You're not funny, stetson
Regarding the trial and tribulations of an ex-president and following:
Don't bother trying to dig up links to enlighten us on the "finer points of humour." You're simply a boor who when challenged said we couldn't take a joke.
Don't bother trying to dig up links to enlighten us on the "finer points of humour." You're simply a boor who when challenged said we couldn't take a joke.
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Comments
Well, as for your title, I wasn't claiming to be funny. Like I say, I'm not even sure if I'm the one who made up the joke acronym in question.
All I was saying was that I personally would have found that version funnier, because I find jokes that insult groups, any group(as long as they're not punching down) generally among the funnier jokes.
And I clarified later on that I wasn't saying the joke was better because I liked seeing Americans in particular trashed, it's just that the events in question happened to be Americans, so if expanded to the group-level, the joke is going to be at the expense of all Americans.
And I can't help but notice that nobody took offense to the other joke I expressed an appreciation ie. "Y'all Qaeda". "Y'all" being a well-known US regionalism. I guess mocking Americans from a certain locale is okay, just not the whole country?
I didn't mean links on humour, I meant I wouldn't even be able to post a link to the Purg. thread in question, such is my lack of digital acumen.
I let yours slide too, until you posted a response that showed no responsibility for the words you posted—basically “don’t be offended at what I clearly said” rather than “sorry if what I intended wasn’t expressed clearly. “
But you didn't.
I'm sorry if you took the "Ya'll" reference as offensive. Guess it's a good thing I forewent the duelling banjoes link!
Seriously though, and I know you might not believe this, but I honestly did consider writing the kind of apololgy you recommend, but I thought people would just write it off as one of those insincere "politicians' apologies", along the lines of "Sorry if anyone was offended".
But anyway, yes, you've provided me a useful template to say what I was originally trying to say. Hope you don't mind if I plagiarize(partly)...
I'm sorry if I didn't make it clearer that what I liked about the joke was that I enjoy group-insult humour generally, not that I want to see Americans insulted more than anyone else. I could have said this in my original explanation, and I should have. Sorry again.
Yeah, but that would have been more cerebral than what I was going for. What I liked about the phrase "More Americans Getting Arrested" was just the simple, blunt, bathos of it, not including any detailed sociopolitical critique. It was more of a belly-laugh than an intellectual thing.
But, of course, the reason I liked the blunt humour was partly because the particular Americans getting arrested are the kind of people I'm happy to see getting arrested, and that's largely related to their political views, including, but not limited to, their double-standards on policing and the law.
Also I don’t know where you got the idea that Don Rickles targeted large groups rather than individuals. The man was famous for picking out members of his audience and insulting them specifically.
To re-iterate, @stetson : We Don't Do This, and we especially Don't Do This in Purgatory, which is for serious debate and not throwing shade.
But Rickles used ethnic stereotypes to target the particular individuals in his audience. For example, when he roasted Freddie Prinze, he did an imitation of a supposedly typical Puerto Rican waiter, and quite openly stated that that's the ethnicity he was portraying.
As for your first paragraph, yes, lots of Americans are anti-Trump. And even among those who like Trump, most of them aren't getting arrested. But right now, a lot of attention is focused on the USA as a country where, moreso than in other countries, people are getting arrested for political-oriented crimes. And insult-humour by definition focuses on the negative.
Yes, the joke insults all Americans, by using the worst of them to represent the whole. That's typically how a joke like that works.
I used to jokingly refer to one of my soccer-loving British co-workers as a "hooligan". Now, I don't think he behaved in any way like the criminal hooligans who have made British soccer notorious. But that's a popular image of British fans(based on the way some of them behave), so that's what I went with. I hardly think it would have really worked to call him a "law-abiding citizen".
Umm, humour?
Q: How do you get 47 Canadians out of a swimming pool?
A: You say "Okay, everyone out of the pool."
You honestly think that I, as a Canadian who doesn't regard himself as particularly boring or deferrent, should be offended by that? If so, we really might not have that much to talk about.
Admonition accepted.
It's like saying in 1862 that Americans really like owning slaves, don't they? Har har har.
Now you are neither American nor AFAIK married to one. You sure as hell aren't married to your audience here. And you think we're going to react with "Ha, ha, very funny" when you express a wish to see more of us arrested?
