But I suppose he’s not going to be in as much trouble as little Johnny Tables.
Why is it always ‘Johnny’? It’s bad enough that toilets are called ‘johns’…
This, I believe, is the credited response. Everyone in WV tells WV jokes. We’ve heard them all. I’m not saying that nobody else is allowed to tell them or tell them to me. In real life, we get to judge if the person is, as you said, being mean, loving, or careless, and what kind of relationship we have.
On a message board, especially with just text, I don’t know if you are being mean and malicious. I think our defense mechanism kicks in, and that applies for race, religion, geography, gender, sexuality, etc.
+1
Well, Doc Savage seemed to think this was a fabulous compliment- Mona, you’re a brick!
Care to supply one or two popular ones?
Actually, i was misremembering; it was little Bobby Tables.
Pretty much. They’re small samples, as you pointed out. I return to my original hunch, which was that most jokes that aren’t mere wordplay are going to offend some people, especially when you can’t know who’s in the audience. Upthread someone pointed out that the crowd going to see Seinfeld doesn’t expect Eddie Murphy and vice-versa. Yep, they get around it by self-selection.
And who could forget this Johnny?
Lest we forget …
Or this Johnny:
Or this Johnny.
Is there an option for the joke is dumb and anyone older than 9 who likes it isn’t that bright? Because I’d vote for that option.
Sure. John Mulaney makes fun of himself for being a pushover.
John Oliver describing the production of his show as “controlled drowning.”. (I was actually looking for one of the innumerable occasions where he makes hilarious fun of his own appearance, but this is what I found instead).
Self-deprecating humor like this is incredibly common–even the bit you quoted, where I referred to myself as “among the woke,” is a not-very-funny example. In the jokes thread, silenus (I think) riffed off the idea that you can only tell jokes about groups you’re in by telling a joke about a fat-assed old white dude. And Pepperwinkle, above, quoted Jimmy Carr’s meta-commentary on the same thing by telling a joke whose punchline was an (obviously fake) admission of being a pedophile.
I’m wondering whether you’ve not noticed it before?
Don’t insult other posters. (Mostly kidding).
Pepperwinkle told a lot of jokes in that thread that i don’t think will offend anyone.
Agreed. He’s curating Reddit, but that’s fine with me!
Holy shit folks - I don’t know about the jokes thread (but clarifying no rape jokes in the titles says a LOT about it), but this thread is offensive in so many places, to so many people, that it’s hard to read.
It’s not that hard to make a joke that doesn’t involve “poking fun” at other groups. As a message board, I encourage us to try it.
Mine does so partly because not only can I often not tell whether the joker’s being malicious, but I know that even if they aren’t, it’s very likely that someone in the group of people reading the boards (which includes people who never post and people who have never joined the boards) is reading it maliciously.
One of the things that telling jokes that denigrate people does is to normalize denigrating those people.
It’s not entirely dissimilar to the epithets we use to dehumanize the ‘enemy’ in war, making it easier to kill them.
Is that hyperbole ? Maybe. But let’s say that’s a 10 on the spectrum. Many of these jokes are somewhere short of that, but still too far in that direction to be useful.
I’m not singling out anybody or any particular joke. I have a brother who was always considered hilarious … except that his humor nearly always came at the expense of somebody else.
Which is akin to the old adage: somebody who’s nice to you but not nice to the waiter … isn’t nice.
So, let us see your entries. I agree it is not impossible, but it is the basis of a lot of jokes.
There is also puns, wordplay and the like, of course.