The New Seven Dirty Words: Culture, Diversity, Inclusion, Equity…
(or When the Jesters Go Quiet, Courage Must Speak)
I’ve long felt that mystics, comedians, and psychotherapists are three variations of the same calling. They point toward what is hidden, offering whatever mystery they have managed to untangle for our good, and in doing so they wake us. Comedians wake us with laughter. Sometimes their words sting, sometimes they simply surprise, but the best of them help us grow and keep us safe. They are canaries in the coal mine, alarms in the dark. When the air turns toxic or the house begins to burn, these are the voices we most need to rattle us and kick us out of our comfort zone.
That is why it matters when the alarms are silenced. When Jimmy Kimmel is suspended for a monologue, or when Jon Stewart’s show ends amid disputes about what topics are safe to cover, or when Stephen Colbert faces calls for cancellation over political satire, these are not just media squabbles. They aren’t just the latest signs of a crumbling democracy. They are spiritual dangers. These are the jesters in the king’s court, the prophets with microphones instead of scrolls. They go where the rest of us cannot, naming truths too heavy for polite conversation. Their superpower is to get us laughing and in an instant pivot us from haha to aha, and just like that we have a new way of seeing the world. When they are gagged, we are not just losing jokes. We are losing one of the last cultural spaces where hypocrisy can be mocked, illusions dismantled, and power forced to squirm.
Take the topic of race in America. Nowhere has this prophetic role been more vital. Race in America has always needed prophets. Not the ones in suits at podiums, but the ones in smoky clubs, hot lights in their eyes, with a crowd hungry for laughter and truth. While politicians polished promises and pundits spun sugar into narrative, comics stood up and said the things everyone else swallowed.
The language wasn’t polite. Sometimes it was jagged, offensive even. But truth rarely arrives in polite packaging. Jesus himself called the religious elite a “brood of vipers.” Not because he enjoyed the sting of cruelty, but because sometimes only venom cuts through the armor of denial.
On that note, can you imagine Jesus as a stand-up comic? It would be divine. (Sorry.)
See?!? That’s why we need the greats. Richard Pryor stood at the edge of his pain and turned it into laughter, naming police brutality when few dared. His “police chokehold” routine in Live in Concert (1979) was more than a joke; it was a lament, a howl disguised as humor. Pryor forced America to see what it refused to see: a country so callous it could weigh lives differently based on skin color. Chris Rock continued that legacy, carving America’s racial contradictions into unforgettable soundbites attacking racial injustice in ways that cut like a mystic’s koans disguised as comedy (Bring the Pain, 1996; Tamborine, 2018). And perhaps the most searing moment in recent years, Dave Chappelle’s 8:46 (2020), where he dropped comedy altogether to deliver something closer to a sermon, grief-soaked truth-telling in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. In many ways, Dave is still carrying the torch Richard Pryor lit decades ago, and the fact that it still burns so hot is less a tribute to comedy than an indictment of our refusal to learn.
And then there is George Carlin.
If Chappelle’s lament was a sermon, Carlin’s fury was demolition.
If Pryor turned pain into laughter, Carlin turned anger into clarity. He was not just making us laugh, he was detonating illusions. His famous “Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television” routine was never really about profanity, it was about power. Who gets to decide which words are allowed? Who decides what can be spoken out loud and what must remain unspoken? Carlin was not obsessed with swear words, he was obsessed with the machinery of censorship itself, with the absurdity of a culture that polices syllables while letting violence and corruption run unchecked. He was the demolition crew, tearing down the polite facades so we could see the scaffolding of control underneath.
That fight is not relic or nostalgia, it is here. As a professor, my forbidden list now includes not Carlin’s seven, but words like “culture,” “diversity,” “inclusion,” “equity.” The only thing dirty about these words is the attempt to censor them. There is nothing more offensive than the fact that we can no longer talk about racism and discrimination without someone slapping a hand over our mouths. Carlin showed us the absurdity of banning curse words while letting cruelty run free. Today we are banning the very words that could help us name and heal our cruelty.
If Carlin’s stage was a wrecking ball, Jon Stewart’s desk was a scalpel. With a wry smile and raised eyebrow, he sliced through political spin night after night, cutting until the absurdity lay bare. He didn’t pretend to be neutral; he pretended to be human in a media landscape that had forgotten how. Stephen Colbert, in his early Colbert Report years, took that scalpel and turned it into satire as high-wire mysticism, inhabiting a blustering pundit so perfectly that the real pundits sometimes missed the joke. Later, as a late-night host, he carried the torch with warmth and wit, showing that truth could still sneak into millions of living rooms through a monologue. And even Jimmy Kimmel, who began with pure comedy, has had moments when laughter cracked into lament: tears in his eyes after the Las Vegas shooting, or his raw advocacy for children’s health care, reminding us that comedians don’t just deliver punchlines; sometimes they carry our collective grief when we cannot bear to speak it ourselves. Night after night, the blue glow of late-night televisions became its own kind of town square, where jokes doubled as news bulletins.
They didn’t try to win arguments. They tried to help us see the absurdity—and laugh, even if the laugh caught in our throats. They weren’t offering talking points. They were offering themselves. Their humanity.
These hosts are not perfect prophets, no prophet ever is, but in a culture where politicians rehearse lies and corporations script narratives, it matters that we still have public jesters with enough reach, wit, and courage to tell a bit of the truth.
The mystic’s job, whether cloaked in robes or wrapped in profanity, has always been to drag hidden truths into the light. Meister Eckhart risked charges of heresy to talk about a God found in silence rather than cathedrals. James Baldwin, who called himself a witness, insisted that America could not heal until it faced its lies. Carl Jung, sitting with patients in Zurich, warned that the greatest danger was not neurosis but unconsciousness, the things we refuse to see about ourselves. Different uniforms, same vocation, they were all trying to unmask illusions before the illusions killed us.
Which is why the gagging of comedians, or mystics, or therapists, is never just about controlling a few voices. It is about keeping the rest of us from waking up. When the jesters are silenced, the whole kingdom dozes off. And history has never been kind to kingdoms that sleep through their alarms. The silence may begin with a late-night monologue cut short, but it ends with an entire people forgetting how to laugh, how to grieve, and how to tell the truth out loud. This is how kingdoms, nations, and our communities die: silence.
So maybe the first rebellion is as small as it is holy: to laugh when the world wants us hushed, to speak when silence feels safer, to resist the sleep history keeps warning us about. Because the question isn’t only whether comedians will be silenced. It’s whether we will. Each of us carries a little stage, a little microphone. Maybe not with hot lights and a crowd, maybe just at the dinner table, in a boardroom, or on a walk with a friend. The call is the same: don’t let that stage go quiet. Listen for the prophets in our midst—especially the ones who arrive with punchlines—and let their courage summon our own. Laugh. Lament. Tell the truth. Wake somebody up.
And so, may we not be silent.
May we have the courage to listen when voices rise with laughter and lament.
May we laugh when laughter feels dangerous.
May we grieve when grief feels inconvenient.
May we tell the truth, even when it trembles in our throats.
And may we find the courage to speak now, before someone decides our words are too dangerous to be spoken.
I went back and re-watched Dave Chappelle’s 8:46 while writing this, and it still reverberates with the same raw power it carried the first time I saw it. It’s free on youtube. Viewer discretion advised.
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