I don't think our Canadian shipmates would be all that enthused to hear you joke about how boring they are. That's a slam too. If you must make group jokes you pick a positive characteristic (such as all the memes and jokes about how polite Canadians are--google them, there are a ton of them out there.)
But America is the only country in the world where MAGA, per se, is a thing, and right now it's in the news for some of its followers getting arrested. And nationality-based humour tends to focus on the negative, or at least the peculiar.
If I was doing a satirical show about global politics in the 1850s, I might portray Uncle Sam as a slave-trader with a whip in his hand. Okay, so that doesn't take into account all the abolitionists. But they weren't really the ones who were responsible for all the attention America was garnering around that issue.
And a joke about slavery made in 1862 would be a joke about a bloody and protracted war that had not previously been part of the national scene, so the dynamics would be a little different.
You seem to be ignoring that there’s a line. Sometimes it’s a hazy line, but it’s there. Your example, playing on the stereotype that Canadians are unfailingly polite and deferent, would likely be considered lighthearted exaggeration of a benign—and arguably complementary—stereotype and on one side of that line. Some might be offended, but others would see it as nothing more than good-natured ribbing.
I suspect most people would think that a joke about arresting all Canadians (in that it “includes a slight dig at the nation as a whole”) for mistreatment of First Nations falls firmly on the other side of the line.
I think I must have really different experiences of humour from other people here. I'm finding it hard to believe that no one has ever laughed at an insulting joke directed against some group they're a part of.
"An unfortunate event at Heathrow Airport today. A Scotsman lost all his luggage. His cork popped out."
That's a joke I remember from The Two Ronnies, on their fake news broadcast at the end. So, I guess the BBC was flooded with complaints from outraged Scotsmen when that first aired?
Look, if you just take on board that it's not wise to use insulting broad generalizations about groups not your own in public, you'll do much better.
You might also consider the fact that the U.S. is coming out of the worst stretch in our history bar (maybe) the Civil War. If I were inclined to make insult-based jokes about Brits, which I'm not, I'd damned well not do it when folks are suffering from the effects of Brexit and a ... suboptimal... pandemic response. That's kicking somebody when they're already down.
My joke was not expressing a wish to see more Americans arrested. It was just joking about the fact that Americans ARE getting arrested.
As for your for comparison between ribbing Americans about MAGA and calling Asians "gooks", do you REALLY think that's a good parallel? When I was a kid, a Korean family moved into our neighbourhood, and immediately had their car vandalized to shit by local kids, who were almost certainly in the habit of using similar words to refer to their victims. Words that are meant to degrade and dehumanize, as you well know.
I would hardly put that in the same category as ribbing citizens of the most powerful nation in the world about the misbehaviour of some of their countrymen.
Not examples I would hold up uncritically.
But if that's what people wanna use for "Canadian" jokes, I'm not gonna bother complaining. I actually think it's funnier when when someone subverts the stereotype, eg. a YouTube video of some drunk asshole smashing up a Tim Hortons in Saskatoon, and someone types in the comments section "polite Canadians".
It's rather like being very tall and having every asshole in the street come up and say "How's the weather up there?" as if it was the first time anybody had ever made that joke. Every fucking day.
After the second time, it gets old. Really, really old. And you can't change your height--or your nativity.
And when insult is added to injury, you have an unspeakable fucking trifecta.
MAGA is the flaming embarrassment that keeps on giving, and that is damned dangerous as well. A sizable percentage of them seem to be verging on domestic terrorism or well over the line by now. I have some of them in my own family, God help me. I would really, really prefer it if you stopped automatically affiliating them with all America. How do you think the Germans feel, when people automatically affiliate them (each and every one of them!) with Adolf Hitler? And if you start talking about the Viet Cong as if all Vietnamese were and are affiliated with them, I'll have to hold my husband down to stop him reaching through the internet to bop you in the nose. It Just. Isn't. Done.
Bigotry humour is best used wisely and sparingly, which I think even you would admit is not the case here, stetson. Your intended target is not finding it funny.
Anti-American bigotry is still bigotry, and I'm not a fan. I realize that in some Canadian cultural circles, anti-American bigotry is considered acceptable, but again, I'm not a fan.
