The wrong kind of jokes?

[JK Ferret]

Ok, so this is a topic going back to March, and I've been meaning to do it, but forgot then didn't have enough time to do so, then forgot (and repeat...) until now.

Specifically, I'm referring to THIS page of discussions.

Now, I, for one, am in favour of the vast majority of jokes, but at the end of the day, aren't all jokes made at the expense of someone? To be sure, there are lots of discriminatory jokes stereotyping all sorts of people.

There's jokes about the Irish, the Scots, the English, the Americans, the Mexicans etc etc...
There's the sexist jokes (both ways) and ageist (old/young)
There's jokes about hair colour, jokes about height and weight
Jokes about sex (or lack of) and sexuality, jokes about religion, jokes about animals, jokes about life and death.
And of course, jokes about race.

Now, what I don't understand, is why racism is a much bigger deal than everything else in this PC-mad world. Nick said that the word 'Paki' is an offensive word, yet surely that is simply defining their nationality? Why are the Irish not similarly hacked off?

As I said in that thread, I have many friends of all types of these minorities and majorities, friends who are different colours to each other, different nationalities, different gender, different sexual orientation, different ages, some religious, some not, some with blonde hair, some red, some brunette and even one with blue hair.
If I called any of them their respective 'stereotype' or told them a joke containing one, I am sure that they would not get all stressed out and attack me or have me arrested for discrimination.

The bottom line is, that all jokes are poking fun at some group, and in the case of some so-called 'celebrities', one person. But it seems to me that the idea was that if someone on the forums could get offended by the joke (keeping in mind, yes this is a family forum), then it's a bad joke. But then, surely all the jokes ever created are bad? By a being a family forum, some children will be having a look around, so surely all of these jokes about sex and sexuality, a big taboo amongst youngsters by their parents, should be censored to the point of deletion?

Now, I'm not saying that I am discriminatory in any way; indeed, I think of myself as very open minded when it comes to other people. However, were any 'joking' to turn malicious and/or spiteful, then I would be one of the first people to say 'no, that's not right, have away with it.' One such instance I can think of involves hottiger (now ) and Blitzen over hottigers' apparent liking of mental handicaps. Obviously, this strike's a very sensitive nerve of Blitzen's and I can understand that, and his reasons for being against these types of jokes.

However, if everyone who was in these situations were against jokes affecting their group/self/kin then where in the world would we find fun? If every Irish person in the world filed a petition to abolish Irish jokes, then the world would be deprived of some of it's laughter, and I for one would be very sorry to see them go. However, I know that will never happen, because stereotyped people DO accept and even tell jokes about their stereotype. And I believe that this holds true for every single sterotypical joke ever told.


So the question is this: WHY is racism such a bigger deal over all other PC issues?

[Dareos]

Personally i think you can say anything you want, as long as you say it with a smile on your face. I don't hate anyone for the colour of their skin, their hair, or clothes. I don't hate anyone for their religious beliefs (just don't try and force them on me), their physical or mental ability (or lack thereof), nor do i hate anyone based on any beliefs i myself hold.

I do hate people who cause others pain for no reason, or for one of the above reasons, nazis or racists or sexists etc, and unfortunately some of these people make jokes which are funny, but cruel, very cruel. There was one about Frank Lampard and his mother recently, which imo was completely and utterly unacceptable, jokes need to have a level of taste and that one crossed the line into someones personal pain, and thats wrong.

I tell sexist jokes, racist jokes, daft jokes, puns, etc etc etc, all very much tongue in cheek, but i would never tell a joke to be cruel, and would never tell such jokes to someone that got a kick out of it in a cruel way.

eg : What do you tell a women with 2 black eyes? nothing, you have already told her twice...

Funny when told in mixed company in a pub, not funny when telling it to someone who beats his wife.


The line thats so easily crossed is very very vague, and in a community as varied as ours there is always going to be someone that is a little more sensitive on one subject than another. We have seen the evidence of that in the well dodgy joke thread. Someone who has been the victim of a hate crime or someone with relatives with their own challenges may well take offence where none was really meant. Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but just as equally the action of taking offence lies entirely with the reader of the posts in this case, who can have a very different outlook on a subject to the poster.

