“Have you heard about the Tempura Shelter? It’s for lightly battered women.”
This was a offered as a joke by a caller as in the “Make us Laugh” joke challenge segment on the Don and Mike radio show this past Friday, and it got a laugh and a smile from the two DJs which fell short of the required two laughs.
This was a fairly offensive joke (to me) and it came shortly after a joke in which a caller used the word “nigger” as part of the punchline, which the DJ’s got pissed about and told callers that they did not want any bigoted jokes. So racial jokes are off limits but jokes about battered women pass muster.
In any case this got me to thinking as to what the FCC defines as objectionable enough to pull a license and what it does not? What are the FCC criteria for going over the line in radio land?
To mods- I’m looking for a specific policy answer, but if you feel this is more of a IMHO or a GD question please move.
The FCC only intervenes when it receives complaints from listeners. What is and isn’t objectionable is policy set mostly by the station owners. A racist joke is probably far more likely to get complaints than a pun about domestic violence.
I certainly would have tried to find a baseball angle as opposed to one bring up the never funny spectre of domestic violence.
I’ve never been exposed to, nor do I have any experience with, domestic abuse. Still, what the f*ck could ever be smilable about it?
I can’t imagine a subject that evokes more widespread derision and disgust.
To answer your question… it was in extremely poor taste. Sharing such a sentiment to an audience over which you have no control as to the age or mental maturity of the listener is even more disgusting. Don’t even bring up Amendments… this is just ugly.
I must be an horrible person because I had a chuckle reading that joke… But then, I never known any woman around me who were victims of physical abuse.
A few years ago, I was doing volunteer work for a fundraising fish fry for the local shelter for victims of abuse when it struck me. There I was, serving battered fish to help battered women. I mentioned it to another volunteer, and she said, “Yeah, I thought of a sign saying [ Batter Fish, Not Women.]”
It is extremely rare for the Federal Communications Commission to revoke a licence for any reason, and I can’t think of a single case where it was done for “bad taste” in programming content. Usually, individual station offences are dealt with by a fine. To lose your licence, you have to prove you are unfit to operate a station, and in that case you lose all of your licences.
I don’t know if there was a regulation change or not, or if the fines are insignificant, but on one station in KC there is a DJ who will frequently say things like “motherfucker”, “cunt”, etc. At one time he was playing that Terrence and Philip song as his intro - you know, “Shut your fucking face, Unclefucker”?
I also heard this sort of thing in New Mexico not too long ago when I was there. Except this was racial, as he was referring to Native Americans as, IIRC, a “white woman raping savages”. Somehow, nothing seemed to happen to him. :rolleyes:
I may be the devil now, but my girlfreind is in a woman’s shelter, to try and get away from an abusive ex that is still trying to hurt her. I will tell her that joke today… its funny… not super funny… but derr… puns never are.
owl brings up a good point. In Robert Heinlein’s book Stranger in a Strange Land, the main character, Valentine Michael Smith (a human raised from birth by Martians), has an epiphany when he sees a monkey suckerpunch another monkey at a zoo. All of a sudden, he gets (or “groks”) humor: All humor (a uniquely human trait) is at someone elses expense or misfortune. This review sums up that scene nicely:
Think about every joke you know. You’ll find that at it’s root is yours or someone elses pain. What one person finds funny, another will not, either because of personal experience or cultural upbringing. I don’t find it particularly amusing, but neither do I find deaf jokes funny either (as in “What are you, deaf?”) since my sister is hearing impaired.
Not to be a wet blanket, but the first thing you did after hearing this “joke” was turn off the raido or change the station, right? After all, that’s what we tell the religious right to do instead of campaigning and complaining when they see gay oriented television programming or hear obscene lyrics on the radio.
As for a factual answer about FCC rules, I dunno but friedo seems pretty close.