no action on racist/sexist jokes thread

LDDD If we were to alter it toWhat do you do when your husband is staggering around the living room?Shoot him again.Would this be funny? Why not test it on a few women friends of yours and see if they laugh. Perhaps if their response is laughter we would have to alter our view of the joke to being not one derived from the cruelty but rather from the absurdity of the notion.Just a thought.

This version has the potential to be funny simply because not that many men are killed by their wives. It's actually almost unheard of for a lot of people.

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The Laminator
For goodness's sake, please vote Democrat this November!

LDDDIt is indeed rare but his still fits your #1 definition.I found the first one funny only because of the absurdity it creates in your mind when your are thinking along one line of impression {a drunk wife} then you are tossed the absurdity {for the vast majority of us} of actually shooting the wife.I grew up with the presence of discrimination {both verbal and violent} and was part of the problem while I was young and then my first wife and I moved close to a native reservation and I got to go to paries and events there.Being the only white man was somewhat disconcerting but I was cocky back then and slightly crazy from drug use.I found myself many night laughing with the natives at jokes that were directed at my race and one night I told a joke directed at them, and then 30 or so natives went silent as the grave.This was probably the closest I ever came to a silent prayer.After a long pause someone in the back burst out laughing and some of the crowd came over and slapped me on the back{some harder than others!}
and I found myself trading jokes back and forth and got to be good friends with them.I also worked at shake mills on the B.C. coast where a god majority of the shake packers were East Indian though they were all lumped under the term paki. One day I decided to do something not normally done in the mills. The pakis would eat in their own lunch shack seperate from the whites and since I got along with some of them {because they actually tallied their work properly rather than pad there work with low grade/high grade mixes} so I decided to walk into their lunch room to eat one day. They stared at me like I had violated some rule. { the white people did too} and I sat down and tried to strike up a conversation with a couple of them but the first couple of days it was just them talking in their native tongue between themselves.Soon though I spent a couple days a week and got to taste some of their food {lots of spice I was in heaven} and learn something of how they view things, Again I learned some jokes that I found funny though there were a few I did not like.I did not spend to much longer there due to an injury tat shut the mill down after a WCB investigation and having experienced a few near deadly misses myself moved on.The point I am making is that the range of culture and social issues is not best served by gaurding against politically incorrect speech and jokes but rather by each of us maturing eough to learn to not take our own shit so seriously that we cannot laugh at ourselves through others obervations of our humourous humanity.This message has been edited by sidelined, 07-31-2004 01:44 AM

Consider my definitions to be more of guidelines than the absolute rules of the game.If you dig hard enough, you can always find an obscure example somewhere that makes just about every joke to fit definition #1.For example, let us look an old joke again:Q: Why don't you want to hit a Mexican kid on a bike?A: Because that bike could be yours.We know for a fact that Mexican kids do not steal bikes more than kids of other ethnic groups. In fact, crime rates are distributed almost equally among all ethnic groups. We tend to see more reports of crimes committed by minorities because the news tend to tell it that way.Anyway, if you look hard enough, I'm more than sure that you are going to find an example from somewhere that once upon a time there really was a Mexican kid that stole a bike somewhere.Here is another example.What's worse than a pile of dead babies?
The live one at the bottom.Although I personally find this one tasteless, I don't see any reason why this should be treated as offensive.Just how often do you find a pile of dead babies with a live one at the bottom? However, I'm sure that if you spend enough time digging around you will find an example of when people actually found a pile of dead babies and a live one at the bottom.Going back to the definition, it's not meant to be absolutely true each and every time (I feel like that knife commercial). I guess this is where you really need human instinct to tell the difference between something that is rare enough to be not considered and something that happens often enough to be treated seriously.Now, I have a story of my own.I used to hang out with groups that were very prejudiced against homosexuals. We told just about every joke there is with the intention of hurting the known gay kids at our school. After my rebirth (when I turned gay), I continued to laugh at gay jokes... and asian ones, too.Jokes are jokes. If you don't have a good instinct about which ones are funny and which ones are offensive, I would highly recommend that you follow my guidelines. If you want to avoid being funny and being offensive, just use the jokes that's within #4.Here is an example of a #4 joke.Q: What does an alien vampire say to an earthling?A: Bring me to your bleeder.Can't believe I laughed at that when I was 12.

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The Laminator
For goodness's sake, please vote Democrat this November!

By the way, Lama dama ding dong is a nickname a friend gave to me when we first met. Freshman college. After hearing my name, he just blurted out that my nickname should be Lama dama ding dong (from Lam). He was an instant friend The thing is I thought he took a really dangerous step there. I've always been a very secured person, so joking about me or my name never really bothered me. If I was an insecured person, boy he would have made me cry. Fortunately, he grew wiser as time went by and stopped assuming that everybody had the same self-esteem as I did.By the way, The Laminator is a nickname another friend gave to me. It was a long time ago. That reminds me. My 8th grade science teacher used to call me The Lammeister.

