Why does that not surprise me? You do realize that great drama can be written even under the strictest censorship? But then if you think movies like Casablanca are boring and bland there’s not much I can say to you. I’d suggest pre-code but I have a strong feeling that you don’t like old movies because they’re old. And a lot of them are in B&W!
I like Louis CK, I think he’s very entertaining, I rarely laugh though. I thought this monologue was along the same lines. He had some good points, esp equating Israel-Palestine to two children continuously bickering.
The barely racist bit? Edgy in the fact that few who think that way would call them racists when they’re trying not to be racist. It’s that weird balance. I was born 6 years after CK, in 1973, growing up in the burbs and we said horribly racists things not even knowing what we were saying. Playing games and doing the count off singing loudly “not last night, but the night before, 25 n*****s came knocking at my door” or calling each other “Mr Honky Mofo”. And that was with people of different races in our friends circle too. It was that tailend of accepted racism where no one corrected grandma on what she called brazil nuts because we just assumed she wasn’t going to change but we had. There was a delusion that racism was then over for the most part. But it was due to open attacks on racism, that left that reverberation that Louis CK mentions in his act.
As for the “offensive” child molester bit, meh. The joke about not being chosen is an old one. That said, I’m glad he talked about a “sacred cow”. One that is so sacred that the idea of googling who made the joke about not being picked by a molester gave me pause. I did not want that in my google search history. Then thinking about searching for it in the private setting made me even more paranoid. I like to think I’m a rational adult, no tin foil hat, I’m not being monitored by the government, yet, I still don’t want to google that. Too much of a boundary for me. So good for Louis CK to even broach the topic.
Anything offensive that’s left over, I leave to the ubiquitous quote by Stephen Fry:
Whoa! I don’t check this thread for a half a day and it has gone from a few posts to three pages of back and forth. Fascinating.
There is no right to not be offended. For example, I’m offended at the very thought of censoring content to avoid offending people, even if it’s only self-censoring to avoid disapproving tut-tuts. I find that propositions just as disatasteful as you find jokes about molestation.
Robert, there’s an old Heinlein quote. A martian is confused by human humor throughout the book. Finally, he laughs at something, laughs hysterically. When he calms down, he says, “I understand! We laugh because it hurts, because laughing is the only way to stop the hurting.”
Louis CK’s humor needs to be understood in this light. The pain is part of the cathartic experience. It’s not incidental, it’s central. But he’s not trying to make people feel bad, any more than a chef who uses a lot of chiles is trying to make people miserable.
I never accused you of simplistic thinking. Please don’t put words in my mouth.
I’d be willing to bet Christian college students can laugh at a “what if you get to heaven and God’s like ‘this is it, sorry’” joke. I’m not sure sure why you think they’d be particularly offended. Have you seen his stand up routine. It doesn’t target Christians specifically.
As an broad category, “old movies” would probably be my favorite genre. But to write them off because they’re boring just due the the fact that they’re pre-code is like ignore all movies that are black and white. I’ve had friends say 'how can it possible be good if it’s in black and white?".
So why don’t you just leave it at that.
But it was a strawman.
The original premise of the thread was ‘Did Louis CK cross the line with the pedo jokes’.
You came in and said, and I quote, “ok, so, you would find it funny if i made jokes about a chemotherapy patient wasting away and using the bathroom in their own pants? whats funny about that?”
A strawman fallacy is when you change the argument and attack that one. You switched it up from talking about pedophilia to talking about the incontinence of chemo patients and asked why we would be laughing at that. The thread was about a very narrow, very specific joke. If you’re either setting up strawmen or you’re widening the net because you’re not catching any fish.
Oh, and by last count, two people have answered yes to your question about having had these things happen to them and found his jokes funny.
(bolding mine)
I didn’t catch this the first time around.
How about you come up with a better defense than just telling me I’m doing a bad job of rebutting you. Or just answer the questions I posed to you both times you said that.
