But isn’t that what we need?
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It’s also a little weird to compare the political bravery of older athletes against modern athletes without mentioning Colin Kaepernick (and everyone else who kneeled or supported them) as one of the examples.
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I’ll try to be succinct in my opinion - noting it is just that.
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Comedy, IMO, plays a vital role as does a lot of other art in both reflecting society back on itself, causing it to look introspectively, and challenge conventional norms. In a way, this is a safe space as it is understood the purpose of a comic is to make people laugh, not to offend. The context is important (see my later point.)
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Vulgarity and jokes that relate to race, sex, orientation, among other subjects, are all integral to this task for many comics.
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Done WELL, this might involved a joke that is “messed up by true”. This sort of joke presents an unfunny truth in a way that instead of repulsion, you laugh. For some people they leave it at that, but if you want to spend some time thinking about it, you can actually confront and accept facts that are otherwise hard to swallow.
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Done POORLY your joke is just “messed up”. This can be a fine line, but most of the time one can discern where the line has been crossed with a little thought. Or by looking at your audience. If say you have a joke about Asians, and they aren’t laughing, your joke is bad. This might also be a hindsight thing, because some comedy hasn’t aged well. Obviously societal norms change.
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One problem is that either bad comics or comics who are making jokes of bad faith will use the idea of “pushing boundaries” or working with “controversial subjects” as an excuse. If you’re making bad jokes, you need to take the feed back and criticism, and rework your material. If you’re making jokes in bad faith, you need to stop it. If you are confusing your bad faith jokes with just being edgy, you need to do some internal work and stop it.
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Now out side of a comedy club, there is the added problem that with Twitter and Facebook and everything else, everyone is a comedian. (Look at me, for example. I’m hilarious. Most of the time. Some of the time?) The problem is, outside of the context of a Comedy club, where the expressed purpose is to get people to laugh, ones’ motive and intent can easily get called into question. And there are many “jokes” that are just slurs in disguise.
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On the flip side the coin, there have been examples of what I would call a bad faith audience. These people take what is clearly meant as jokes, in a comedy environment, one where everyone else is having a good time, and yet getting offended to the point of having a show get cut short. Or sometimes they miss the whole point of the joke and heckle back to the comic.
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And finally, there is a similar audience trend where one can only joke about a controversial subject if it directly relates to them. While I do agree that some people fail when they do this, I don’t think subject matter should be completely taboo. I think this is summarized in the bit Cheppelle recently did where they were fine with him saying one slur, but not another, because he didn’t belong to that other group. He reminded them he wasn’t part of the first group either.
Epilogue:
There is always Brian Regan!
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Definitely. The system we have, on the other hand, is designed to corrupt or make someone like Kareem so miserable he’ll give up.
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Whoo-boy, yes.
And not just random commenters on the Internet, either.
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Fuckin’ A; on top of that, he’s in his 70’s, let the man enjoy his ‘golden years’ in relative peace.
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Whats your vector, Victor?
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Yeah thats kind of what I was thinking when I came out of that movie. Tarantino’s gimmick of re-imagining famous events is to me, a cheap trick.
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