn't fall for it until they bribe him.
Literature
- Kurt Vonnegut's short story Harrison Bergeron takes place in a future dystopia where everyone has been made equal by handicapping devices which curtail excess intelligence, strength, creativity, beauty, or any other natural advantage (and if you had an unnatural advantage, such as skill due to training, you were only allowed to use it to make yourself average). There's even a government official (The "Handicapper General") whose job is to oversee this. She's fond of using shotguns as a tool of equality. The TV movie had a similar take. The government remakes the world to look like the 1950s (because that's when Americans are thought to have been happiest); the death penalty is enforced—on live television—for crimes like jaywalking; in schools, you fail if you score too low... but also if you score too high; you're supposed to be embarrassed if you beat someone in chess too easily... And people are in favor of all this. One government official (in order to rule, of course, they must be free of the devices that inhibit them) explains to Harrison in a borderline non-sequitur that while this has resulted in a marked decline in, for example, the arts, if it had meant an end to atrocities like what happened in World War II, he would put the gun to Beethoven's temple (they were listening to Beethoven while watching footage of World War II) himself. (This was meant to lampoon what Objectivists and conservatives thought communists were like in the Cold War.)
- Also, in Sirens of Titan, the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent has people handicap themselves so that everybody is equal—for instance, a good runner always carries a heavy bag to slow him down, or somebody with good eyesight wears glasses that nearly blind him.
- Some Discworld novels feature the Campaign for Equal Heights, who protest about using terms like "short weight", and insist employers should hire three dwarfs for every two humans because humans are half again as tall. Most of their campaigners are human; dwarfs are baffled by the whole thing. (And if they do feel insulted by humans, they can make their feelings quite clear without any help, except possibly a battleaxe. Generally, though, a dwarf will answer such insults by outworking a human, making better stuff, getting more money, and buying his business out from under him.)
- There is also at least one human who has renamed himself Strong-in-the-arm and cranked up his prices because "Dwarf Made" is a synonym for quality. The campaign for equal heights can't complain because it would require them to draw attention to his height as a disqualifying point.
- There are also the
undead "differently alive", not the same as dead "living impaired" (or more rarely "vitally challenged") persons.
- "Differently alive" is those who still live, like vampires (hereditary) and banshees. "Living impaired" counts those who have died, but are still walking around, like zombies. Except in rare instances that those who have died and aren't walking around are considered lazy by people who should really know better (Reg Shoe, mostly). There was also, for a brief time, a group of humans who wanted to protect troll rights. Trolls never joined, because they thought they already had plenty of rights, what with being multi-ton masses of living stone.
- Well, there is a Silicon Anti-Defamation League...
- In Goblet of Fire and continuing on afterward, Hermione founds S.P.E.W. in order to free the house elves from slavery. The majority of the characters roll their eyes at this, suggesting that Hermione is taking it too far. It's later revealed that even the elves are against it, since (aside from one specific example) they like being slaves. In a later subversion though, it becomes quite clear that the House Elves are frequently abused by their masters, which seems an abused-spouse level wrong whether the elves are happy with the situation or not, suggesting Hermione is not as crazy as thought. Word Of God has it that she goes on to a happy career in the Ministry of Magic, working for better treatment of house-elves.
- To clarify the situation, though, it's not the abuse they like... it's the work. They gain personal satisfaction from being hardworking servants. The abuse they can live without...
- The thing Hermione doesn't grasp is that at least for the non-abused House Elves, freeing them isn't the equivalent of liberating a slave in their eyes; it's the equivalent of sacking them in disgrace.
- Hermione's mistake is in assuming that Dobby was the norm-she should have paid more attention to Winky, who, having been hired on by Dumbledore after her freeing by Barty Crouch, is so distraught by the clothes that she refuses to do any work, instead choosing to spend all her time sitting in the corner getting slammed on butterbeer (a non-alcoholic drink probably something in the vein of near-beer) and wallowing in depression. She surfaces from her moping only long enough to chastise people who say bad things about her ex-master and be offended about her salary. Dobby at one point confides that he has to do all the cleaning work in Gryffindor Tower because the other other elves are so offended by Hermione's little knitted caps that they won't go near the place.
- Hermione's seems that she misunderstood the elves way of thinking in Deathly Hallows.
- The non-fiction book Who Stole The News mentions an incident when a reporter on an aircraft carrier was reprimanded for saying that the blast from a jet plane could "blow a man overboard". He was told to change it to 'person', whereupon he pointed out a) there were no women on board US navy aircraft carriers in a combat zone (it was the first Gulf War) and b) it was a Man Overboard drill not a Person Overboard drill.
