And sometimes, only one person who is in the group can truly understand the joke.
Example: a couple of weeks ago, two friends of mine told me something which they understood to be a joke attacking people from my homeland. It’s actually a joke about how little outsiders understand us and how little they know about our political situation… :smack: I was mad at them, but more because the bloody morons were making the stereotype true than because of anything else. That joke means two completely different thing to outsiders and insiders. The same is true of an enormous amount of inside jokes.
ISTM that your approach renders any joke involving either groups of humans or individual humans off limits.
Can you come up with an example of a joke that fits your own filter? Other than perhaps chickens crossing roads for really inane reasons that aren’t sneak digs at some group of humans? Or are the only acceptable jokes simple wordplay?
I’m not being (deliberately) obtuse here. Jokes have butts. I’m just struggling to see a joke with a non-human butt that ordinary humans would find funny.
Absolutely. And, I think the world would be a better place if we expanded this outside of our own little groups. Good natured humor, even that which involves sensitive topics, can be a powerful bond among people. I wish that off color, but well intentioned jokes could be more often met with like minded ripostes as a way to bring us all into a larger group together.
There are no subjects off limits for humour. No words, situations or stereotypes that cannot be put to comic effect.
It is all about context, audience and intent.
I guarantee you that, amongst your small group of friends and family, you probably say the most horrifyingly offensive things and make the most inappropriate jokes and comments. I know I do and my wife does too. It works because your audience knows you well enough to understand what you really think.
I’ve have noticed the some of the ones who are concerned about humor towards, gays and blacks have no problem with jokes about red necks, conservatives, and the like.
I guess the words hurting argument, only extends to certain groups.
I think it’s really, really imperative that the joke be funny, and funny jokes have to have some sort of nugget of truth at their core. That can be a truth about a tendency that does exist within a group, or a truth about attitudes others have toward the group, but something has to be true.
The jokes I find offensive are ones that are not funny because they are not true, but are rather based on a flawed understanding usually rooted in ignorant bigotry. When people tell jokes like that and others react poorly, the unfunny jokester is likely to blame people willfully ignoring the humor in favor of sensitivity. But I think the lack of funny is important, too.
This is more or less how I feel, though I reference a bit by George Carlin where he was commenting that rape can be funny. As such, I think ANYTHING can be joked about and it’s just a question of where our hangups are, and if I run into a joke that I feel offended by, which is rare, I don’t react by telling that person it isn’t funny, rather, I take note of it that it’s an area of improvement for me. Why is it YOUR fault if I’m offended by something that clearly wasn’t intended to be taken offense to.
That doesn’t mean that any joke about any topic is funny. As an example, a joke like “Aren’t so-and-so people really stupid? HAHA” isn’t a joke. But there’s countless jokes about cultural, sexuality, etc. How many comedians have jokes about the last one-night-stand they had or oddities about relationships between men and women. The same sorts of jokes work just fine in the context of a gay couple, particularly if it’s something that tends to play with various stereotypes. Hell, I think those sorts of jokes that turn stereotypes on their heads and show how ridiculous they actually are is one of the most effective ways to break down those walls.
However, even if I believe a topic is fair game for a joke doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be sensitive to those around me. If I’m aware that someone isn’t fond of a particularly type of joke or I have reason to suspect they aren’t, I’ll generally avoid it. Even if I think people would generally be better off facing whatever those things are and overcoming them, they may not be in a place to face it now, nor is it my place to force them to do it, and it would probably kill the mood and joke anyway. Hell, even trying to be aware of that myself, I’ve failed a few times, at least until I was able to get some thought into it, and though I’m not one to make a scene and blow a mood, a little bit of stewing can still dampen it and at least make me not have fun.
Seriously oppressed groups like gays and blacks find they have common ground with other oppressed groups, and thence understanding of their common situation. The jokes they’re telling are in reaction to how they’ve been treated.
Rednecks, conservatives, and the like are generally oppressors. Of course no one takes their bleating about “words hurting” seriously. Maybe after a few decades of conservatives having crosses burned on their lawns by gents in bedsheets, or are beaten to death for being conservative, then they’ll get some sympathy for “words hurting.”
It’s a combination of actually being funny, and what the joke is actually about. Michael Bay has a history of gay jokes in his movie, you can see a supercut of it here, and in pretty much all of those the joke is about how weird or gross or absurd being gay is, with the expectation that the audience feels the same about how foreign and weird homosexuality is. And those jokes are usually not funny, and usually called out in reviews about being not cool. But the TV show Happy Endings had a character who was gay, and I believe other characters said gay jokes, but it never was about how weird or gross being gay is. There were jokes about Max being gay, but more about him being a slob or weird in other ways.
Also, there’s always context. I don’t remember doing so, but I could maybe make a gay joke to my gay friends Brad and James, because they know me, and know my thinking, and even if I do say something stupid or it sounds homophobic, they know that I’m not. (Even so, if I was constantly making gay jokes around Brad and James, they would probably start to wonder how if I am homophobic or not). But if I met a random gay person at a party and told a gay joke, they don’t know me, and don’t know if I’m joking from a point of “isn’t it absurd that people think homosexuality is wrong?” or if I’m joking from a point of “isn’t it absurd that people engage in homosexuality and don’t think it’s wrong?”.
Funny to who? To you? To the person telling it? To greater than 50% of the population? To 100% of the population?
If you see Louis CK in an HBO comedy special, you are seeing a distilled version of jokes that have been worked and reworked on stage hundreds of times. If you catch him at the Comedy Cellar you’re going to see more works in progress, which may or may not be “funny” to you.
The greatest comedians in the history of comedy have told unfunny jokes. Lots of them. Sometimes working the unfunny premise in front of people leads somewhere insightful and funny. Sometimes it doesn’t. Comedy is an artform, and it’s not up to me to tell the comedian how to get to the finished product, or even if they ever get there. Let the artists decide how to get there and then either enjoy it or don’t.
I guess what I’m saying is that the “funny” litmus test isn’t for me. I don’t care if a joke is funny to me or not.
You don’t get to decide that though, except for yourself. The reason Nazis can’t be funny telling Jew jokes is because of how you feel about Nazis. Personally, I find Nazis kind of funny (or maybe “silly” is the right word) to begin with, so I might laugh at a Jew joke told by a Nazi.
But the context is also what makes it funny or not. A Jewish person telling Jewish jokes has some amount of affection behind the jokes, even if he’s talking about absurdities in the culture. There isn’t hate behind it. And his starting point is something I could probably somewhat understand, even though I’m not Jewish. But an actual Nazi who actually believes in the extermination of the Jewish people would not have affection in the joke. And the context he would have and the premise he would be starting with about how the Jews are malevolent creatures would not be a starting point that most people would have. It’s not impossible that a Nazi could tell a funny Jewish joke, but it is extremely, extremely unlikely.
An important concept about humor that has been discussed a lot recently, but I haven’t seen explicitly mentioned here yet (sorry if I missed it) is the idea of “punching up” vs. “punching down”. The above quote illustrates the idea somewhat. A Jewish person making jokes about Nazis = funny, a Nazi making jokes about Jewish people = not funny.
We have learned over time that making jokes at the expense of a historically oppressed group is no longer considered funny. However, making jokes at the expense of a higher class? Bring it on! Now, what we end up observing is that different groups have different senses of who is being oppressed and who is the oppressor. We see this in political disputes where certain groups seem to perceive that they are being oppressed by others, whereas looking at it from the outside one might go WTF? (I’m trying to be deliberately neutral in that description in order to avoid turning this into a political debate.)