In the first quote I asked you where you want to draw the line and instead of tossing out some suggestions or saying “I’m not sure, we’d have to discus that” or something, you just attacked me like a dog backed into a corner and tell me that it’s a bad tactic. You came at me with a post that made no sense at all.
In the second quote, I mentioned that just about everyone is going to be offended by something. This was after some long winded posts about how you have no right not to be offended and it’s pretty much impossible to tip toe around everyone’s sensibilities etc. But instead of defending your position of LCK being over the line, you just tell me that I have a weak defense.
And somewhere in the mix you insulted all my favorite movies. Do yourself a favor, go watch All About Eve or M or A Marx Bros movie. The good movies are out there, but there also just weren’t that many movies cranked out in those days.
Jim Norton on the controversy about Trevor Noah:
“…using the bathroom in their own pants?..”
If that means what I take it to mean I declare Robert163 to be a comedy genius.
I just had an ELIZA flashback.
How that chemo patient got into their own pants, I’ll never know!
Have YOU been affected, directly?
Because if you haven’t then I’m not sure it’s your place to be outraged on behalf of someone else. It’s up to those affected to decide whether or not CK Louis or anyone else is offensive. I’m also going to take a wild guess and say that’s going to vary from one affected person to another, because how people handle and react to something, even something traumatic, varies greatly.
You know, I don’t find death funny, I have certainly had people I care about die, hell, I’ve actually watched people die, but one of the ways I cope with that is with humor - I can laugh uproariously at very dark jokes about death and dying. That doesn’t mean I find death funny.
Some people use humor to cope with pain. There’s nothing wrong with that. If you’re offended by that then don’t watch. Every TV ever made has an “off” switch.
That pretty much is what happens when you have “freedom of expression”.
Of course, if enough people find a comedian offensive said comedian might wind up waiting tables or changing oil at Jiffy Lube instead of being on stage.
Robert163, would you please try to explain, as you see it, what the joke(s) are from Louis CKs monolog regarding molestation.
I understand that you don’t find it humorous. What I’m wondering is whether or not you can even identify the construction of the joke and what the comedian was attempting to do.
I will say up front that gjven your analogies to cancer jokes, the humor in Louis CKs bit was NOT that it is funny that children get molested and it was NOT that we should find the suffering of molestation victims amusing.
If you are able to describe what was supposed to be funny and can still articulate why it was too offensive to be “appropriate”, I will at least find your position respectable even though I disagree. As it stands you appear to be reacting from a position of sheer ignorance in a Pavlovian response to the mention of the subject of molestation.
I’m curious as to how they fit a bathroom in there.
I just laughed at this. I laughed because my late husband did the exact same thing when he was dying of cancer - and it had to be Matlock ( or Murder, She Wrote ), we used to joke about his deathbed compulsion to watch murder mysteries featuring really old people.
And it also pokes some much needed holes in all the misguided " cancer is war " metaphors.
I think humor is a wondrous thing. Our brains make an inappropriate or left-field connection or association and instead of feeling fear or confusion we somehow poke a neurological reward mechanism. I think humans would be very different if this didn’t happen ( and not in a good way).
And as to the Louis CK bit, I thought the child molestation stuff was hysterical. To those that don’t get it … He didn’t make jokes about kids that were kidnapped and never seen again. He joked about the kids that WEREN’T molested and the funniest part was about the kid that continually beat the molester at his own game.
I laughed.
Is there a transcript of the monologue? I don’t have headphones so I don’t want to do YouTube.
Regards,
Shodan
You should wait. His delivery was a big part of it. He was playing with the audience’s discomfort. And the part in the middle about his kids was all delivery.
<shrug> People in Nazi death camps joked about their situation (“Don’t worry. Soon we’ll be in a better place – as a bar of soap in a shop window”). Nothing is off-limits to humor. The only question is to how it’s handled.
Louis C.K. handled it well. And he made a valid point – pedophiles love pedophilia. That’s hardly an outrageous statement.