- A story by Connie Willis called Ado, in which a high school student was trying to get her fellow classmates to read Shakespeare's plays while increasingly bizarre censorship blanked out the text entirely. For example, one group got Polonius's death in Hamlet censored because "curtains don't kill people, people kill people." Moreover Interflora wanted the scene where Ophelia is gathering flowers removed because it reflected badly on flowers. In the end only the very first scene between the guards complaining about the cold night was left. It was short some lines to boot.
- Incompetence by Rob Grant is set in a future United States of Europe where (based on actual laws proposed in France) it is illegal to discriminate candidates for employment not only on the grounds of gender, age, race or creed, but on actual ability to do the job, with predictable results.
- MAD Magazine, appropriately enough, had an article like this wherein at the close of the article one person got to join the NBA despite being dead.
- Let's not forget about the horrible circus accident where a six-foot-tall "midget" clown suffocated inside a clown car along with his three-foot-tall co-workers because of being hired via affirmative action.
- A sketch from Not the Nine O'Clock News went even further: the dead worker should be paid overtime because he spends so much time in the office. Tom Lehrer did almost exactly the same.
- A duo of "children's books" called Politically Correct Bedtime Stories take this trope and run wild with it, to the point of parody and turning the old classics into something new and amusing in their own right. Ant and the Grasshopper? Ant gets arrested for illegal stockpiling. Princess and the Pea? The "Princess" turns out to be a medium who channels many different spirits, which makes for interesting mealtimes at the castle. Little Mermaid? The rescued prince ends up getting a genetic procedure done so that he becomes half-man, half-prawn, instead of her going to live up with him. And then there was the "Politically Correct Alphabet"...
- Though this is never explicitly stated in the book, it's likely that Political Correctness Gone Mad played a role in the development of the Utopia Justifies The Means society of The Giver. Even color is eliminated. Not just skin color — all color.
- There is a story called The Highest Treason by Randall Garrett. A society where you cannot say that one man can be better than another in anything, promotion is strictly according to age, and that society is quickly losing a war against aliens. So, the protagonist, as a desperate patriot, joins the enemy, helps them conquer a planet, and slaughters the people there, showing the humanity that one person can be worse than another. In the end, the humanity is victorious, and their philosophy is now that one man cannot be better than another in everything.
- The backstory of Fahrenheit 451 gives this as the reason for the censorship and banning of virtually all printed literature.
- The second Odd Thomas book, Forever Odd, has a hand in this. The Pico Mundo high school football team used to be called the Braves. Someone got it into their head that this offended the Native Americans in the area and so the school was forced to change their name to the Gila Monsters. They call themselves the Monsters, though, saving some embarrassment. The really stupid thing about this? NONE OF THE INDIANS WERE COMPLAINING.
Music
Television
- Some TV shows will have someone use the term "pot calling the kettle black", and the black people will give this person a look. Do people in real life think this term is racist? Or do writers think Viewers Are Morons about it?
- Scrubs: where Elliot had apparently been practically assaulted for singing "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" at a karaoke, and outright told she, as a white person, could never try to sing that song. At the end of the episode she does again and is given a murderous look by a black doctor.
- In a 30 Rock episode, Liz discovered that she simply could not tell her black date that she disliked him as a person without being Mistaken For Racist. At the end of the episode, the following conversation is set to inspirational music:
Liz: Can't one human being not like another human being? Can't we all just not get along?
Steven: Liz, I wish it could be like that. And maybe someday our children or our children's children will hate each other like that, but it just doesn't work that way today.
Liz: So what you're saying is that any woman that doesn't like you is a racist.
Steven: No, no, no, no, no. Some women are gay.
- In the first episode of My Name Is Earl, Earl refers to a gay man as "gay", then to avoid offending him follows up with, "Sorry... Homosexual-American?"
- A Touch Of Frost has Detective Frost wincing every time he accidentally uses a phrase like 'keeping in the black' in front of his black coworker. She eventually tells him that he doesn't need to alter the English language for her.
- An episode of The Thin Blue Line parodied this, with Fowler ordered to get everyone at the station up to standard on political correctness. He makes a series of embarrassingly awful attempts to express enlightened views about race, gender and sexuality: "That would be the pot calling the kettle ... er ... African-American!"
- The main schtick of Dean Pelton on Community is going overboard with political correctness.
