The Tyranny of Humour

IME there's an uncanny valley, where you can't tell if a potentially down-punchy joke is meant at face value or not. Is it

A. Intended to make you sympathetic with the joker (hey, loosen up, it's just a damn JOKE), or

B. Intended to express sympathy with the target (i.e., jokes intended to show how the joke is ACTUALLY on the person who is so horrible as to have racist/sexist/ableist views in the first place).

I used to know a guy whose fave joke was "Do you know why there are so many battered women in America?" (dramatic pause) "Because they just don't fuckin' LISTEN!" Now that's a pretty down-punchy joke. I don't like it much.

If Rodney Dangerfield or whoever is still out there saying "wow, bitches sure do take a long time to get ready, amirite"?

I would like to point out for the record that Dangerfield never did this, the butt of his jokes was *always* Rodney.

many xxposts

Sorry, that was sloppy, I should have come up with a better standin for the category "old white out-of-touch comedian." I would welcome suggestions for who would fill that bill more accurately.

Don Rickles

louis ck

Continual repeated jump towards "nasty" itt makes me v sad for yis that have been so horrifically scarred by humour in yr lives

― Daithi Bowsie (darraghmac)

oh, no, it's not that. it's just that i am a mean, nasty, and vicious person, and in the past i let a lot of that come out through my "jokes".

Wd have a pint with

everyone had at least one laugh at the special ed kids in school as a kid, but I'd like to think we're better than that as adults.

or when someone falls on the street -- you can laugh or you can see if they're ok. We all have the potential to laugh, but it's not the best impulse to cultivate.

well idk depends on who fell. was it Dick Cheney?

everyone had at least one laugh at the special ed kids in school as a kid, but I'd like to think we're better than that as adults.

True about my own childhood, but I am not sure it's still true. I have one special ed kid and one "normal" kid, and I observe them and their peers quite closely. Contemporary kids (at least the ones I encounter) are pretty tolerant of diversity and difference, if not totally woke. When naming the children, I remember shying away from names that would have gotten a person beaten up on the playground in my day, and my wife was like "yeah kids don't do that anymore, because they're all like Sheldon and Atticus and Marley."

They've imbibed a LOT of Sesame Street-style "it's okay to be different" messaging. So did we, of course, but now it seems to have taken.

Just speaking from my own neighborhood, I find that to be true from observation on the playground. For example there's a kid maybe 9 years old or so there a lot who seems to have some kind of emotional issue that leads him to have sort of breakdowns that are out of proportion to the situation, crying or screaming over small things, and the other kids who play with him are very patient with him.

I remember shying away from names that would have gotten a person beaten up on the playground in my day

my wife refused to entertain the notion of naming our son Buck for precisely this reason

a friend of mine once ran into (and I mean ran) a glass door. I will never regret laughing. (he ended up fine.)

What socioracialdemographic did he belong to

Avian-American, sounds like

i like the idea that you can use the most hateful, demeaning language you can imagine at somebody and it has no moral content as long as you're joking

i mean i assume that's your position d unless you think there's some nuance we're missing

we could extend it from hateful and demeaning to actual threats? i'm just not sure saying "joeks" empties every kind of speech from any other meaning

Wd have a pint with

― Daithi Bowsie (darraghmac)

ok, but you're buying.

a friend of mine once ran into (and I mean ran) a glass door.

Have done this. What's worse, it was at a petrol station and had a big black and yellow warning stripe across it to prevent people being dumb enough to run into it. Have also gone through a screen door hard enough to punch holes in it with my teeth.

then what was your immediate petrol emotion?

i like the idea that you can use the most hateful, demeaning language you can imagine at somebody and it has no moral content as long as you're joking

― The Brexit Club (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, 15 June 2016 22:57 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i mean i assume that's your position d unless you think there's some nuance we're missing

we could extend it from hateful and demeaning to actual threats? i'm just not sure saying "joeks" empties every kind of speech from any other meaning

― The Brexit Club (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, 15 June 2016 22:58 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Theres a joke about reductio ad absurdum

and who is it on Daithi Bowsie?

You said it mate

ya at first i thought darragh was trolling because we were clearly talking about awful things (ie other people's serious misfortune) people have laughed at but have stopped laughing at or shouldn't laugh at

a kinder interpretation is that he was referring to harmless joshing

whatevs

it's a new day

god gave it to us

god also gave it to your mom

just joshing

touched by god (inappropriately)

Bump!

a friend of mine once ran into (and I mean ran) a glass door. I will never regret laughing. (he ended up fine.)

― ryan, Wednesday, 15 June 2016 22:31 (one year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

What socioracialdemographic did he belong to

― Daithi Bowsie (darraghmac), Wednesday, 15 June 2016 22:42 (one year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Avian-American, sounds like

― a 47-year-old chainsaw artist from South Carolina (Phil D.), Wednesday, 15 June 2016 22:49 (one year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This was solidly tyrannical

walked into a glass door in the old virgin megastore on oxford street in london and left a remarkably distinctr fogged up outline of my face on the glass. somehow no one else seemed to see me do this but I had to laugh out loud anyway. the inwards punch is the most noble of all imo

Truly

I feel like I use humor a lot, but I'm incapable of smiling or laughing at my own joke after delivery

this means you're a pro

ya rly. It takes all the muscles in your body not to do that. Once you master it, people end up not realising you're joking and you end up having to explain you're joking and it ruins years of training.

the good comedian, like the magician, never doth revealeth his secrets

a subtle cue from or a word to the wise is sufficient to exchange a hidden element

http://i.imgur.com/1BGuWoK.jpg

the moment that stand-up comedy is having is indicative of the degeneration and banality of our culture

I realized why I occasionally laugh at my own jokes is because I don't always realize whether they're going to be funny to me
I need to plan better

sometimes I forget to change stations when some desperately unfunny smug/witless R4 comedy comes on. I guess bad comedy is a different type of tyranny than what this thread was intended for. But I feel like it must be some kind of joyless imitative crowd behaviour tyranny, when a live audience is laughing out loud at such dross.

I thought the recent Frankie Boyle's New World Order ep was one of the best responses to Grenfell I have seen on the bbc. Obv that is a very low bar, and there isn't any humour to be derived from the needless corporate manslaughter of 100s of people. But it was the only response on the bbc I've seen so far that wasn't either N Robinson style apologist propaganda or insincere po-faced fakery.

https://slate.com/arts/2017/07/trump-and-his-trolls-arent-killing-comedy-theyre-saving-it.html

Fuck me that needs editing down to

Baudelaire, in his treatise on laughter, makes a distinction between “significative comedy,” which you recognize by its carefully expressed “moral idea,” and “absolute comedy,” which you recognize because you are laughing.

lol yes everything else is commentary

The best of it is the treatment of the Lenny Bruce era et al school of comedy as having an inherent sociopolitical bias which is of course what this thread is really about, ilxors reaction against this being proven time and time again as a fallacy

Mike Birbiglia's success is evidence of how dire the comedy circuit is these days

aw, he's funny, calm down

the tyranny of scatological humour

Just don't look

kind of want to start a thread about differing senses of humour, but this thread will do

obviously a thinly-veiled continuation of my attack on ilx - 'the tyranny of lame humour' - excelsior tariff lower than ever, genuine waspish wit or ingenuity at an all-time retreat, j'accuse

or has this always been cuddlestein mountain

Im more interested in the humour of tyranny these days tbh