I do think that Political Correctness has gone mad, its abused more and more, it was originally devised to prevent hate being spread, especially in the workplace, but all its really done is hidden it. No, i shouldn't be allowed to tell a colleague i want to rip her panties off with my teeth, thats pure harrassment, but i do think i should be able to tell a joke like the one above, without fear of retribution.

Anyways, just my thoughts on the matter, imo tell any joke you want, but be aware that not everyone shares your sense of humour, nor appreciates being reminded of painful events or situations.

[CaseyV9]

PC is all messed up in general.

It's always good to get away from PC, relax and not be so touchy. Especially on threads such as the joke thread.
I think people who try and tell you what is and what is not acceptable don't really know the answer to the quetion themselves. They just go with whatever is getting the mobs angry at the time. And times are always changing.
It's all a load of crap.

For a family forum all the jokes here are pretty dodgy. I loved them though and I'm sure that most people are aware that if they don't like it they don't have to read it.
Looking at the nature of the thread, it's pretty obvious that if you are a bit sensitive about certain sterotypical type jokes then it is only a matter of time before before it's going to come up.

[mediaboy]

Racism is such an issue because people in those houses in the middle of london (Those ones called Parliament) decided that racism is not good, discrimination is not good.

However, just because something isn't considered to be good doesn't mean it doesn't happen. It just so happens that, in this case, we are telling jokes which COULD be seen as racist. Or sexist. Or whatever other form of stereotyping you refer to.

However - that is why they are funny! If we stuck to jokes which no one would get offended by (none of which I can think of at the moment then we would have an extremely boring forum.... and one that I probably wouldn't visit that often.

Yes, racism is bad, but I trust myself to know when it has gone to far, and when it has I complain or end the issue.

Some of my friends are shocked at the way I defend other people - who I don't like - when they're the subject of the joke. They think that I should only defend my friends. THAT is why racism is such a big issue. People think that if the form of discrimination is something that doesn't involve them then it's something that they can use.

However, those FRIENDS that ARE the subject of these jokes don't care... They know it's a joke, so I'm more likely to not defend them, and join in the fun instead.... because that's - like someone else said - a situation in which it is funny, and in which you know not many people will be offended.

There is a line somewhere. The politicians drew it so that white straight males have no rights. I'm redrawing it, and I'm not planning on stopping it any time soon.

[Stewart]

There is a line somewhere. The politicians drew it so that white straight males have no rights.

Nearly right, me old cocker.

'There is a line somewhere. The politicians drew it so that white straight male athiests have no rights.'

[mediaboy]

Ah yes.. forgot the atheism bit. Same difference though.

[Stewart]

If you are a straight, white, male Jew, or Muslim, suddenly you've got rights coming out of your erm... head.

Suddenly you've got a private army of middle class pricks who read the Guardian, who will (without fail) get offended and complain on your behalf should anyone else do anything which isn't actually considered offensive by any minority, but will be deemed offensive by the Guardianistas on behalf of the minority they are 'representing'.

This creates an issue where there really isn't one, and white, working class Sun readers with single figure IQs (like me) get worked up that the minority are getting offended about nothing and vote for the BNP.

If the middle class do-gooders would drop the PC obsessed, moral police attitude, all the non-issues would be exactly that, and wouldn't be reported in right-wing newspapers.

Every time you see a story along the lines of 'baa baa black sheep banned' or whatever, trace back the complaint to its source and it will be some middle class 'right on' type who thinks they are being all 21st century and understanding by complaining.

If only they would stop bleating (har har) everyone could just get on with their lives without being suffocated by PC. I've never met a black person who gave a toss about baa baa black sheep. I've never met a Muslim who gets offended by Christmas cards.

Why would they? We have Muslim next door neighbours, we send them a Christmas card, he gave us some sort of cake things during a Muslim festival (Eid, Divalli, I'm not PC enough to know what it actually was ).

No-one got offended for the following simple reason - we are both sane, and as such do not get offended by life happening.

In the world of PC, we'd have to have a meeting, probably at the BBC, or the national conference of one-legged Lesbian vegans against nuclear weapons and St George , to discuss any possible offence that might be caused by giving a Muslim a Christmas card... in a Christian country.

We'd have to decide against it, call it Winterville, and keep the curtains closed until January 1st. If the neighbours clapped eyes on our Xmas tree they might get a Jihad on us!11!!

