Politics & Power Quote by Mike Myers

Myers is puncturing the tidy myth that comedy is born in a tribunal. In his version of creation, the primary audience is the room: collaborators chasing the next laugh, not a future panel of moral jurors. That’s not a defense of cruelty so much as a confession of process. The joke gets assembled in the messy middle, where timing, escalation, and surprise matter more than ideological cleanliness. Political “correctness” arrives later, after the thing is already alive and, crucially, already public.

The sly move is the geography. By framing “political correctness” as a European question and an American non-question, Myers isn’t really doing sociology; he’s describing different relationships to satire and offense. Europe, with its older class structures and tighter proximity to national identity, tends to treat humor as an argument about social order: What are you allowed to say, and who gets to say it? America, built on mass entertainment and a First Amendment self-image, prefers to treat humor as consumer product: If you don’t like it, change the channel. That posture can look like freedom. It can also function as a convenient way to dodge accountability.

Context matters here: Myers’ most famous work trades in big, blunt caricature (Austin Powers’ swinging-60s camp, fat suits, broad accents). The line reads as preemptive framing from a comedian whose material lives exactly where “PC” debates erupt. Subtext: don’t mistake a writers’ room’s reckless laughter for a political platform. But also don’t ignore that the laughter is a form of power-testing, and the world outside the room gets the last vote.