Dana Gould on “Things that you should never joke about”: “Let’s kick things off with an AIDS joke. a rape joke, and a joke about 9/11.”
And I had the perfect context to tell the first one, too: I have a good gay friend who had gastric bypass surgery and lost a lot of weight really fast. I went through the standup bit with him, and he laughed his ass off.
This exactly. After all, CAH’s tagline is “a party game for horrible people.” On their homepage, they expand on this: “Unlike most of the party games you’ve played before, Cards Against Humanity is as despicable and awkward as you and your friends.”
And, I absolutely agree, if you want to play CAH without inappropriate humor, just pick up Apples to Apples.
I think they’d be laughing on the inside.
I don’t think there are subjects that you can’t make jokes about, but there are definitely subjects that most people shouldn’t make jokes about. Let’s face it most people aren’t funny and their idea of making a joke is to merely repeat some hackneyed drivel from the last century.
Why is it that every time I reply, “your mom” it turns out the person’s mother recently succumbed to some horrid, drawn out illness?
“What’s the name of the porn star who was just in the news?”
“Your mom?”
SOB
You haven’t heard a thing until you hear a group of widows joking about their dead husbands. And yes, we do.
Look, nobody forced you to be a mortician.
I suspect the reason for this is that murder, however horrible, doesn’t reach as many people as rape/pedophilia/sexism/racism. It’s about knowing your audience, your crowd. I doubt people who have lost their babies find dead baby jokes all that funny, but there are a relatively small number of them relative to people who have been sexually abused, raped, or made to feel inferior based on race or gender. A comic is probably taking less of a risk with his audience by making the dead baby joke.
Don’t even get me started on the gross double standard of male rape.
My favorite rape joke by one of my favorite comics.
Oh, and the other favorite.
Notice in both of these jokes, the storyteller is the butt of the joke, not the women.
My father in law, an otherwise fine person, has a terrible sense of humor. He jokes routinely about me beating my husband, and occasionally, my husband beating me. Domestic violence is normal in his family of origin and basically all of his brothers beat their wives, so I guess the joke, to him, is that we’re not like that. Plus I guess he thinks it’s funny to invert the trope by gender, since in his universe, it’s always the man beating the woman.
But it pisses me off. I am not a violent person, I have violent women in my family, and even joking about me treating someone I love with violence rubs me the wrong way. Plus I work for a fucking domestic violence organization. Know your audience.
I speak from experience, it frees up your material a lot.
I have only one favorite rape joke: a dozen guys were trying to rape a German girl. She kept saying nein!, nein!, so three of them left.
I think it was Jon Stewart who said that the reason Hitler jokes are fine to tell, is because when you make fun of something or someone you take it’s power away.
I stopped watching Drawn Together because of moronic jokes about Princess Diana, also the Challenger disaster.
I don’t know why I even watch Family Guy any more. Those types of jokes are just the tip of the iceberg.
“Know your audience.”
A friend of a friend refused to watch The Drew Carey Show. Said the character of Mimi reminded her too much of her mother.
That’s why people started saying that there are certain topics that you shouldn’t joke about: clueless bores. It’s a drag to try to socialize an adult who should already know better, it’s easier to just tell him there are rules. Joking is just like any other skillset: the ones who are good at it can break the rules.
Category error. Suggesting that a member of your audience be raped isn’t an insult. A reminder that she’s vulnerable to that sort of attack, yes. Insult, no.
Rather large excluded middle, don’t you think, between treating someone politely and suggesting that they be raped.
It’s surely possible for a comedian to be rude and insulting to someone in funny ways without suggesting that they be sexually assaulted. Just a hunch.
Great username/post combination.
And that’s what really gets some people: It’s elitist, it’s a meritocracy, and some people are going to be able to get away with stuff you couldn’t even dream of doing because they, through some combination of innate talent and socialization and practice, are better than you and always will be. And if you feel that those people are making hay out of your misfortune, well, there’s really nothing you can do unless you have enough clout you can force them to be silent… in which case, they’re the ones punching up, now, aren’t they?
Sometimes, you have fun, and sometimes, the fun has you.
God I hate “punching down.” A comic can punch up, down, left, right, himself, the nun in the front row… it’s about funny not justice. Tosh’s anti-heckle wasn’t good because there was no humor in it not because he is punching down. I don’t consider going after a heckler to be punching down anyway. It’s a disturbance that needs to be dealt with and swiftly. Very often brutally because that’s all that will work. Last weekend I watch Ben Bailey screaming “Shut the fuck up!” At a woman in the front row. There was a lot more that led up to that which was quite funny.
There’s a lot about the circumstances surrounding the Burr rant that made it unique and hard to compare to anything else, especially to a set in a comedy club.
Ayup.
There’s a qualitative difference between ‘‘GTFO you ugly shrieking harpy’’ (or whatever) and "I hope you get raped.‘’ The first is a comic (understandably) lashing out at some rude asshole at their show. The latter smacks of a man trying to put a woman in her place.
Whatever, I fucking hate that guy. I despised him before this happened and I will go on despising him. Treating people like shit is not ‘‘comedy’’ to me.
Another kind of comedy I hate is ‘‘we’re being terrible to people ironically, so it’s okay’’ which almost never comes off as truly ironic. It’s what Family Guy has devolved into. It’s too bad. Family Guy has some classic bits.
I suppose the conclusion is that I like dark humor, but not mean humor.