Of course Carlin got it right.
I thought this was going to be about Tom Segura. The Canadian Down Syndrome society is demanding that Netflix censor his special because he uses the word retarded. His bit is not making fun of people with Down Syndrome. It is literally a riff on how we can’t use the word any more. I guess context isn’t important to some.
Of course when a petition against him was posted he responded on Twitter with “Hey Netflix please don’t take my special down. That’d be so retarded.”
I’m in the category of “any topic can be funny.” But that means I am happy to hear any jokes. I’m well aware that any number of folk are very ready to be offended by attempts at humor, though.
When I was a kid, we joked about anything. Ethnicity, race, gender, death, impairments, sexual orientation - ANYTHING. In fact, there was some humor value solely in the offensiveness. I still believe there is some humor/cleverness in wordplay, or playing with expectations/norms. But these days, I am far more careful of whom I will share such humor with.
Our society is such that certain attempts at humor could have legal or employment repercussions - be viewed as hate speech, harassment, etc. Whether I personally agree with that reaction, I have to acknowledge it.
Oooh - maybe there is one category that is verboten - joking about bombs in an airport security line!
I could definitely imagine a woman at a feminist-themed event starting with that joke and getting chuckles, though, couldn’t you? Maybe while introducing the idea of, say, making pussy hats, since sometimes humor is the best way to defang your opponents.
“OK, I know sometimes we can have a reputation of being too serious. How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb? THAT’S NOT FUNNY!” <wait for laughs> “But, seriously, sometimes humor can help, and perhaps there are times when even the most passionate advocate of the most noble cause needs to lighten up. Humor can also help take the wind out of the sails of your opponents. To that end, I think we should knit these hats…”
I think, given the right joke teller, audience, circumstance, there’s no topic that is always taboo.
I often think people miss the point: they think “funny” is on one end of the spectrum, and “offensive” is on the other end. This is absolutely not true. It’s perfectly common for something to be both hilarious and obnoxious. “But it’s funny” should not be an excuse for being an asshole; but we also shouldn’t try to accuse someone of assholery by telling them they’re not funny, because that’s often a transparently false claim.
I actually heard that joke years ago (back in the nineties, I think) from a pretty feminist woman. Something like “How many Harvard girls does it take to screw in a light bulb?” and the answer was (IIRC), “It’s Radcliffe, it’s women, and IT’S NOT FUNNY.” So, obviously a pretty old joke.
But when a woman is telling it as a wry poke at herself, it’s way different from when a dude is telling it to smirkingly dismiss feminists. Obama, I think, summed it up best, after di Blasio made a joke about CP Time:
In the late 1990s, I read a commentary about this very subject that was written by a guy who belonged to a BBS (or whatever those things were called that week) for people who liked really bad jokes, gallows humor, etc. and just to see what would happen, he asked if anyone had heard any Princess Diana jokes.
He was almost banned from the forum.
Yeah, I remember those shuttle jokes after Challenger, and Columbia too.
I don’t think anyone has brought up cheap laughs. ( not offensive, but cogent to EVERYTHING IS OK)
Fart jokes may be easy, low hanging fruit…but if your audience laughs or better yet pays… it’s funny.
Beyond that I have no new content.
Yes, funny is in the eye/ear of the beholder.
Dead baby jokes are not good at the baby’s funeral.
Some jokes are only funny because they are awful.
Saying shitty things, then covering it with “just kidding” is ignorant, disingenuous, and a disservice to actual funny people.
This is what I’m talking about, though! Something can be both funny and shitty. Someone can say something shitty and say “Just kidding” and be right, and that doesn’t let them off the hook for being shitty.
I disagree with your coworker that sexual harassment is something that cannot be joked about, but I do think that the particular video you linked isn’t funny to me and should not really be promoted because it trivializes a serious problem and reinforces blatantly false ideas about the topic. It relies on the false but common ideas that sexual harassment lawsuits happen over trivial matters (like making eye contact), that women welcome blatant sexual advances at work if a guy is conventionally attractive enough, that men are always looking to have sex with any woman near them, and that women deciding who they want to have sex with is wrong. It’s perfectly possible to think that dark humor is fine without thinking that skit is something that should be promoted.
People that tell jokes about their own cultural/racial/nationality/religion/gender/ethnicity are generally regarded as being a wit, the very same jokes told by someone from a different background would probably be regarded as a bigot.
I thought Shodan’s feminist lightbulb joke was rather lame…but I ‘got’ what was funny about the joke. So I guess that makes me a sexist oppressor by some reckoning.
For the purpose of objectivity and equal time, it would be interesting to maybe hear a few sample jokes about sexist oppressors. Does anyone know if they tell these sorts of jokes at Lillith fare type events? If they don’t, maybe some of the comic-minded here can devise some.
I’m pretty sure you’re agreeing with me and expanding on what I wrote, and I certainly agree with what you wrote. I think Ulfreida (and maybe one other poster here) is disagreeing, however. She’s saying some topics are always forbidden and never funny. I’m not trying to get pitted here, but in the context of that very joke, my irony meter is straining to keep up.
So, in order to avoid a pitting, let me be clear. That joke, told by some sexist jerk, would probably not come across as funny and may well be offensive. However, that very same joke, told by a feminist making fun of herself or her movement, could pull it off and it would be funny.
I posted the below before I saw your post, but clearly, Patton Oswalt addressed it better than I could have.
The problem I have is the knee-jerk ‘‘It’s comedy!’’ whenever someone makes a joke that probably does net harm to society. ‘‘It’s comedy!’’ does not absolve anyone from responsibility for the messages they put out into the world.
The most obvious example I can think of is when Daniel Tosh screamed at some female heckler that he wished the men in the audience would rape her (or something.)
Patton Oswalt wrote a lovely piece about the way people dismiss comedians’ complaints about hecklers and the way people dismiss women’s complaints about insensitivity to real issues they face. Here.
I’m pretty disappointed that you think a woman being upset at someone publicly joking that she should be raped is evidence of thin skin. But Tosh is an unfunny piece of shit, so it’s not like his behavior made me think any less of him.
Compare to Bill Burr’s genius rant at the citizens of Philadelphia when they wouldn’t stop heckling him. The audience was acting like drunk, heckling assholes so he spent the remaining 12 minutes of his set absolutely annihilating them. It’s insanely offensive but as he’s referring to the audience as a collective, and not punching down, I find it more funny than offensive. YMMV.
ETA: This is a really good example of how subjective humor is, and how weirdly based on context it is. Because I can’t really fully explain why I don’t find Burr’s bit offensive, but I find Tosh to be an unfunny piece of shit. I suspect if this were a regular set of his, I wouldn’t be loving it, but something about the organic nature of his rage is pretty satisfying.
As others have said, there is no topic that is always inappropriate for humor. There are, however, certain topics that are always inappropriate to certain people. Good luck finding out proactively which topic/people combos those are.