Video Games
- When Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa was still running, it featured this trope for the holiday season. The AFS referred to it as "Seasonal Holiday Observance" or SHO, where major military bases would sport a "Festive Seasonal Holiday Observance Flora" (Christmas tree), under which soldiers could find "Holiday Hats" (a Santa Claus hat). The political correctness was probably tongue-in-cheek given the overblown military acronym style of the names.
- Graham Nelson's seminal interactive fiction game Curses used the phrase, "Call a spade a spade." This lead to protests from a surprising number of people who thought this was a racist phrase, when in fact it comes from ancient greek and really does refer to spades.
Web Original
- On Homestar Runner, resident Granola Girl Marzipan hosts a disturbingly politically correct school program called L.U.R.N. in the Strong Bad Email coloring. Students are referred to as "life-blossoms", classes are in a variety of environmentally conscious topics such as "eco-algebra" and "talking to animals", and coloring is done with crayons that have "politically correct" names (like "Crimson Suggestion" for "red") and can't actually be used to color, "so that no one life-blossom shines brighter than any other".
- In Red Vs Blue, Andy is a sentient bomb, and Caboose tells everyone to refer to him as an "Explosive-American."
- Don't even get Doc started with this. Any time anyone says anything that could possibly be construed as offensive toward anyone at all, he jumps in with the inane politically correct version. Most notable in one of the holiday specials, where he constantly corrects even himself.
- Sarge, of course, would have nothing to do with it. It doesn't work out well for him.
- This school announcement.
Webcomics
Western Animation
- In a latter-day episode of The Simpsons, the school is segregated according to gender by a staunch feminist, and Lisa is so disappointed with said feminist's "How do numbers make you feeeeeeeeel?" style of teaching (complete with light show) that she crossdresses herself into the boy school.
- In the 90's flashback episode, Marge's college teacher Stephan is being consistently and obnoxiously politically correct about everything he says and does, going way beyond an ordinary Soapbox Sadie.
- In an earlier episode, the kids bought ice cream from an ice cream van called "Native American Ice Cream (formerly Big Chief Crazy Cone)".
- South Park does this one several times a season. In "Death Camp of Tolerance", the kids are sent to the titular camp after they complain about Mr. Garrison being "gay"... when they're trying to say that Mr. Garrison is performing sexual acts in front of the class.
- It was also subverted in "Death Camp of Tolerance", when, after having just emerged from the Museum of Tolerance - where the boys were encouraged by the curator and their parents to be accepting of the life-choices of others - the curator yells at a smoker to go away (even though he was outside and away from the doors), with the parents joining in by calling him "dirty lungs", among other things.
- Additionally, in "With Apologies to Jesse Jackson", Randy Marsh (Stan's dad) gets hounded everywhere as "that Nigger Guy" he goes because he accidentally used a racial epithet on national television, (A quick explanation of how- It was wheel of fortune, the bonus round, the clue was "People that annoy you" and the letters were N_GGERS. The answer? Naggers.) even after he literally kisses Jesse Jackson's ass while seeking forgiveness. This episode slowly turns into a subversion of the trope by the end, though, when Congress becomes so outraged by the oppression of Randy Marsh and others like him that they ban the epithet "Nigger Guy", stating that while "nigger" and "guy" are perfectly acceptable words on their own, put together they're unspeakably repressive.
- "Mr. Hankey, the Christmas Poo" in which Mrs. Brofloski protests the school's Christmas play so that he school will remove the overtly Christian elements. The priest counter-protests that if they take Christ out of Christmas, they'll need to take out all the stuff about Santa Claus as well. They have to take down the Christmas tree due to objections by environmentalists and the lights because it may offend epileptics. One person even claims to be offended by mistletoe, though they don't explain why. So, what they get is an abstract avant-garde musical, with all the third graders prancing around in black unitards to ambient music and chanting. It's not received well, and the audience breaks out into a riot.
- In the Sealab 2021 episode "The Policy", nearly everyone on Sealab abuses the affirmative action policy to get promoted to Captain... except for Quinn, who's too proud and too sensible, and Stormy, who's too stupid.
- The animated show Pelswick had some examples of this. The title character, who uses a wheelchair, is often referred to as "differently able". In one episode he anonymously published a cartoon in the school paper that people objected to on the grounds that "differently able" people might be offended by it... and then blithely withdrew their complaints when it came out that Pelswick was the artist.
- Lampshaded in Venture Brothers where Jefferson Twilight fights Blackulas for a living. When asked if he only fights African American vampires, he responds "No, sometimes I fight British vampires, they don't have African-Americans in England! ...Look, I specialize in hunting black vampires, I don't know what the PC name for that is."
