Riddle me this, Batman: How come everybody found it so acceptable to make fun of Terri Schiavo?

* - I didn't even know about Terri Schiavo until three days ago because I've been living in a news-free, diamond-encrusted, holiday world fantasy for the past three weeks. SO many prawns, so much music! Love it love it love it! Meeeaaaaoooww!

It is mean. I'm mean. Mean, mean, mean.

no, cuz it's illegal to.

Not really, because the very folks who were out there blowing crucifix shaped trumpets and snapping foam rubber stone tablets in half outside the hospice believe that starving to death is still dying by god's hand (i.e. naturally), whereas a lethal injection (or something along those lines) would constitute as murder.

If you don't laugh you'll cry and all that.

xpost in this case dying by dehydration isn't by God's hand either alex!

yes i'm aware of this. obv the practical painless death was out of the question.

I'm not sure whether I should be offended, or laughing my ass off. Help me decide.

And there's something else to it, something about an anorexic woman in a vegetative state being legally starved to death for thirteen days.

Add the jugglers and protesters and Jeb & Jessie, and you can't help but laugh.

xpost

the photoshopping i mean.

Yeah, it's actually startling...even mild permanent brain damage will affect the way you look. I have no idea what it is, but I've seen it personally. It starts doing weird things, maybe you don't have the same control over your facial muscles as you used to? And the worse it is, the worse the muscular problem is...? I have no idea.

right.

i would suggest that perhaps there's going to be no resolution to this issue. that perhaps people who are insensitive to the deaths of others should not post or maybe even click on serious RIP threads, nor those who are sensitive should not post or maybe even click to obvious joking-about-death threads. ultimately, yes, we can go back and forth about who's right and who's wrong, but everybody here has to take responsibility for what they want to read and participate in (ie. i don't read uk football threads, 'cause i know next to nothing about it).

...is pretty much right on, but I still don't fully want to accept that, because my idealistic mind still has trouble with the idea that morals outside of actual life boils down to aesthetics, tho I suspect it's true.

tons of xposts

Is she over there doing lines and getting all crazy paranoid again?

Tho I guess if you don't care about the issue one way or another it's fair game.

at the very least, it means she won't abort the fetus if you get it on w/ her.

First, I think Remy and Allyzay are perfectly right to object to those who made fun of Terry Schiavo's helplessness. Degrading and dehumanizing people who are weak and helpless isn't actually funny in my view, in that it is more akin to bullying than to humor.

The peculiar difficulty in Ms. Schiavo's case was the fact that our compassion for her plight was being turned upon us like a fire hose and being used as a cynical political tool to thwart our best interests. That fact made it very tempting to disempower those who were abusing our compassion by shutting our compassion down and by demonstrating our lack of compassion in crude and obvious ways.

Next, through bludgeoning repetition, the media images of Ms. Schiavo were turned into empty icons having little connection to her actual human self. This in itself dehumanized her more effectively than the jokes about her did. Because the media images were already dehumanizing her, it gave the thoughtless photoshoppers an imlpied license to do the same, but minus the psuedo-reverence and bogus moral posturing. This is an example of compounding wrongs, in the name of remedying them. It doesn't work very well.

Personally, I found it much simpler and saner to simply shut out the media noise than to stop caring about pain and suffering. But I can see how others might have fallen into that other, cruder path.

FALSE BINARIES! :)

xxpost

I probably made a few bastard cracks here and there, too.

i can, and i do.

an analogy: you discover that the pipes in yer apartment are about to burst. you tell yer landlord who agrees to fix them, but doesn't respond fast enough so they burst. he agrees to pay for the damages, but not in the amount and as quickly as you'd like. in other words, you have a legitimate dispute. but instead of negotiating w/ yer landlord -- directly or otherwise (e.g., through lawyers or insurance companies) -- you remember that yer landlord is jewish, so you go to find a bunch of neo-nazi skinheads to make his life hell. obviously, you would have chosen the WRONG method to resolve yer (legitimate) dispute, will have caused yer landlord AND yerself more damage than had you settled things through legitimate means, and you've lost any legitimacy you would've otherwise had morally (and probably legally).

to be shorter: the minute the schindlers brought jeb bush, randall terry and operation rescue, and tom delay into this thing = the minute i lost all sympathy for them.

I don't understand any of those posts you picked so I can't really say. are they supposed to be jokes/funny? I can't tell. I'm mystified that anyone would find such fault with my assertion that an awful lot of humor is based on suffering - it's not like I'm the first person (much less the first comedian) to make this observation. Any routine where the comedian is making fun of themselves (Seinfeld, Woody Allen, Rodney Dangerfield, ad nauseam) is clearly based on the comedian's perceived "suffering". Cruel jokes about other people (Terry Schiavo, the Pope, Michael Jackson) are clearly based on their suffering. Slapstick = suffering physical pain. Racist humor is clearly based on humiliating/making light of the suffering of others. There's tons of routines about people enduring various indignities which are obviously based on turning their own suffering into comedy... I could go on and on...

