Actor Tim Allen wasted no time blasting political correctness — with a wink and a nudge — as he was out promoting the return of conservative comedy "Last Man Standing" to television.
"We're gonna be very politically correct," Allen told a reporter, his tongue pressed firmly in cheek to plenty of laughter. "I'm going to identify as an Asian woman that wants to be a European man ... we’ll do the journey of what it’s like to be an Asian woman in a European man’s body ... I eat a lot of Ramen. It’ll be a lot of Asian dishes. It'll be subtle."
But then the actor and comedian got serious about the uptick in political correctness that's resulted in a chilling effect over comedians who want to push against that envelope — himself included.
"I don't want to be PC," Allen continued. "For all of us in the stand-up world, all of us are seeing this and feeling this, and it’s a little dangerous and uncomfortable that there [are] things you can’t say because they might hurt people’s feelings."
Allen also disagreed with a culture that's "all of sudden" declared that "words matter."
"Words mean nothing," he added. "It's the intent behind the words. Lenny Bruce said it. Comics play with them all the time. We joke around about words ... and in my gut, words don’t matter. The intent behind the word matters. I'm a wordsmith; we play with words all the time."
Allen added that it's a "weird thing when I can't say stuff [be]cause you don't like what that means ..."
He shared that his "Last Man Standing" character Mike Baxter "has a way .... of putting things into a very clear perspective" and likened him to "Archie Bunker that went to the University of Michigan."
"He's got a very big sense of self, his opinions matter," Allen noted about Baxter, adding that he's also dealing with three daughters and a wife with "different points of view" and "he's conflicted."
A year ago, ABC canceled "Last Man Standing" after six highly rated seasons — fueling speculation that the network dropped the show because of its conservative content. But ABC denied that politics was reason, saying instead that production costs and Allen's salary were the triggers for the network.
But an online petition, which garnered more than 400,000 signatures, argued that conservative politics were the reason for the show’s demise.
“Last Man Standing is one of the only shows on broadcast television, and the only sitcom, that is not constantly shoving liberal ideals down the throats of the viewers,” the petition read. “And sadly, that is likely the real reason the show has been cancelled.”
After the cancellation, Allen tweeted that he was "stunned and blindsided by the network I called home for the last six years."
Although a couple of months before "Last Man Standing" got the boot, Allen ripped Hollywood for its ideological intolerance — and on ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live."
“You’ve gotta be real careful around here. You get beat up if you don’t believe what everybody believes,” Allen told Kimmel. “This is like ’30s Germany. I don’t know what happened.”
Fox picked up "Last Man Standing" last week and slated it for its fall lineup.
(H/T: Louder With Crowder)