Bigotry humour also dates very quickly. I looked up the broadcast dates of "The Two Ronnies", 1971-1987. Even if I charitably assume that the joke you heard is from the latter part of their career, that's 34 years ago. If from the earlier part of their career, that's fifty years ago. Bigotry humour from fortyish years ago does not date well... if your education in humour was in the 1970's, and you imagine the bigotry humour that was acceptable to some in the 1930's, you can see what I mean.
When it comes to humour, nobody bats 100%.
We forgive others the jokes that didn't work as we would have them forgive ours....
How long have you been on the Ship? Maybe you don't remember any of the many conversations we've had about American-slamming. It's not funny. It never has been. We've gotten thoroughly sick of it. You're not some new thing that we can all ooh and aah over. You're More Of The Fucking Same.
Yes clearly the stereotype of the polite Canadian doesn't apply universally. Some of you are raging assholes. Like you.
Dude, are you seriously trying to shut down a Hell call with "everybody just play nicely, there are very fine people on both sides?"
You don't need to complain about Canadian jokes at all on the Ship, because people don't repeatedly indulge in insulting Canadians as a group, whether in efforts to be funny or not.
Stuff it Dave. My grandfather and sister are American, other relatives.
Stuff it yourself. You have a history of being rude to Americans on the Ship.
"Some of my best relatives..."
That's an excellent observation.
Not least because as I read it, it acknowledges not just that something is no longer acceptably funny, but also that it once was. Lots to think about there.
Beat me to it.
Speaking as a guy who grew up in Appalachia...
I have a little circumspection around that one, even though it makes me smile because there's enough truth in it to make it a functional joke.
And if I heard that joke from a fellow city slicker in Chicago, I'd basically snarl at them for picking on a situation they clearly showed no understanding of. It is a thing I have done.
The rule in gallows humor is that the further you are from the one hanging, the less right you have to make light of their situation. I've lived on the edge of "y'all" country and I try to avoid making those jokes. I don't humor them from city slickers. If they're not your people, kindly fuck off.
And if you're not American...similar. You lack the nuance and appreciation for detail to make a joke like you're attempting. It's not funny.
Oh, believe me, I despise anti-Americanism as an ideology in Canada, especially when Canadians use it to exonerate themselves from similar sins. To hear some Canadians tell it, racism, bigotry and imperialism are alien to the country, and to the extent they exist at all, were brought in by Americans, either personally or via media influences. (Some, if pushed, will admit the British did some bad stuff, but Canadians qua Canadians are always rendered pristine.)
But that's not what I was doing. To be perfectly honest, when I was hoping to see more interpretations of MAGA as "More Amerìcans Getting Arrested", I was assuming that most of the people doing it would be Americans.
(Seriously, I could start a whole thread on what's wrong with sanctimonious Canadian nationalisn, but I would quickly end up sounding like an obsessive. It's definitely one of my "Don't get me started..." issues.)
FWIW, I think the USA pretty much still IS the most powerful country in the world. Can you name a more powerful one?
And while Canada, the EU, the UK etc might not be quite as powerful as the USA, they're are all pretty much up there, relative to a zillion other places, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.
As for "stomping on Shipmates feelings", well, all apologies to your inner-child, Oprah, but when Rob Ford was serving as the crack-addled mayor of Toronto, MAD magazine from the US ran a cartoon of him smoking from a crack pipe, under a sign stylized to look like the Toronto logo, but rendered "Moronto".
Now I'm not exaggerating when I say I know some Torontonians who seemed seriously traumatized by the Ford mayoralty. And I suppose some of them might have seriously been offended by a buncha New York satirists implying the city is full of morons. If so, they needed to get a fucking life.
(FULL DISCLOSURE: The Toronto commentariat has a not undeserved reputation for sanctimony, not least in regards to my redneck bastion of Alberta, so I definitely got a kick out of seeing Hogtown taken down a few pegs.)
Your last claim assumes that critics of Trump would never engage in the kind of group-level self-deprecation that I'm talking about. But I know people who do that all the time.
And I'll also point out that the phrase "More Americans Getting Arrested" implicitly praises some Americans, ie. the ones who are doing the arresting, and presumably also the ones who support the arrests. So it's not quite like saying the USA is a benighted wasteland, bereft of all hope beyond what can be offered by morally superior outsiders.
If you want to try your hand at self-deprecating humor, do it for yourself, not others. You'll probably suck at it, but maybe you can drag fewer people down with you.