Comedian Jim Norton on Trevor Noah Backlash: ‘Mob of Self-Centered Narcissists’
Comedian Jim Norton has quite a lot to say about the outrage bubbling about new Daily Show host Trevor Noah, and expressed his feelings about the “increasingly reactionary mob of self-centered narcissists” in Time Magazine today.
Norton contends that, basically, Western culture has become a “tireless brigade of social-justice warriors” working their hardest to find something, anything, to be offended about. And Noah, of course, had committed the ultimate sin: saying things “that may be deemed even remotely offensive or upsetting by any segment of the population for any reason.”
And this outrage, Norton says, is an addiction:
Being outraged and upset and feeling bullied or offended are not only things we enjoy, they’re also things we have become thoroughly addicted to. When we can’t purposefully get our feelings hurt by a comedian, we usually find another, albeit less satisfying, source of indignation… I choose to believe that we are addicted to the rush of being offended, the idea of it, rather than believing we have become a nation of emasculated children whose only defense against an abyss of emotional agony is a trigger warning.
He looked through Noah’s controversial tweets and the only thing Norton found connected them was “the embarrassment I feel for anyone claiming to be offended by them.”
Norton’s only the latest comedian to push back against the Noah furor, after plenty of others leaped to Noah’s defense or mocked the outrage on Twitter. Patton Oswalt in particular mocked the outrage as a way of welcoming Noah to comedy in 2015.
You can read Norton’s full piece here.
[image via screengrab]
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