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The Laminator
For goodness's sake, please vote Democrat this November!

quote:

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Would this be funny? Why not test it on a few women friends of yours and see if they laugh. Perhaps if their response is laughter we would have to alter our view of the joke to being not one derived from the cruelty but rather from the absurdity of the notion.

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But by changing the joke to a woman shooting her husband you have changed the joke to being more absurd.It isn't particularly absurd to suggest that men kill their female intimate partners.It happens, on average, three times a day.Men kiling their intimate partners accounts for just over thirty-three percent of the murders of women, but they only account for three percent of the murders of men.It is rather a lot more absurd, by contrast, to suggest that women kill their male intimate partners.Everyone keeps bringing up Phil Hartman's murder, and I just find it interesting that this is the only example that keeps popping up.This message has been edited by schrafinator, 07-31-2004 08:16 AM

This conversation we are having reminds me of something that happened to me years ago.We lived on the top floor of a big house that was built at the turn of the last century. There were only narrow, somewhat overgrown walkways between the houses on the street, and the parking spots for the apartments and houses were all in the back alley.I had just come home from work and parked our truck in our parking space and had started to walk down the stairs and into that area between the houses. It was almost completely dark out. I heard running footsteps right behind me so I whipped around and yelled really loudly, hoping to scare away whoever was running up on me. I was, for just a few moments, terrified.Turns out that it was my husband. He was walking up the alley from the other direction on his way home from school and while he saw me pull up and park, I didn't see him at all. He thought it would be "funny" to run up behind me and "surprise" me.He was completely oblivious to the fright he would cause me. He didn't understand that women live our whole lives with the knowledge that we are the preferred targets of rape and mugging.We may not talk about it constantly or act really visibly differently all the time; we couldn't function in the world if we did. However, our awareness is heightened at times and places that mens' generally aren't.

This explains a lot.

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The Laminator
For goodness's sake, please vote Democrat this November!

see, no sense of humor.and, uh, my last women's studies class was a hoot.

Explains a lot about what?Me is particular or about women in general?

Oh, I was just saying that it explains a lot about women in general. My female friends have told me millions of times that they are a lot more alert than guys. But no matter how many times they told me, it still doesn't click naturally for me.What am I saying? It's good to be a guy, I guess

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The Laminator
For goodness's sake, please vote Democrat this November!

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Anyway, back to the subject. We laugh at these jokes not because the condone a certain action, but because these actions are taboo.

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No, we laugh at them precisely to condone them; to establish a mutual recognition of these events as humerous RATHER THAN, for example, threatening.And its not surpirsing most men are not threatened by a joke about shooting their wives - they are far more likely to do it than to have it done to them.--This thread its proving its case admirably; what moderator action will now be taken?This message has been edited by contracycle, 08-02-2004 06:37 AM

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This thread its proving its case admirably; what moderator action will now be taken?

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Contracycles, I am one of the people trying to explain why I really did not like some of the jokes told.Yet I don't want there to be any "moderator action".Look at how much good, interesteing, healthy discussion has come out of this thread.While I do not know if I was able to effectively explain why a certain joke was really not funny and quite disturbing to many of the others here, at least there is a mature, intelligent, honest discussion about it rather than censorship.

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No, we laugh at them precisely to condone them; to establish a mutual recognition of these events as humerous RATHER THAN, for example, threatening.

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I think the reason we laugh at the "shoot her again" line is because the punchline is shocking and unexpected. All humaor is about the unexpected "twist" of the punchline.Well, I didn't laugh at that punchline, I gasped.OTOH, in the film Pulp Fiction, I laughed when the informant got his face shot off in the back of the car because it was unexpected and because Jules and Vincent didn't start freaking out over killing this kid by accident. They began bickering because Vincent had made a big mess, they were driving down a busy street with blood and brains all over the back window of the car, they were going to be late, etc.Do you think I actually advocate this callous attitude towards shooting people, particularly after my participation in the gun control thread, even though I laughed at this part of the film?

One time my ex-girlfriend and I were walking back from a party at about 4 am, and she was absolutely terrified. I had no idea why, it was a neighborhood we walked through all the time. So I asked her, what's wrong? She responded, "You don't get it. You're a 6'3" guy. I'm a 5'1" girl. Just accept that this is scarier to me than it is to you."I nodded and shut the Hell up.

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"Egos drone and pose alone, Like black balloons, all banged and blown
On a backwards river the infidels shiver in the stench of belief.
And tell my mama I'm a hundred years late; I'm over the rails and out of the race
The crippled psalms of an age that won't thaw are ringing in my ears"
-Beck

Bull chips. Telling a joke is like having sex. The only way to understand it is to experience it. And what qualifies as a funny joke varies as wildly from person to person as enjoyable sex does.Tell it. If laughs happen, it was a funny joke.

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"Egos drone and pose alone, Like black balloons, all banged and blown
On a backwards river the infidels shiver in the stench of belief.
And tell my mama I'm a hundred years late; I'm over the rails and out of the race
The crippled psalms of an age that won't thaw are ringing in my ears"
-Beck