Dr. Retard

A lot of sick comedy comes from exploiting stereotypes. For example, if you have a Catholic friend, you can interrupt a story about a priest he knows with, "Was he busy ass-fucking toddlers"? Or if someone's looking for someone who's Irish, you can say, "Just follow the smell of potatoes and whiskey". Where'd Ms. Chung go? She can't have gotten far, you know, with her bound feet and all.

Many people have a very negative reaction to this sort of comedy. They say it's not funny. They morally condemn those who employ it.

I think, "Surely, they understand why it's funny". I can't believe they don't understand it. I'll spell it out, though. Immorality and tragedy is funny -- e.g., Holocaust jokes. When you make an evil claim, it tends to be funny -- e.g., "that's what she gets for being a woman". Stereotypes are often hurtful and oppressive. So they're just one instance of this universal fact about comedy.

I suspect people pretend not to understand the humor, just to portray themselves as serious opponents of bigotry.

In the typical circumstances surrounding these jokes, all of the parties share certain broad values, which are inverted by the joke. They agree, for example, that Jews have been oppressed throughout history, and that Shylock stereotypes of greedy, cunning money-lenders have perpetuated this oppression. This shared agreement makes it funnier when one of them says dryly, "There should be a show like DuckTales, only with a greedy old Jew and his money, so that the kids know the score". No one in the room, much less the speaker, agrees with the sentiment typically expressed by sentences like this. That's what makes it irony. It's a sick, evil sentiment. That's what makes it funny.

In other circumstances, people might not share the values being inverted by the joke, or just know whether everyone else does. So when you employ this type of comedy, there's a risk. You risk (i) being misunderstood by those who cannot be sure that you are being ironic, and being condemned for your statement, and (ii) perpetuating oppression, by reinforcing bigoted values in those who already accept them. The more outrageous the claim, the less likely it is that anyone will take it seriously (in both senses of the phrase), and the less risk you're incurring.

So is there anything wrong with this type of comedy? The only thing I can see is when you risk perpetuating oppression, by reinforcing the sick values of a bigot, by contributing to an atmosphere of disrespect for the 'butt' of the ironic joke. Exploiting stereotypes for laughs is fine among friends, but a bad idea among your racist relatives. I can understand that.

Is there anything else, though? Is there any other good reason not to exploit stereotypes for laughs?

P.S. Sorry if these jokes aren't particularly funny. They were off the top of my head.

Koyaanisqatsi

I would argue it depends on the individual telling the joke and the context in which the joke is being made.

If one is telling such a joke because it is so offensive that the desire is to shock one's audience into laughing at the shear audacity of saying it, that's one thing.

If, however, one is telling such a joke because it is so offensive that it makes a "political" statement (i.e., to affirm in the minds of your audience that you actually believe the stereotype and the joke is meant to underline your beliefs), that's another thing.

It's almost impossible to remove a joke from the teller and the context (and the audience) to analyze it in a vacuum like this.

When I was a kid, for example, I grew up in a "white" suburb of St. Louis. When I was ten, we moved to Oregon. Long before we moved, one of my friends used to repeat racist jokes that he no doubt heard from his father, but didn't do it (at that time) in any fully knowledgable way (i.e., none of us at that time were mature enough or experienced enough in life to really know what was being said and why it was funny, it was just shocking). As I grew older and subsequently visited my old childhood friends over various return visits, I noticed that the friend in question was telling these "jokes" far more often and in more abundance, setting up a pattern that I could no longer dissasociate from his "politics." It was no longer shock value; it was personal prejudice thinly veiled.

I sadly realized that a good, innocent friend of mine had clearly turned into a racist just like his father over time and those earlier "innocent" jokes were now his way of letting the people around him know his racism in the form and repetition (and volume) of the "jokes" he was now telling.

Strange, too, since we all grew up together and in the same lilly white neighborhood, yet he had absorbed the irrational hatred from his father and it "took." The expression of that irrational hatred came in the form of racist "jokes," which was obvious to all (and resulted in my no longer considering him a friend).

Conversely, when in Oregon, I met my best friend (who I've known now for over twenty five years), who is not racist (or sexist or any "ist" for that matter), but understood the difference between telling an offensive joke for the sake of the shock value and communicating a racist, et al, value system; a system I know he doesn't have.

Context, context, context and a very fine line separates it, but as just about anyone who has have ever been in the presence of someone who tells such jokes can relate, it all depends on who tells it and why.

After all. I can make fun of my mom. You cannot.