You’re assuming they’d understand the joke to begin with.
That’s the point I was trying to make. I think it comes down to being able to recognise our own foibles, and being able to laugh at ourselves. Someone non-maliciously makes me the butt of their joke? ‘Yeah, I do that.’ So I laugh because I see what they’re making fun of and I can laugh at me. As a society, we’ve lost that ability.
The other thing I guess we need to acknowledge is that sometimes a snowflake triggers an avalanche. If you’re Irish (for instance) maybe you’ve gone along with being jabbed with Irish jokes the first 9,999 times. Then someone tells one joke—maybe not even a vicious one—and you’ve had enough. Similarly I wonder if sometimes kids who shoot up schools do so not because of the quality of the bullying but rather the quantity, like a death by a thousand cuts, etc., a collective effect.
If so, telling even a trivial, seemingly harmless joke may be inadvisable.
This is among the reasons that punching up is less problematic than punching down. Those at the top generally have fewer little attacks on a daily basis, and more other resources to draw on.
Because it made me laugh out loud, and i think it is extremely unlikely to offend anyone, I’d like to point out this recent joke on the SDMB:
My comment was in regard to the mod-bashing that took place in the Jokes thread that I thought was unfair, not to the OP here, which did not come off as critical at all and as you say, is a topic worth discussion.
It really is a slippery slope what is “appropriate” when it comes to joke-telling. I do think that offensive humor can be a coping mechanism we use in tense or tragic situations, sort of “shock therapy” for grief or anxiety. Like the Challenger space shuttle jokes. Jokes that insult ethnic groups are of course very bad. Unless…you’re a member of that ethnic group? What if you join the ethnic group, like Bryan Cranston’s character on Seinfeld, converting to Judaism just for the jokes?
This is probably as close as anybody is going to come to answering the question “when is an offensive or tasteless joke acceptable?”
If it’s okay, let’s use a recent joke of yours in that thread as an example:
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.
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.
I started the thread. I just wanted to share some funny jokes. I didn’t realize it would lead to rape jokes, etc.
OTOH:
Billy Crystal
doesn’t sound too impressed by the current state of comedy and cancel culture.
“It’s becoming a minefield and I get it,” the comedian told The Post. “I don’t like it, I understand it … I just keep doing what I’m doing and that’s all you can do right now.
“It’s a totally different world [now] and it doesn’t mean you have to like it,” he added, with a laugh.
Mel Brooks:
“I’ve never been a fan of political correctness. I’ve been a fan of decent behavior, which is different from political correctness. Because political correctness demands too much respect for being good. And comics are not good. We are bad. We whisper into the king’s ear. We tell him the truth. And that’s our job. It’s our job to say it like it is. And sometimes use the words that we use in the street. You can’t always play ball with the system, you have to strike out and tell the truth,” Brooks told The Daily Beast.
Jimmy Carr:
“You go, well you can’t joke about race. Well if you’re from a different race and that’s your experience of the world and you want to talk about that, then fine. Or you can’t talk about disability, but disabled comics can talk about that. Those are the rules. Okay, so, two pedophiles are walking in the park….”
Fair enough. I had it filed under “wisecracking kid,” not putting down a woman (I know some of those jokes as well). Is it possible I (white male) am not sensitive enough,or that you’re too sensitive? Or is there an objective appraisal of the joke? I guess the best thing to do is have a poll. The populace isn’t always right, but it could be interesting to note.
- the kid is just a wise cracker
- the kid is putting down the teacher
- it’s just a silly pun
- I think it’s a little offensive
- I think it’s moderately to severely offensive
- I don’t think it’s offensive
- other
0
voters
I’d vote that the kid is pushing back against authority, and in the 20th C. that included sexual repression. But this is the 21st C.
We use humor to fill the gap between our ideals we create and the reality we can’t control. Animals don’t have ideals or shame, so when your cat misses a leap, instead of laughing at himself he’ll instantly start grooming (which I find hilarious). But that’s how he asserts control of his situation.
We still have the ideal of sex as the most exalted physical experience of our lives, special for mommies and daddies who love each other. We believe in this, but of course we soon learn otherwise. So we have raunch comedians recounting tales of holding back a fart until their boyfriends are finished going down on them (tellingly, this joke goes over better for women than men comedians).
However, while Black comedians can tell jokes with “and do you know what that cracker did?” Or Jewish comedians tell the “I had (dogshit) lunch with a stormtrooper” joke, if women comedians are telling jokes about being raped, it’s news to me.
Perhaps you should have included the gender of the responders in your poll. Because if you can ever hear that punchline in your head as spoken by any male at any age, as funny, then you obviously are not female.
I considered that. I wondered about people who may have been born one gender yet identify as the other etc. I tried to keep it simple but maybe it’s too simple.
- I’m male and I think the joke is NOT offensive
- I’m male and I think the joke IS offensive.
- I’m female and I think the joke is NOT offensive
- I’m female and I think the joke IS offensive
0
voters
I’m going to agree with that. I decided to ignore that joke as a moderator, even though I definitely file it under “this place is misogynistic”, because I felt like there’d been enough moderation in the thread recently, and while offensive, that joke wasn’t terrible. But it didn’t make me laugh, it made me cringe. It’s the wisecracking boy using his maleness to put down a female who would otherwise have authority.
Women don’t like being constantly told that all that matters is how hot we are.
Yeah, no. The Pit is for ranting about real life, or calling out other posters for unacceptable behavior. It’s not the, “It’s okay to be racist/sexist” forum.
Wow.
It seems like it works both ways. If a man remarks that a woman is not attractive, then people say he’s bad because women are worth more than their attractiveness. But if a man remarks that a woman IS attractive, then people say he’s bad for the same reason. I’m probably not the only guy in here who would say we’re afraid to compliment women because we don’t know how it will be received.
Obviously I’ve never been a woman so it’s interesting to hear that you feel it’s a constant thing.
The point is that the message is that all that matters about a woman is how hot she is.
I recommend you not tell your female coworkers they look hot, unless it’s someone you don’t work with much and you are hoping to date her, not work with her.
But lots of compliments are fine. Feel free to tell your female coworker that you think her proposal is really strong, and you think it will really improve the business. Or that she did a great job of keeping that difficult meeting on-topic. Or that her documentation was very clear.
I miss the option “I don’t get the joke”. I’ll go with other then.
I still don’t get it.
It’s based on a pun. “Urinate” sounds like “your an eight”, on the common scale where men rate women’s appearance from 1 to 10.