The Joke's on You

You may have noticed that I like word play. Some of the stuff I come up with works OK, some of it less so. Humour is a very subjective thing. The recent and worsening attacks on all-things-offensive is a cause for concern - and humour is definitely one of the major targets. I don’t understand humour all that well (and you might be tempted to say “yes, it shows” at this point). I think if you have to analyse humour it sort of loses a little something.

Here’s a joke I find funny

Q: How do Welsh farmers find their sheep in the long grass?
A: Very satisfying

For context, for some inexplicable reason, in the UK there has been a “meme”, long before anyone knew what a meme was, that Welsh farmers were particularly enamoured of their livestock, and not in a wholesome way. It’s baffling and bizarre, but it exists.

Do I think the joke has any grain of truth in it whatsoever? No, of course not. Is it offensive to Welsh people? Maybe to some I suppose. I like it because of the unexpected wordplay. Everybody knows (or should know) that the supposed stereotype is nonsense - but is it all part and parcel of the same kind of othering and demonization that went on, say, in pre-WWII Germany?

Where is the line to be drawn? If you’re one of the SafetyPeople™ you will want to draw the line right at the edge and ban any and all instances of speech or humour that could potentially cause harm or offence to some group or another - unless that group consists of people you disagree with, of course. Then it’s OK.

There’s this weird concept called “punching down” which seems to be unacceptable where humour is concerned. I’m not sure I can explain it because I don’t understand it, but it seems to be the suggestion that jokes are only acceptable if directed at those in “power”.

My brother is, shall we say, “alternatively placed” on the progressive spectrum than I and here’s a joke I told him that he criticized me for. He thought it was racist.

Q: Why don’t Chinese people play cricket?
A: Because they’ve eaten all their bats

This one surfaced because of the focus on the Chinese origins of covid, at the time thought to have originated naturally in bats, and the suggestion that bat was a delicacy to be found in Wuhan markets. The humour is contained, again, in the unexpected wordplay. Is it offensive or racist? I can’t see it, myself. It’s far less “judgemental” to Chinese people than the ovine slur towards the Welsh. I’d say there’s no judgement implicit in the bat joke at all. It’s just a silly, and humorous, play on words that takes advantage of an emerging situation.

For the record, I love my brother to bits and we have some really great discussions about things - recognizing and respecting our differences of opinion.

Here’s another joke, told by the UK comedian Jimmy Carr, that some will definitely find offensive or objectionable. I am writing it from memory so it will not be as polished as the original version.

I was a Catholic altar boy. I got really fed up with all the instructions - sit down, kneel, stand, sit down, stand, kneel again. I said to the priest - for God’s sake just pick a position and fuck me.

Once again the humour is contained in the unexpected twist at the end, but this time it’s about a subject that is about as far from ‘funny’ as it is possible to be. Child abuse is a truly, truly appalling crime. It’s like a murder of the soul where you exterminate the potential of a happy future - or at least make that happy future an almost impossibly difficult place to get to.

Yet, despite my unequivocal abhorrence at this vile crime, I find this joke funny. Some would argue that humour is one way of coping with dark and difficult subjects. There’s probably a good deal of truth in that, but I don’t want to get side-tracked into analysing this particular joke and whether it’s funny or not. The point is whether we should allow such jokes to be told?

There’s some sort of “online safety” bill being proposed in the UK at the moment. They are inviting public comments on it for another month, I think.

I’ve not read the bill, but have seen excerpts. What I’ve seen is quite chilling and gives the government a great deal of extra power, should it so choose to use it. Which they will, when it suits them. I’m not sure, because I haven’t read the bill, but I’d be very surprised if they actually define exactly who it is that decides what is disinformation and what is not. There are probably some weasel words about “consensus” and “reasonable”, but these, too, are words we need to be cautious about. Who gets to decide what is reasonable, and who gets to decide what constitutes a consensus?

Something that has bothered me throughout the pantodemic is the almost complete lack of any metrics. Define what constitutes a medical emergency, for example. Why is flu not considered to be one, yet covid is? Where is the line drawn, and what metrics have been applied to determine the placement of that line?

If I tell a joke that 10% of my audience find offensive, does that make my joke only 10% offensive? If 55% of the world’s scientists agree on something, is that a consensus? If 2/3 of people find my comments reasonable, does that make them only a third unreasonable? And so on.

I might be wrong, and I hope to God I am, but as things progress it looks more and more like covid was a ‘fortunate’ pretext for the introduction of greater control. I can think of no other really good explanation for the deliberate ramping up of fear and the deliberate obfuscation of statistics to make covid seem a far, far greater threat than it actually was.

These things were not accidental but very deliberate and calculated. One might argue they were strategies to ensure maximum compliance so that fewer people died of covid, and that might be true, in part - but it’s not really a very good explanation when the people who decided on all this were partying away without masks and distancing. But, somewhat conveniently, the exaggerated fear has also been a huge factor in the “success” of the vaccine rollout. Happy coincidence? I think not.

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