For example, An individual could be law abiding, have a good job, be sociable, polite, friendly but if they think that rape jokes are funny then suddenly a lot of people will see them with disdain.
Why is this? Surely it is foolish to judge a person of one belief. Even in psychology, a person cannot be diagnosed as a schizophrenic simply because they see grey aliens once. They have to have paranoia, mood changes, thought disorder for a consistent amount of time before one can judge that.
Even when it comes to certain crimes this holds true. I know I’ll probably get flack for saying this but why does society see rapists or murderers as evil cowards? If it is just once how can that be judged?
Maybe because rape is about the most unfunny thing possible? Someone doesn’t commit it out of self-defense or do it accidentally, either. Any normal person would give such a person the fisheye.
With murder, at least there’s the possibility of mitigating circumstances. But even then, there’s always the thought at the back of your mind, this person has taken a life.
Statutory rape could possibly have mitigation, but it still isn’t funny. Not in any way, shape, or form.
Well different people find different things funny. It’s better to respect that. An opinion does not become fact simply because most people believe it to be true. And what’s wrong with laughing at rape jokes? Does it really promote rape culture?
Without digressing into the specific examples that the OP cited, we humans are really bad at treating unknowns that we consider important as simply unknown. So we fill in our mental map of someone with suppositions from a small sample, rather than properly leaving huge blank areas on that map.
Also any person capable of at least a little introspection is aware of their personality being a bundle of huge contradictions, but somehow we assume everyone else’s personality being of a piece.
I can think of some things a lot unfunnier than that. How about nuking 20-million innocent Iranians? Yet, no shortage of jokes along those lines, without accusations of insensitivity. It is the basic fundamentals of humor (irony, play-on-words, plausibility, unexpected punch line, etc.) that makes things funny, not somebody’s sensitivity to subject matter.
One of the funniest nun-rape jokes I ever heard was told to me by a nun. She thought it was funny enough to tell.
If the one idea that a person holds is repugnant, then you can extrapolate all kinds of things about that person and make reasonable judgements.
If someone holds the opinion that they don’t like peanut butter, there is no reason to make any judgements about that person other than they don’t like peanut butter.
But if a person finds rape funny, then it’s not too big of a jump to assume that the person has some pretty hostile attitudes towards women and is probably pretty unpleasant. It just saves time, it’s one more person I don’t have to spend time getting to know before finding out they’re a creep they told me up front.
As Nava said above, it was the nun, not the rape that was funny. Every joke is a composite of numerous components, which work together to trigger a universal human response, laughter. When you start deleting elements out of sensitivity, the joke become unfunnier, and unfunny is not a useful objective in telling a joke.
There are plenty of jokes about people who get exaggeratedly bent out of shape over politically correctness issues. Which would be funny if there was not such an abundant supply of them to make fun of.
Anything can be funny, rape, murder, genocide…absolutely anything. What really matters is who is telling the joke and what the intent is. There exists, lazy, viscious comedy aimed at an easy target with the intent to hurt and demean. There is also hilarity to be found with the word “nigger” and great routines on rape and the holocaust that can make very important points.
Intent is everything, one of my team-mates broke my nose playing football by booting me flush in the face by accident. On another occasion I was elbowed maliciously by an opposition player with the same end result. Which incident do you think bothered me more?
Comedy can and should shock now and again and if that means using taboo subjects in order to jolt us into, firstly…laughing and then…thinking, well so much the better.
There are some in this thread who think laughing at rape jokes is encouraging rape culture.
I don’t accept that as a blanket statement. It is possible to tell a joke that involves rape (or any subject) that actually undermines that rape culture.
So to those who do think that way can I ask, do you think rape should ever form part of a joke or comedic routine? under what circumstances? which other subjects are also taboo?
As for the OP more specifically I don’t care what a person holds in their head as long as it doesn’t impact in the physcial world to the detriment of others.
Let me illustrate a case in point. The Darwin Award. Every one of the incidents itemized in the list of Darwin Awards is based on a person who rather stupidly violated one of the conventions out society holds dear, often some kind of criminal behavior. That fact that one thinks the Darwin Award is funny, is not by itself an implication that one has no respect for the law or civil order.
Yet, we have here people implying that if you think the Darwin Award is funny, you are revealing yourself to be a creep, about whom nothing more need be known in order to reject you from any social exposure. Or may not, be, depending how carefully the Darwin Award listings are sanitized to ensure that bungled indiscretions are limited to the things which have not yet been thrown into the hungry maw of politicfal correctness.
A friend of mine is a very light skinned black man with a shaved head. People tell him jokes, thinking he is a white, racist fuck. He retells them totally deadpan.
You probably have to be there, but it is equal parts disturbing and sad.
Rape jokes can be funny. Almost any joke can be funny. But for something like a rape joke, or a murder joke, to be funny, it has to have some of the following components:
make fun of the rapist, not the person being raped
be so over the top it’s clear the joker does not mean it
be delivered to the right audience
be delivered in the right manner
It’s number three that so many people fall down on. If you are just telling rape jokes to a general audience, I don’t respect you very much. Clearly you have no idea how to read the crowd and you just like being an asshole. What’s worse is when they’re all “I was just joking, can’t you take a joke”.
I have an excellent sense of humor and love to laugh. I won’t laugh just because it’s a joke, though. And I will have contempt and scorn for you if you tell a rape joke to me and I don’t know you well and you don’t even know if I like those kinds of jokes at all.
Well, while I say all that, I should also say welcome to Earth! This is how us huy-mons think.
Imagine the most beautiful car you can think of. Perfect lines and curves, flawless paint, impeccably styled. A rolling work of art.
Now imagine it with a two-foot fluorescent green dildo permanently attached to the hood.
Are you still thinking it’s a beautiful car, or do you find it impossible to overlook that bizarre hood ornament?
Depends on the belief. If someone declares they are anti-vax or favors homeopathic medicine or believes the moon landings were faked, then they’ve given you a glimpse of how their thought process works in general, and I don’t think it’s foolish to dismiss them as idiots. It may be that one in fifty can be swayed by the voice of reason, but if I’m trying to decide who I want to spend my limited time with, I’m not going to waste all that time trying to deprogram a nutball; I’m going to steer clear of them and just go find someone who appears reasonable from the outset.
Go visit them in prison and see what they’re all about. I watch MSNBC’s Lockup from time to time. Occasionally you find a prisoner who isn’t an irredeemable monster; I recall one sad case of a prisoner in his sixties who deeply regretted the murders he had committed in the course of an armed robbery gone bad, and spent every day of his life sentence wishing he could undo the awful damage he did as an impulsive 20-year-old. But most of the people in prison only seem to regret their crimes for the inconvenience it caused in their own lives. They’ll say it was stupid to rob that bank, because they’ve wasted ten years in prison and missed watching their kid grow up – sometimes they’ll even acknowledge how much hardship their imprisonment has caused their own family – but it’s very rare to see them acknowledge the moral transgression of their crime that got them there, and the irreparable harm they did to others in committing it.