I'm just saying I don't think there's anything wrong with this, per se - whether you find any of these things funny depends entirely on your personal distance from the subject. Terry Schiavo, for example, was pretty distant from me on an emotional level - she was thrust into the media spotlight and quickly became a caricature - as such, I found a lot of the photoshop stuff hilarious, and I don't feel any need to apologize for it. It's personally reasonable that other people who DID feel some sort of emotional resonance with her story to NOT find that stuff funny... but that's no justification for telling other people not to make those jokes or not to laugh. Humor is relative, if you don't think a particular subject is deserving of humor, DON'T READ JOKES ABOUT IT.

I don't understand any of those posts you picked so I can't really say. are they supposed to be jokes/funny? I can't tell. I'm mystified that anyone would find such fault with my assertion that an awful lot of humor is based on suffering - it's not like I'm the first person (much less the first comedian) to make this observation. Any routine where the comedian is making fun of themselves (Seinfeld, Woody Allen, Rodney Dangerfield, ad nauseam) is clearly based on the comedian's perceived "suffering". Cruel jokes about other people (Terry Schiavo, the Pope, Michael Jackson) are clearly based on their suffering. Slapstick = suffering physical pain. Racist humor is clearly based on humiliating/making light of the suffering of others. There's tons of routines about people enduring various indignities which are obviously based on turning their own suffering into comedy... I could go on and on...

I'm just saying I don't think there's anything wrong with this, per se - whether you find any of these things funny depends entirely on your personal distance from the subject. Terry Schiavo, for example, was pretty distant from me on an emotional level - she was thrust into the media spotlight and quickly became a caricature - as such, I found a lot of the photoshop stuff hilarious, and I don't feel any need to apologize for it. It's perfectly reasonable that other people who DID feel some sort of emotional resonance with her story to NOT find that stuff funny... but that's no justification for telling other people not to make those jokes or not to laugh. Humor is relative, if you don't think a particular subject is deserving of humor, DON'T READ JOKES ABOUT IT.

As for the "pissing in my chicken" thing - some people WOULD find it funny (ever seen a Farrelly Bros movie? A South Park episode? TV Funhouse?), and it would be funny because of my reaction to it/how I dealt with suffering the humiliation, etc. Would I personally be laughing? No, obviously not, but that's because it would be happening to ME and not someone ELSE (ie, no emotional distance).

that is not why seinfeld stuff is funny. "it's funny cause it's true" ring a bell?

re: racial jokes, you can't say a particular joke is funny cause racial stereotypes have hurt people. okay you can say that, i'll just think you're full of shit. again "it's funny cause it's true".

but this is just an extension of exaggerating the absurdity of whatever daily-life minutiae (in this case toothpaste) is being targeted. "its funny cuz its true because toothpaste really IS fucking bizarre! what's up with that!"

plays on language = nonsense, obviously. See Lewis Carrol. Or Ogden Nash.

(yes, I know I'm being reductionist in my analysis here - but only because complaining about offensive jokes cuts to the heart of why people find anything funny at all.)

Another analogy. Your wife/child is about to die. You can make a pact with the devil to keep her alive. It's a bad choice, but you might be tempted to make it, for the right reason.

They were using ever resource available in a life or death matter. I don't think they made wise choices, but I do think their ultimate intentions were for their daughter and not to be media whores.

But your point is well taken that they did make horrible decisions.

Assuming facts not in evidence. 90% of Seinfeld isn't funny to me.

(and fwiw, I don't find Seinfeld funny at all. But I can see why other people do.)

A friend of ours who owns a house in West Oakland heard gunshots last month and later found out there was a shooting in the house over the street. Then a week later, they heard gunshots in the house NEXT DOOR and it turns out that a 15 year-old girl had witnessed the first shooting, so they broke into her house and shot her through the hand and the foot in retaliation.
He's thinking of selling.

-- Airtube (adamr...) (webmail), April 1st, 2005 1:44 PM. (nordicskilla) (later)

*but you aren't.

uh, have you SEEN the last episode of Seinfeld, where they all get thrown in jail because they've been such assholes over the duration of the entire show? It's not all observational humor - a lot of times it's about taking those observations to an *ahem* absurd level and making other people (or himself) suffer as a result.

but this is just a premise, not a joke. Now, say you were a porn-chasin, booze-drinkin, pathological liar robot and we're halfway to a TV series...