Comedian Jerry Seinfeld’s recent statement that he won’t perform in colleges any more, for this sociologist, highlights how important decades and time are in modern society. When do generations come to an end, and where are the boundaries that separate them? What stops an older generation and starts a new one? When a famous Boomer generation entertainer is suddenly rejected by Millennials, surely light is being shed on these questions.
What is the cause of this rupture? Its protagonist blames the younger generation’s changed values and outlook. “They’re so PC,” he says. What Seinfeld means by political correctness is less important than the fact that he identifies the younger generation as having a changed view of the world. Here we find two generations on the cusp of change, with the older one discovering that the younger does not appreciate it. For Jerry Seinfeld, the young are incomprehensible for not understanding the satirical use of racism and sexism which was the common currency of Boomers. In return, Millennials think his attempts at humor just aren’t funny. Two generations have parted ways. The “Seinfeld Show,” a comedy adored by the generation of the late eighties and early nineties has, for Millennials in the mid twenty-teens, descended into cultural insensitivity and irrelevance.
Seinfeld’s honest and heartfelt frustration about this alteration is nowhere more evident than in the fact that his own fourteen-year-old daughter rejects him. “That’s racist. That’s sexist. That’s prejudice,” she hurls at her 61-year-old father. Clearly they no longer share the same cultural terrain. He expostulates “They just don’t know what they’re talking about.” For her part, his daughter holds her ground; she isn’t budging.
Whether it’s a college audience or your own children, eventually a cultural gap opens up that separates whole generations. How long is a generation given to be itself and live on top of the wave? Recent research seems to show that cultural generations last about eighteen years (see my blog post “Generations: A Mystery to Social Science”). But until we get sociological research with representative samples of generations, we must catch at what straws of information we can. The separation of generations that sincerely baffles a famous person like Jerry Seinfeld shows us the sociological process going on here.
Source: Cavan Sieczkowski The Huffington Post 8th June 2015
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/08/jerry-seinfeld-college-politically-correct-racism-sexism_n_7534978.html