Down With This Sort of Thing
On Jerry Springer, the Overton window, and cancel culture.
The Jerry Springer Show was controversial from its beginning. In America in the nineties, it wasn’t uncommon to turn on the TV and find the professionally outraged, often wearing clerical collars, calling for the show to be cancelled. Here in the UK, our own would-be censors targeted not the talk show, but the comedy opera bearing its name. Jerry Springer: The Opera was (much like its source material) notoriously bawdy and gleefully profane. When the BBC aired a performance of the opera back in 2005, aspiring theocrats decided the comedy was no laughing matter.
To a vocal minority of Christians, Jerry Springer: The Opera was intolerable blasphemy. It didn’t matter that the BBC aired it after the watershed, when kids were tucked up in bed and ostensible grown-ups could watch the performance if they so chose. The show featured God and the Devil as characters, along with obscenity-laden dialogue, and that got the gears moving in the machine of fundamentalist outrage.
At first, you wouldn’t have known there was pushback from conservative Christians unless you happened to be one of them. When the church my family belonged to wrote to the BBC condemning them for screening Jerry Springer: The Opera, I thought it was just us writing stern letters to some polyester-suited bureaucrat in a cramped BBC office. I recalled (suppressing a grin to hide my dissent from the church elders) Father Ted ineffectually protesting outside his local cinema:
I hadn’t seen the Jerry Springer opera (and I’d bet that most of those I shared the pews with hadn’t either), so I tried to find out what the argument was. By what logic were we attempting to persuade others of the problem? I was told that Christians shouldn’t have to subsidise anti-Christian productions. Here in the UK, the BBC is funded in part by the public. It wasn’t the strongest argument, but it made a kind of sense to my teenaged mind, when I’d yet to eat of the tree of knowledge of logic and reason.
Years later, I thought about this argument in the context of some controversy that’s since vanished into the maelstrom of contemporary cancel culture. I realised that there’d been a single broadcast of the Jerry Springer opera, but the BBC had aired Songs of Praise every week since 1961. One broadcast against sixty years of Christian hymns. Why should every non-Christian have to pay for that? Wasn’t it a classic case of give and take in secular society? I wished I’d thought of this back then to argue against the thin-skinned censoriousness of the church.
Eventually, I discovered that churches across the country had complained to the BBC and were praying outside of theatres where the live show was staged. Christian activist groups demanded an end to the show’s run and that the BBC face criminal prosecution for blasphemy. A Christian pressure group threatened to make the already difficult lives of cancer sufferers even harder by picketing the patient centres of a cancer charity if it accepted a donation from the Jerry Springer opera.
This was not even good work, let alone God’s work. Recalling these events from my distant past, I think of a line in Isaiah, which, ironically, I didn’t know back when I called myself a Christian but have read several times since losing my faith: “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil.”
This was my first real taste of what’s known, in today’s parlance, as “cancel culture”.
The term “cancel culture” is thrown about as if everyone agrees on its meaning. I used it twice above, and I’d guess you assumed you knew what I meant by it and agreed with my usage, or you assumed you knew what I meant by it and scorned me. In reality, the phrase has become useless as a shorthand, because it means so many conflicting things. As you can’t get far these days without reading about cancel culture, I’ve been considering how to usefully define it. I’d start with this:
Cancel culture is the attempt to censor opinions that fall within the Overton window, with consequences appropriate for ideas that fall well outside of it.1
Demanding that a person lose their job, or place at university, or social standing because they hold a view that ought to be tolerated in civil society, simply because you disagree with that idea, is cancel culture. Petitioning for the ousting of a journalist for interviewing someone disagreeable: that’s their job, and you’re engaging in cancel culture. Insisting that everyone you know cut someone out of the social circle because she voted differently to you in an election: cancel culture, and not grown up.
But who decides what “ought to be tolerated in civil society”? An Overton window is a moveable thing; what couldn’t be said in polite society a hundred years ago can now be discussed with your aunt at the dinner table. This, I’ve come to believe, is what all the irritable social media posts and calls for cancellation are really about. They’re proxies for a more nuanced and perpetually necessary dialogue about what belongs in or out of the Overton window.
