So here’s the thing. If I were to make the joke “How many white supremacists does it take to screw in a light bulb? THATS NOT FUNNY”, that joke wouldn’t land. And the reason it wouldn’t land is because humorlessness is not a trait that we collectively as a society have assigned to white supremacists, even though it’s been my observation that white supremacists are FAR more humorless than feminists.
So how then did we get the stereotype that feminists are humorless? Did it come from a place of objective observation of a distribution of character traits? Of course not, it was a part of a deliberate campaign by anti-feminists to shape the narrative in a way that allowed them to not seriously engage in the content of the arguments.
Are there some feminists who are humorless? Of course there are. But those incidences are deliberately amplified by anti-feminists as a reinforcement of stereotype so that they dominate the narrative.
If you’ve ever gone back and watched a lot of 90s television, it’s sometimes astounding the quantity of gay jokes that absolutely would not fly today. There are stereotypes of gays being overtly rapey and being aggressively infatuated by straight men. There are stereotypes of gays being emotionally hysterical and fainting at the drop of a hat. There are stereotypes of gays as catty and emotionally manipulative for the sole purpose of causing drama.
These jokes have become a lot less funny today as we’ve become less ignorant about gay people themselves. We’ve realized that the gay people depicted in the media in the 90s weren’t written as gay people, they were written as what straight writers needed to believe about gay people to maintain their self-definition of heterosexuality. It’s only after we had real gay representation in the media and a broad societal understanding of what gay people actually were that those jokes started slowly disappearing because they just weren’t that funny.
Similarly, while I don’t think it’s as simple as topics that aren’t appropriate to joke about, I do think there are methods of joking that aren’t really appropriate, even if we fail to recognize them at the time. Jokes about how gay people are constantly trying to convert straight people aren’t really appropriate nowadays, simply because they have no basis in actual reality, they’re simply a projection of the fears of homophobes. Similarly, jokes about feminists being unfunny are similarly unfunny because they have no real basis in reality.
Very little is off the table. Heck, “Office” did a whole show about a sexual harassment meeting. At least it was a big part of the episode and Steve Carroll made pretty much every faux pas like only he could do.
A few days after the Kennedy assassination Lenny Bruce opened his show with a long pause after the applause and then, “Boy, is Vaughn Meader fucked.”
Back in 1986 after the Space Shuttle Challenger went kablooie, there was an immediate spate of gallows-humor jokes about it on Usenet, also including a sub-discussion on the propriety of such jokes, which was certainly controversial.
A compendium of some of them:
Sorry, some of these are tasteless enough that I’m going to pile another layer of spoiler tag here:Collection of Shuttle Jokes
I don’t doubt that white supremacists have even less of a sense of humor than feminists. But feminism is much more common in the public discourse than white supremacy, so more people are going to have feminists jokes resonate than jokes about the KKK. But yes, extremists in general have no sense of humor about the topics about which they are extreme.
Or, those who get the joke get it because it resonates with their experience of some feminists. No vast conspiracy required.
No offense, but just repeating the punchline back in several paragraphs reinforces the point of the joke. It doesn’t diminish it at all.
You are correct - it is useless to argue about whether or not a joke is funny, because humor is subjective. That cuts both ways.
there was a certain sports bar here in the av that no matter what happened the bartender/owner had joke about it … I don’t know if he found them on the net other bartenders or what but he always prefaced the really offensive (but hairlious )ones with “I might be going to hell for this one but did ya hear about…”
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n fact way back in the olden days of the sdmb we even had a “jokes we’re going to hell for” thread in the pit …I think the mods shut it down after a year or two tho
But I don’t know about everyone elses experiences but in mine I often heard all the racist jokes from someone of that race/nationality often from religious figures … (like all my jew jokes came from a rabbi…)
People were making Hitler jokes before the end of WW II. Everyone from Charlie Chaplin to the Marx Brothers to the Three Stooges. Hogan’s Heroes in the 60s was nothing but one big Hitler joke. So was Mel Brooks’ The Producers. If you can joke about Hitler, it seems that nothing is really taboo.
I don’t think anything is off limits, but know your audience and if it falls flat, deal with it. I’ve had people tell me a joke on a controversial topic that failed to get even a grin out of me. That got me the “sorry I offended you” speech with the subcontext “sorry you have no sense of humor, feminist!”
9 times out of 10, I don’t find myself offended. I find myself supremely unamused. It’s not that the joke is inapproprite; it’s not funny. Lacking in humor. Gilbert Gottfried springs to mind. Screaming and setting out to be deliberately provoking don’t help. I’m not a snowflake, I’m not butthurt, I’m not offended, I’m not angry: it’s just not amusing. Not funny. I’d rather hear a third grader read his first joke book.
I’ve been on the “too soon” or just plain wrong end of the stick as well. After Sonny Bono and Michael Kennedy died, I posted “Trees 2, People Zip.” One woman was so offended, she called my boss. I was told that people like me were what’s wrong with America today: insensitive and uncaring. Oh well.
(I couldn’t remember which Kennedy it was and had to do a little googling. I discovered that Sonny Bono’s headstone says “And the beat goes on”. Immediately, I thought “not through that damned tree, it didn’t”.)
No. To me anyway, there is a certain kind of joke that is always offensive, and that is a joke made by those in power about those who are not, which plays to a caricature most comforting to those in power.
Tell some black people watermelon jokes about pickaninnies and see whether they think they’re funny.