- In an episode of Rick And Steve, the gang goes to San Francisco for Pride Week, only to be shunned by the rest of the gay population for being normal-acting gay people, rather than extreme stereotypes. Also, the itroduction to the Mayor's Welcome Speech lasts the entire episode, as he is sure to include the politically correct term for every sexual preference imaginable.
Stand-up Comedy
- Russell Peters has a piece where he's playing Bla... oh, sorry, African-Americanjack.
Examples of people complaining about it
Anime and Manga
- There's an episode of Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei about prejudice. At the end of the episode, Nozomu is about to have gay sex because he apparently thought turning down advances from a gay man is offensive.
Comics
Literature
- In the first Harry Potter book, Uncle Vernon is presented as a Mail reader and makes some comments indicating a reactionary viewpoint.
- In the book version of Layer Cake, one chapter shows the protagonist at a barbershop with his con artist friend, who is pretending to be plummy aristocrat "Lord Hugo". In this persona, he expresses some very "Mailesque" views (reinstating national service, complaining about giving Hong Kong back to the "slope heads", etc.) and hearty endorsement from both the other patrons and the staff. At the same time, the protagonist is pretending to be a South American footballer who doesn't speak English and is addressed to his face as a dago and similar ethnic slurs.
- Harry Flashman is an interesting case. He subverts Politically Correct History through being a man of views typical to his kind: extremely racist and politically incorrect, speaking of what we would consider unambiguously good individuals like anti-slavery activists as crazy liberals. However, the author increasingly uses him to point out the follies of the above as the series progresses.
- Granted, he lived before political correctness existed, but Hugh "Bulldog" Drummond is definitely one of the most reactionary heroes in Edwardian mystery/suspense, even though he was written in an already pretty reactionary time. Drummond was fond of flogging communist villains to an inch of their lives and these villains tended to be Jewish intellectuals. In one encyclopedia of mystery fiction, the editor posits that were Drummond an actual person he would likely have become a committed Black Shirt during the 1930s and 1940s.
Music
- Brad Paisley and the Buckaroos released the Cowboy Christmas Song, with the word Christmas getting bleeped, then the word White, finally leading them to sing the original version, ignoring the bleeps.
Television
- DCI Gene Hunt from Life On Mars is highly politically incorrect and rather popular with the viewing public because of it. One of his more printable quotes is:
Gene: Dealers are so scared, we're more likely to get Helen Keller to talk. The Paki's in a coma, the evidence is about as hard as Liberace's dick when he's looking at a naked woman, and all in all, this case is going about as fast as a bunch of spastics in a magnet factory! [ Beat] What? Sam: I think you left out the Jews....
- One subplot on The Sopranos involved the fiercely Italian guys from Tony's crew butting heads with a native American group protesting their town's Columbus Day parade.
- In one episode of Jonathan Creek, a police officer who rails against the death penalty being abolished turns out to have been the murderer and becomes the subject of a rather dark version of Hypocritical Humor.
- From Doctor Who:
Shakespeare: "Who are you, exactly, and, more to the point, who is this gorgeous blackamoor lady?"
Martha (British, of African descent): "What did you say?"
Shakespeare (apologizing): "Oops. Isn't that a word we use nowadays? An Ethiop girl, a swarth, a Queen of Afric?"
Martha (angry): "I can't believe I'm hearing this…"
The Doctor: "It's political correctness gone mad."
- An entire episode of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle is an extensive deconstruction of this phrase.
- The entire series of Love Thy Neighbour. Interestingly, it was made during a time when political correctness extended as far as not using the "N" word (at least not in public), but it seems to make a mockery of racism and intolerance as a whole despite the liberal use of derogatives.
- Jeff Dunham's Very Special Christmas Special lampshades this trope at least twice:
Jeff: Well, Walter, you look very festive. Happy Holidays!
Walter: You know, there's something I've been wanting to say for a while: Screw you, it's Merry Christmas!
- And later, with Achmed the Dead Terrorist, who has donned a Santa Claus hat for the occasion:
Jeff: I like your Christmas hat.
Achmed: Oh, don't say "Christmas"; it's a Holiday Hat.
Jeff: Why can't I say Christmas?
Jeff: You're afraid of offending people? But you're a terrorist; you kill people.
(beat)
Achmed: That's different. Killing folk's is easy; being Politically Correct is a pain in the ass!
Western Animation
- The actual phrase is used on two separate occasions in the animated show Bromwell High.
- On one occasion, one of the teachers suggests kidnapping someone and when told that's illegal he utters the phrase.
- In Looney Tunes: Back In Action, Porky Pig and Speedy Gonzalez complain about not getting much work because of this.
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