There have always been individuals who want to cancel somebody for something that everyone else tolerates; if that individual can persuade enough people to follow their lead, they can leverage that collective to turn up the volume on their protestations. Inevitably, wider society will come to wrestle with this demand for cultural course correction. Eventually, the culture adapts to the debate by adopting some or all of the argument put forward. Given enough time, like a species that evolves to suit its environment, the range of socially tolerated views moves, expands, or contracts.
To carry the Darwinian metaphor a little further, the protest against Jerry Springer: The Opera was a mutation in our cultural DNA that failed to replicate. The show fell within society’s Overton window,2 while banning a comedy did not. The movement failed to convince the rest of us that either of those conditions should change.
In light of the various tactics used against the Jerry Springer opera, I think my proposed definition of cancel culture could be refined. There’s something a touch vague about my definition, like a soft-focus image whose lines become unhelpfully hazy. I think I can narrow the lens and bring it into focus with a sharper definition:
Cancel culture is the attempt to move the Overton window by coercing society rather than by convincing it, through the use of force or threats rather than disputation.3
This is precisely where the protests against the Jerry Springer opera went wrong. In going through the courts to use a dusty and outdated law to silence the show with judicial force, they gave up on dialogue and the attempt to win hearts and minds. They said to hell (and they’d have meant it literally) with conversation; instead, they tried to coerce society to embrace their worldview.
This really is the difference between democracy and dictatorship. One depends on the assent of society, the other insists on forceful rule over society. It’s not that those who engage in cancel culture are fascists (another overused word) but that cancel culture is an oppressive convention that contributes to the rise of despotism in a decreasingly free society. That’s what groups like Christian Voice really advocate for, and it’s revealed in their methods of cancellation over conversation.
In 2020, filmmaker John Ridley published an open letter to HBO.4 In it, he asked the company to consider removing Gone With the Wind from their streaming platform (for an undefined “respectful amount of time”). This was categorically not an instance of cancel culture, whatever online reactionaries might have claimed. Ridley stated a position and made his case publicly for everyone to see. I happen to disagree with the position he argues for, but I have no problem with him arguing for it.
On the hypothetical other hand, had Ridley called for the firing of members of staff at HBO or threatened a lawsuit, perhaps with the claim of “hate speech”, that would have fallen foul of my working definition of cancel culture. Instead of trying to convince the company or a majority of his readers to take his side, he’d have been resorting to mere, and intolerable, coercion.
I’ve come to see that the only truly unconscionable act by those faithful few who opposed the Jerry Springer opera was their attempt to use legislative force. Seeking a judicial condemnation of blasphemy was an attempt to coerce the culture into reshaping itself according to the religious sensitivities of a Christian minority.
Except for that one strong-arming tactic, I can’t really fault the efforts of Christians who prayed outside of theatres and wrote to people in charge. They were expressing their views in public fora and attempting to convince others to side with them. That’s a form of conversation. It’s our duty to respond to them, to continue the dialogue rather than cancel them for their lack of culture. And when words fail, as Jerry Springer: The Opera revealed, laughter can be an appropriate response to provocation. It’s better than being perpetually offended.
For those new to the concept, the Overton window is the range of subjects and arguments permitted in cultural discourse by the mainstream population at a given time. It technically applies to political discourse, but it has come to include (as I do in this essay) the broader culture. The window naturally changes over time; it can shift, shrink, or expand.
Interestingly, a decade later, one of the show’s writers decided to remove some gay slurs from the script — not because anyone was calling for him to be “cancelled”, but because a necessary conversation had happened in our culture, the Overton window had naturally moved, and he’d become convinced that he should remove them.
A brief caveat: with this definition, “cancel culture” is something to be largely avoided, but it might be justified in the most extreme circumstances. Sometimes, violence actually is the answer; so too, perhaps, with the use of coercion to move the Overton window. I struggle to think of an instance where this might be true, but it isn’t necessarily or obviously false.
I just watched that episode of Father's Ted last night!
Was very happy to see Father Ted mentioned after I saw the title! Brilliant show, in the episode by protesting outside the theatre of a controversial movie, local people only find out about it because of the protest and it ends up having a huge audience. Bit like the Streisand effect!