How soft are we? To many of our nation’s outspoken older folks, we millennials are softer than a batch of freshly-baked cinnamon buns –a bunch of latte-drinking, self-obsessing, starry-eyed philosophizing, entitled wussies (Isn’t that what each generation says about its predecessor?). But here’s a relatively new and concerning opinion, something that might hold some truth: we can’t take a joke.

Chris Rock won’t even perform at college campuses anymore, telling the The Vulture that kids are becoming too conservative “in their social views and their willingness not to offend anybody…You can’t even be offensive on your way to being inoffensive.” After I read his interview, I dismissed the trend as perhaps being only a college thing. Maybe it’s just the university atmosphere. They’ll grow out of it. Nope, the aftermath of this year’s all-school assembly bolstered my anxiety.

Apparently Dan Devine and Bryce Hughes’s comedy routine was too racy. Three jokes in particular were allegedly inappropriate enough for multiple administrative meetings concerning their performance to take place in the following week.

A few members of the audience didn’t take kindly to Dan calling freshmen “Hobbit Gremlins”; Bryce jokingly asked Dan to KOH, and that allegedly upset some students and faculty for mocking the act of two guys asking each other to the dance. Even Dan’s joke about women gaining a few pounds after pregnancy was met with disgust.

My peers weren’t profane; they didn’t call out any one person specifically (as if calling out Freshmen as a group actually hurts anyone’s feelings) or discuss anything particularly controversial (unless a simple joke about post-pregnancy weight gain is considered controversial nowadays). To interpret their joke about the dance as a mockery of the gay community is reading too far into a simple stunt that was purely intended to call attention to the upcoming dance; it would have been equally effective if a guy and a girl presented it. The comedians’ only mistake was performing at a high school. Maybe the wise, old social commentators are right about something.

Due to Bryce and Dan’s performance at All-School, the Mr. LT pageant will be under a microscope, and freshmen jokes will allegedly be limited at next year’s assembly. Two events that have ignited unity, passion and fervent spirit within our school walls are now being censored.

The LT-Central rivalry has escalated tremendously over the past few months, so obviously our fans are pretty fiery. Perhaps the problem is that we don’t know our boundaries – of course excessive swearing and joking about recent local tragedies, or following Red Nation’s leader home from Taco Taco shouldn’t be socially accepted – that stuff lies in the black area – yet it has happened, so censorship seems to be the only option, even if it’s stuff that only mildly pushes the boundaries.

Maybe we ourselves, as LT students, aren’t going soft. It could be the culture perpetuated around us, which makes us feel guilty for laughing at Dan’s pregnancy joke, to give a tame example. If we’re raised in a culture that condones being easily offended, of course we won’t be able to take a joke, and eventually we might not be able to say anything meaningful at all.

The idea that comedy is one of the most important components of a healthy, democratic society certainly isn’t new. We can try all we want to label our jokes as black or white – between tasteful or crude, between teasing or taunting, but that’s never going to happen. The essence of comedy lies within a gray area. And this isn’t a political issue, as many would lead us to believe. The talking heads can whine about the rise of radical feminism and those obnoxious liberals causing America’s perceived loss of machismo all they want, but this “wussification of America” is purely social, and it starts with our ability to take a joke.