Comedy – The Progressive Midwesterner

Yesterday, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders sent out this tweet in response to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump refusing to condemn former Ku Klux Klan (KKK) Grand Wizard and failed 1991 Louisiana gubernatorial candidate David Duke, who has publicly praised Trump:

America's first black president cannot and will not be succeeded by a hatemonger who refuses to condemn the KKK.

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) February 28, 2016

Bernie’s rival for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton, had absolutely nothing to add, so, in an extremely rare move, she retweeted Bernie’s tweet.

On the other hand, John Oliver, the host of the HBO comedy show Last Week Tonight and not a politician, had a lot to add. Oliver devoted nearly an entire episode of his show to Donald Trump’s record of bigotry, mocking people, failed business ventures, hypocrisy, dishonesty, and being a total jerk. I encourage everyone to watch the entire Oliver segment on Trump here:

I have absolutely nothing else to add.

This paragraph will be the last paragraph of a blog post here on The Progressive Midwesterner in which I use the words “actress” and “comedienne”. From this point forward, a person who plays roles in movies, television shows, and/or plays, regardless of gender, will be referred to as an “actor” (plural: “actors”), and a person who is a practitioner of comedy, regardless of gender, will be referred to as a “comedian” (plural: “comedians”)

There are two reasons for this change:

In a non-scientific poll that I conducted on Twitter, two-thirds of respondents voted for using “actor” as a gender-neutral term (although only six people voted in the poll).
I use words like “hero” as a gender-neutral term, even though there are many people who do not (example here).

As a general rule, with the exception of pronouns, I’m not going to use gender-specific terms to describe someone.