If the real world, you give him the card on Xmas eve, he gives us one, and we get to eat a funny cakey thing. Madness, huh?

People talk about 'playing the race card' and rightly have a moan about it. Know who plays the race card? White people. PC white people. They play it 'on behalf' of minorities. Wish they'd stick it up their arse instead, do everyone a favour.

That story not so long back about it now being legal, in the event of 2 people going for the same job being equally suitable, to select the non white applicant, in order to promote diversity... yeah, great idea.

Patronise and insult people of colour by pretty much saying they can only get on in life with a helping hand from the (mostly white) ruling classes, and feed the BNP with another story that plays right into the hands of pissed off white people.

Total disaster all round.

You can always tell how good an idea is by looking where its come from. PC was a gift to the world from... America. Enough said.

PC warriors - STFU.

[Dareos]

well put

[Nick]

I don't think it's the fact you're making a joke of stereotyped racial type that's an issue, such as the English, Irish, Scotsman jokes... we know that not all Scots are tight with their money and not all English are stuck-up snobs and not all Irish are daft as a brush... we know these are untrue.

In America, the exact same jokes work if you change the stupid race to the Polish and again, we know they're not stupid... (the Polish that is, I'm on the fence about Americans)

It's the fact that these jokes are often dependant on a particular, obviously untrue, stereotype that makes them more acceptable.

But then there's racial jokes that either rely on a misconception or a truth... and these are the ones I'd be more wary of.

Here's a couple of examples, produced purely to illustrate my point:

What's see-through and lies in the gutter? A Paki with the crap kicked out of him.

What's brown and taps on the window? A wog in an oven.

The first joke ONLY works because it relies on a truth about the colour of the race in question and then implies violence is funny.

The second joke again implies violence is funny but is in this case needless as there's other ways to tell the same joke, substituting a baby for a 'wog', which makes the joke funny for the shock value... but then others will find it more offensive as harming children might be a touchy subject.

Now without going all the way back through the entirety of the dodgy joke thread, I can think of two instances where I've intervened. The first, as has been said, was because of a complaint by Blitzen but the issue there went further than the joke thread with Blitzen receiving very offensive PMs full of the usual ill-informed crap that ignorance seems to let flow from people. And I think it completely right that if someone asked you to stop making jokes about a touchy subject, you should... you would if you wre in the pub having a drink with that person, wouldn't you?

The second time I got involved was over a race issue, and, as my second example 'joke' above illustrated, there was no need for a racial reference to get the shock value of the joke across. It was probably copied from an email and was likely added in purely for a racial dig at black people.

But with all that said, I do very much think that racism and PC-ness can go way too far. Especially when you read in the news about racial attacks and then see the guy they caught is your classic wigger, who's just stabbed some bloke who may or may not be innocent of any crime... but I find it ironic that some white kid, who's way of dressing and speaking is based on the US black gang-culture, thinks he's on some sort of racial superiority trip and stabs a black bloke...

But racism is sadly pretty much ingrained into society and it's only as kids of different races grow up together that it'll ever gradually die out... and it WILL take a few more generations until it does. My aunt and uncle still call anyone non-white 'wig-wogs' and they think that's being PC! But then, I've had the misfortune to run into some severely racist black blokes... and Asians, Indians, Chinese, French and Germans... the best you can hope for is that their kids don't listen to them too much and in time learn that we're all the same.

Until then, people are going to carry on being offended by jokes that use racial based truth in a derogatory fashion... and until then, it's perhaps the true calling of comedians like Chris Rock to try and make people realise that humour can bridge the gap.

[JK Ferret]

Iirc, Nick, one of the times you intervened was in reference to one of my posts (deleted by you now I believe) which contained a couple of 'rascist' jokes. However, If we could change the subject away from race, would that make so much of a difference?

The jokes in question were not implicating violence (being related to war weapons, rather thanm outright beatings/stabbings etc.), and the main focus of these jokes were that the weapons were poorly made. So if this can be changed to, say, a poorly organised Rebeliion army, rather than a Pakistani or Iraqi or whatever army, will that make it all right? If so, then one could argue that the joke was based on an untruth, since we all know that these armies aren't unorganised - look at how long they've been resisting the USA, they're probably better organised than us in ways.



