I wasn’t responding to you, so I don’t understand why you’re taking it so personally. But since you brought it up, could you explain to me what’s so funny about lynching? Because I can’t think of one single thing about lynching that could possibly be funny. Lynching is not funny. It’s just not. If you think lynching is okay to joke about, that says really bad things about you.
For all of you who think it’s harmless to tell racist jokes…what do you think children think when they hear these kinds of jokes? I’m ashamed to think that I thought some racist/ethnic jokes were funny when I was a kid (not anything like these jokes, but Pollock-type jokes). I learned stereotypes about groups of people I’d never even seen in real life from jokes. Then I grew up and I met Polish and Asian and Italian people, and I realized that those jokes were wrong. Those harmless, innocent little jokes lied to me. They told me Polish people were stupid and black people were lazy, and I believed it. Racist jokes teach and reinforce stereotypes. If you don’t believe that, you probably also think TV commercials don’t make people want to buy stuff.
Nothing is funny about real life lynching. It’s a sad page in our history, and nothing good can be said about the actual, real life act of lynching. But that doesn’t preclude any clever humor about fictional situations. To say that a joke about lynching is automatically wrong and depraved is to say that cartoons where characters fall off of cliffs are evil, too. After all, someone falling off of a cliff in real life would be an incredibly horrible thing that no one could laugh at.
Your story sort of goes against the idea that these jokes will forever haunt kids’ perceptions of blacks of Jews or what have you because you learned it not to be true, but I agree that your experiences could have gone down a different path. I see your point, and I’d never advocate telling these kinds of jokes to any child, or even any adult you knew to not be comfortable with the joke or whose racist tendencies you question.
Which is why I said it’s all about context. I don’t think it’s appropriate to be telling these jokes to children, who haven’t learned history and (possibly) haven’t encountered the race that the jokes purport to be mocking. But the jokes for me are (as someone mentioned upthread), a meta-criticism of racism in the first place. I know that, and in the right group of people everyone understand that. I never claimed that I would tell jokes like this to strangers, or in situations where I wasn’t absolutely clear that they would be taken for the mocking deprication that the jokes deserve.
I’m sorry, but any joke except for the most plain, boring child-humor is going to offend someone. Should I curb everything I find funny on the basis of whether someone else is offended by it? Or rather should I recognize that there’s a time and a place for things, and some things have fewer times and places in which they are acceptable?
For me there’s humor in just about everything. And that includes, and is sometimes found most in, the darkest, shittiest parts of the world and human nature. If you don’t find things like that funny then you don’t, but it doesn’t mean that other people aren’t going to. And it doesn’t make those people less moral than you.
Or in other words actions speak louder than words. What people say matters less to me than what they do. If your sister was burning Jews and lynching blacks, or supporting with money or otherwise those who do, then I’d worry. Until then, it’s a bit ‘meh’ to me for telling some stupid off-color jokes.
My response would have been “Please stop telling those stupid jokes, sis - they’re offensive and not even funny.” But I wouldn’t assume that it meant my sister actually believed those things were true or would act as if.
So when I was kid (probably a second lieutenant, I got drunk with Herr Zeigler, the World’s Most German. We began to exchange such jokes.
I explained to him, through my laughter that such jokes are not funny. He replied (in your best Colonel Klink accent, if you please), “No they are funny, but ze accent is creepy as hell.”
When I was in the Air Force in Germany, a bunch of us went on a tour of Bergen-Belsen. As we were leaving, in a big bus full of GIs, someone in the back tried to lighten the mood by telling holocaust jokes. One guy in the front yelled “Shut the fuck up! My grandfather died in the camp you sick bastard!” Everyone quiets down, waiting for the fight to start, until he yells “He got drunk and fell off a guard tower!” At which point we all started throwing things at both of them.
Your whole post sums up my feelings especially the above. I feel that no white person should ever use the “n” word ina ANY context, joking or not. I think the jokes in the OP are disgusting and I have a great sense of humor.
I’m in the same camp as you regarding the fact that I don’t make any jokes regarding race/ethnicity. There are plenty of other things in life to make fun of.
If I heard someone making those jokes in the OP, I’d think them racist.
I first heard the one about “a pizza can feed a family of four” about a trombonist.
Actually, I think the other jokes are a little funnier (so to speak) if you say “black man”, because saying “nigger” signals that the joke is going to be racist and reduces the shock value of the punch line.
The joke would work, I think, when told about any group who was stereotyped as either lazy or economically worthless. The other jokes are playing off of other stereotypes and wouldn’t be funny when used on other groups. Auschwitz means that only Jews can be the punch line of the joke about pizzas and ovens. And so on.
Which is another good reason not to make these jokes in the first place: people don’t always know how you really feel. Notice how I used the word “probably” in my post?
The OP proves that too.
I’ve got no idea where this came from, but okay.
Likewise. But you appear to believe I said the jokes are funny when all I said was that they don’t always indicate racism.
Lisa Olson, one of my all time favourite sports columnists, wrote a column while in exile in Australia about the racism of one of her family. I think it was Thanksgiving and after a big family feast everyone gathered before the TV to watch the football.
One of her uncles began giving a commentary full of racist insults and people began to wander off out back to watch the game on a little portable. Her uncle ended up watching on his own and she knew that he wouldn’t get the message, and she knew that he wouldn’t change but she was glad that the rest of the family quietly ostracized him.
Folks on this continent in this day and age should know that certain jokes will be offensive and hurtful to other people. If they tell those jokes anyway, it signifies that they don’t care about being offensive and hurtful to other people.
In other words, you can make whatever kinds of jokes you want to make; you just shouldn’t be surprised if the result is that people think you’re an asshole. And if you want to make racist jokes, you should anticipate that people might think you’re a racist.
I recall seeing John Cleese on TV once, reminiscing about the time Monty Python filmed a couple of episodes in Germany. One weekend, they took a tour bus to see a concentration camp. A guard came up to the bus and explained that the camp was closed that weekend, and they’d have to go back. Graham Chapman leaned out the window and yelled, “Tell 'em we’re Jews!”
When I was a pre-teen, everyone told Pollack jokes. Except no one seemed to know what a pollack was, we just thought it meant moron. The pollack joke craze of the 70s seems kind of weird to me now, because I can’t think of a single ethnic stereotype about Poles, other than “they’re dumb” and that they have too many consonants in their last names. Other ethnicities–Irish, Mexicans, Blacks, French, whatever–have all sorts of other stereotypical traits associated with them. But not Poles. Was America that lazy that we couldn’t bother to dream up more complicated stereotypes about Poles?
And I remember at 13 or so, kids started to tell anti-black jokes. And these had a certain something about them that was lacking from those pollack jokes. A certain air of danger. If an adult or, God forbid, someone differently pigmented overheard you saying one, it could mean your ass. And so these jokes were reserved when there was a “safe space” for trying them out. The audience was always all-white, all-male, and all young teen. And there was a definate attitude of making the joke BECAUSE it was wrong to make that kind of joke.
I wasn’t responding to you, so I don’t understand why you’re taking it so personally. But since you brought it up, could you explain to me what’s so funny about lynching? Because I can’t think of one single thing about lynching that could possibly be funny. Lynching is not funny. It’s just not. If you think lynching is okay to joke about, that says really bad things about you.