80% Angel

Dead babies aren't funny

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 12:42:00 -0800

One day early in our marriage, the topic of dead baby jokes came up on a mailing list my wife and I were subscribed to, and I was startled to see her go into bloody-minded rage in reaction. I thought the humor was in bad taste but I didn’t understand the violence of her reaction. At this point my wife had children from a previous marriage, but we had yet to have any children together.

Nowadays, having helped birth two babies, one of which came out with an umbilical cord around his neck and needing some help in the breathing department, I understand her reaction perfectly. My first, instinctive reaction when someone makes jokes involving harm to children is to gut them with a bowie knife then and there. Then I remember I live in a civil society and decide that perhaps reporting them to the cops as a psychopath might be sufficient. Eventually I calm down and settle for regarding the speaker as a sadly defective human, and hope optimistically that he or she will eventually grow out of it.

Parenthood changes a person at a very basic level. But that’s not what this post is about. The point is that everyone has something which is Not Funny. Even comedians have their limits.

One of my longtime favorite shows—even though it’s been years since I watched it regularly—is South Park. What I love about Matt and Trey’s sense of humor is that it is relentlessly, aggressively, fair. They make fun of everyone and everything. Liberals. Conservatives. Gays. Straights. Jews. Athiests. Muslims. Scientologists. Kids. Adults. The magic of South Park is that one moment you’ll be having a belly laugh and the next you’ll have an appalled look on your face saying “woah, too far, man, too far. And you know that somewhere, someone else is watching the same show and saying the same thing—only about the parts you found hilarious. And laughing at the parts you found objectionable.

Humor is just one of those things that humans do. I’ve heard that EMT humor is some of the blackest there is; the kind of humor which would make a corporate ethics officer’s head explode. Does that make EMTs bad people? Hardly. Thank goodness for them. If it helps them get through the day, I don’t care what kind of depraved car-wreck jokes they are telling while they wheel me into the ER.

Which brings me to the subject of Sensitivity. I worry a fair amount about being sensitive. I question my own actions and try to get outside opinions. I sometimes yell at people for being insensitive and driving away diversity when we should be embracing it. I rage at my computer screen to see the casual misogyny of privileged male nerds.

But for all that, I don’t feel like I fit in with the Sensitivity people. Lately I’ve been reading /r/ShitRedditSays, a sub-reddit where people highlight the misogyny, racism, homophobia, and general douchebaggery that shows up reguarly on Reddit (as it does in any open online forum). And it’s certainly instructive. I’ve learned some things about subtle bias, about casually throwing around words like “rape” denatures them and desensitizes readers to the true infamy of actual rape.

But at the same time, I find around 50% of the tasteless comments that are linked to as exhibits of bad behavior to be laugh-out-loud funny. Even as I acknowledge that they are insensitive. And I realize that to the other members of /r/ShitRedditSays, these things are simply Not Funny. They are beyond the pale.

Now, I suppose this could just mean I’m a bad person. But I think it speaks to a difference in philosophy. I don’t want a world where we defeat bigotry by being perfectly polite and sensitive to every possible background. I want a world where we defeat bigotry the South Park way: by telling filthy jokes about each other until we all finally realize that human differences are, fundamentally, hilarious. Not wrong. Not shameful. Just really fucking funny.

I do think we need to be sensitive to context. That’s why I worry about subtle misogyny and racism in the land of software engineering. It’s one thing to have a room full of men and women of all races and backgrounds laughing about each other’s differences. It’s a very different thing to have a room full of men—and a lone woman—where the men are all telling “slut” jokes. It’s not that slut jokes are Wrong. It’s the the context which makes them threatening.

Unfortunately, I feel like a lot of people aren’t able to make this distinction of context vs. content. One the one side you have people who, when you tell them that now is not the time and here is not the place, think that you have no sense of humor and want to censor them in all contexts and on all topics. And on the other you have the watchdogs of sensitivity, many of whom seem to think that perfect equality is a world where nobody ever has cause to blush. And I worry that the twain shall never meet, and that I’ll be somewhere in the middle, a stick-in-the-mud to some and a neanderthal to others.

80% Angel

Dead babies aren't funny

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