Let's say for example, it was open mic night at a comedy club, and a black man came on and told rascist jokes (against blacks and coloureds), then a female came on and told sexist jokes. Why would this be more acceptable, simply because they are making fun of themselves? If a white man told the same ones he'd get thrown straight out and probably mobbed by an angry crowd, even if it was the same crowd who'd just listened and laughed along to the female and Mr Black Man's jokes.

As Stewart has said, even the people who are being 'protected' by PCism are sick to the teeth of it. In a country where we supposedly have free will, we are being restricted in our every action, to the point where we may as well blindly follow orders, since anything else will get us arrested. And I, for one, really don't want to live with that attitude of Big Brother-ness and the nanny state, and I'm sure that many others feel the same.

[Nick]

I don't remember removing any of your jokes, but hey, maybe I did... tbh, I don't know.

I guess the question you're asking is how can it be ok for someone of a racial background to make fun of that background?

Well the answer is a complex one, certainly so from the standpoint of what makes a joke funny, but in the simplest form, I guess the defence would be something along the lines of "I am (insert demographic of choice here) therefore I can make fun of it and myself but you, who are not the same and do not suffer the trials and persecution brought on by being (insert demographic) cannot comment as you do not know and possibly fall into the the category of being a persecutor of my demographic".

ie, unless you're one of my lot that I'm joking about, laugh away but don't make your own jokes.

But my main point still stands... there are jokes that play on obvious untruths but can pretty much fit any set of contrasting values to work as they play off the contrasts against each other. Englishman, Irishman, Scotsman could as easily be South African, Nigerian, Ethiopian... or Brazilian, Peruvian, Argentinian...

But then there's jokes that rely of a stereotypical, derogatory, not necessarily true, trait to work. And then there's jokes that have some sort of slur in their matter which is actually the point of the whole joke.

Now someone from that group making those jokes serves a multitude of purposes... first, it disarms those that would make the jokes against them... very much like if you make a pratt of yourself by tripping over and landing face first in your dinner in the canteen, you can either be laughed at or laughed with... and people respect and like you much more if you can be laughed with, that's the way we humans work.

Then there's the bringing of taboo subjects into discussion by using humour in a variety of forms, be they straight jokes, one liners, irony or parody. The Brass Eye special of paedophiles is a classic example.

And then there's those that make jokes about a subset of their group who, they feel, are responsible for the generally bad perception of their group. Chris Rock on niggaz, Omid Djalili on Iran and Iranians, Alan Shain on disabilities, Jackie Mason on Jews (ok, so he was fairly soft but he paved the way for some really good new comedians).

The point is that these people take our preconceived steretype mindsets of their group and blow them apart by not only making fun of the group but doing it in a such a way as to make us reflect on our preconceptions and realise that we were wrong... which we invariably are.

And my take on this? It's only once we actively teach ourselves to stop looking at colour, faith, disabilities, social background and the like and realise that we're all humans that we'll ever start to understand different ideas and cultures. But EVERYONE has to do this... it doesn't work if only a few take it to heart. Oh, and some groups need to just lighten the hell up or we'll never have a good Danish religious cartoon and the PC grip will just keep on tightening.

[JK Ferret]

Oh, and some groups need to just lighten the hell up ... or the PC grip will just keep on tightening.

Hear hear!

I get the feeling that we're arguing the same point, but we can't see each other, maybe like on different sides of a wall yet both in the same corridor (i.e. a u-bend)?

I wholeheartedly agree with what you are saying Nick, jokes are there to be funny and laughed at, and if the butts of these jokes can join in the laughter then yay, the world still has hope yet.

[CaseyV9]

A fine line it is then.

I still think the PC kind of shoots itself in the foot.
It should be more relaxed. You get to the point now that where normally the colour of someone's skin or sexuality or race wouldn't normally be an issue. The fact the person in front of you is black may not be something you would even notice. But through PC, it does become an issue because you have be so carefull not to say something that would be considered rascist.

So through PC it becomes an issue. Especially with people taking offence to Blah Blah Black sheep.

[Dareos]

NIck, i think you put it far better than i tried to. with the same intent.


The simplicity is this : If you tell a joke with the specific reason of demeaning a person (race, creed, ability etc) then it is wrong


The Reality is : sometimes you have to lighten the hell up


I would never tell a joke to demean someone ( unless its hitler or David Hasslehoff), and personally would prefer that others did the same (especially about hasslehoff)