# Jokes, in response to moderation etc **URL:** \ **Category:** About This Message Board\ **Created:** [February 19, 2022, 2:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/jokes-in-response-to-moderation-etc/959768 "2022-02-19T02:40:41Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 28
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2022, 3:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/jokes-in-response-to-moderation-etc/959768/28 "2022-02-19T15:27:22Z")
> [@lobotomyboy63](#): > > My hunch is that not many jokes that are truly funny are also totally guilt-free funny. I mean, I think it’s accepted as cliche to refer to puns as the lowest form of humor. Many of those are probably safe, not offensive…but few of those are hysterical. If it’s okay, let’s use a recent joke of yours in that thread as an example: > [@More Jokes](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/more-jokes/848629/1528): > > A teacher is teaching new vocabulary to her students. “Today’s word is ‘urinate.’ Who can use it in a sentence?” > > Dirty Johnny says, “Teach, urinate and if you had bigger tits you’d be a ten.” I don’t like this joke. First, it’s wordplay–essentially a pun–which is fine. I love me some puns. (A local beekeeper told me she’d found a hive that had been built so there’s no exit. But that sounds unbelievable). But it also relies for its humor on sexual harassment of a female teacher by a male student. The butt of the joke is the woman, and the protagonist of the joke is the witty boy. When I read that joke, what hits me is how exhausting it is for women to deal with assholes like Dirty Johnny who want to put them in their place through humor. The pleasure in the wordplay is entirely overtaken by the sense of “gross, dude.” To change the subject slightly, one of the worst things that kindergarten teachers teach children is, “That’s not funny, that’s mean.” Kids hear these words as opposites, and as a result internalize the idea that if something _is_ funny, it must not be mean. Plenty of professional comedians, in their complaints about PC culture, still haven’t unlearned this lesson from kindergarten. Funny and cruel aren’t opposites. Some things that are tremendously cruel are also very witty. Rush Limbaugh was a master of the form. If we want to minimize cruelty in our community, saying, “But it’s funny” should be entirely irrelevant. > [@Johnny\_L.A](#): > > We’ve lost the ability to laugh at ourselves. On the contrary: a lot of modern humor, especially among the woke, is predicated on laughing at ourselves. Self-deprecating humor is awesome and wonderful. What we’ve “lost” is the willingness to put up with people with more power sneering down at us–or, rather, we’ve gained the ability to tell folks sneering at us to fuck off. Folks whose humor is predicated on that sort of sneering stereotype humor don’t much enjoy this change, because nobody likes being told to fuck off. I’m pretty okay with it. That thread is chock full of great jokes that don’t rely on sneering at other people, especially that don’t rely at punching-down sneering. I read that thread because I love that kind of great joke. If there were fewer Dirty Johnny jokes, I’d enjoy the thread a lot more. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/jokes-in-response-to-moderation-etc/959768)._