Well, maybe it was a way of avoiding finishing my taxes, but it looks like we’ve already got a full house BINGO.
Doctrine of the Preferred First Speaker for those new to the term.
(And a warm welcome to all our brand new posters who just happened to sign up to call people shitstains and mock progressives!)
Inorite! Just be careful - apparently it is impolite to imply they’re not here to engage in productive discourse 
As far as George Carlin’s rape jokes are concerned, I don’t think it’s unfair to expect men to show more caution when joking about it than a woman would have. If you take rape, murder, gender, race etc. seriously, then you’re more likely to hit the right note if/when it comes to joking about it. If you don’t respect women much, then your jokes about women may give people the impression that you’re punching down.
Ahem:
Confused…
I watched The Daily Show last Thursday (3/26). Pretty sure I saw a clip of Jason Jones with his dick stuck inside a cantaloupe.
Just Sayin’.
Not on your side? What? Are we picking teams for grade school dodge ball?
Side note: much discussion of rape jokes and offending women. Strange that more men are raped each year than women but the focus is on not offending women instead of rape victims or people in general.
Cite relevant stats or GTFO
Actually, let’s do the math. Trevor Noah has about 9000 tweets that he’s posted over the last six years ([Noah’s Twitter profile][1]) So far I’ve seen only 5 or 6 tweets that people are calling offensive. Let’s round that up to 10, since there’s probably some that have been missed, and we get a little more than 1 offensive tweet for every thousand tweets. I think 0.1% is an acceptable rate for someone who is a fallible human being trying out jokes on twitter.
[1]: https://twitter.com/Trevornoah
Hasn’t happened yet. 40+ years and counting.
In fact, here’s an anecdote which might be apocryphal, but is nonetheless instructive:
There was a comic in the early 60s named Vaughn Meader, who made two records based on an impression of JFK. Sold a ton of them. As you know, JFK went and got himself shot. Really bummed parts of the country out. That night Lenny Bruce was playing a club in NYC, came out, and immediately said “Boy, is Vaughn Meader fucked.”
I would have voted for JFK. Enthusiastically. I would have been pretty upset that day. And if I had been at that club, I’d’ve laughed.
P.S. Later, Lenny Bruce was prosecuted for being “offensive”. Partly for saying “fuck” a lot.
Maybe you should listen to the Carlin jokes (again?). Also, maybe he isn’t 100% responsible for mistaken impressions of them. To paraphrase the man himself, consider how smart the average person is, and now consider that half of everybody is dumber than that guy.
Too many internal rhetorical questions, I retract my confusing and intractable comment 
Carry on 
The report
http://www.justdetention.org/en/listserv/2011/042611.aspx
Reporting on the report
Just one comment: I don’t think Patton Oswalt was defending Trevor Noah’s jokes, just his right to say them. The value of a joke will be determined by the perceived comedic value of the joke by the audience. He is arguing against political correctness alone as a judge of humor, but I think he does believe the political correctness impact of a joke is a factor in whether or not it’s funny. He acknowledges it’s a lot harder to be funny if your jokes are sensitive from a political correctness standpoint, while implying that if you are successful the comedic payoff can be much larger. Some of his other Twitter experiments (the split Tweets where if you see the second half without the first, it’s incredibly offensive) are a perfect example of this.
Especially once your clone realizes they were created as an organ repository, to be harvested at will.
But that clone will come in handy should you be harmed in any way for your defense of others rights.
I am beginning to wonder if it will be possible to speak in the future. It seems our culture is more and more just waiting around to be offended by something (anything, even if it doesn’t apply to us personally). Being offended is the new American pass time.
It’s the complete eradication of the private mind. by politicizing everything, we can start to control private thought through government violence. now, whether we ever reach that stage, who knows, but there’s historical precedent.
Bottom line to me - our society is worse off in this perpetual outrage cycle where we have to destroy any thought that is different from our own. it’s dangerous. someone makes a joke you don’t like? boycott and destroy their career so no one ever commits the same sin of not being homogenized.
quick edit:personally, I think Trevor’s biggest sin was simply not being funny. To me, everything can be funny, but not everyone is funny. If you’re going to make a joke about child rape, cancer, death, life, religion, race, weight, etc… then be funny. #1 rule.
If someone personally finds something offensive and rejects it on their own - understandable. Or if they ask someone to warn them about certain types of potentially offensive material, or don’t want their children exposed to offensive material, also understandable, It’s the self-appointed arbiters of taste who think they must police the sensibilities and frailties of those they don’t know, who use words like “problematic” that are not understandable to me. It makes me shiver with revulsion just to read some blogger use that word as a pronouncement. If it were done in a political context it would be straight-up McCarthyism. These articles themselves should have warnings. They’re douchebaggery of the highest order, chutzpah gone amok. But that’s just my opinion, about how they make me feel, personally. I wouldn’t dream to suppose others might react this way, although clearly a majority has already. And Patton Oswalt didn’t influence my take on this, it was visceral. He just brought my attention to it. Kind of wish he hadn’t, to be honest.
Comedians have always been social commentators. At least, the good ones have been. Maybe way, way, way back–like Vaudeville era–there were comedians who just told “funny jokes.” But as far back as the 60’s and 70’s the comedy was already getting bitingly political. Essentially stand-up comedy took on the role that poetry held in the first half of the 20th century: people standing up before a crowd, doing something entertaining while at the same time forwarding a very biting criticism of the times.
What’s new with the present is the saturation of mobile media access so that everything hits everywhere immediately and with un-deletable intensity. As human beings we invented our own form of communication and we still fail at it constantly, and those moments of failure are now shared with everyone completely unfiltered. Yeah, it’s doing some great things for freedom–but man, it’s dangerous in the arena of fame.
I don’t think its that simple, though I think you are mostly correct. My main issue with that statement is “Government”. I don’t think this is a government thing, but more a structuralism or zeitgeist thing, rather than a more conspiratorial agenda.
The German car joke made me chuckle. Not the best joke I’ve ever heard, but worth a small, smirk at least. This makes me also think that modern Americans dramatically underestimate everyone who isn’t them; I can get a chuckle at an antisemitic joke, while not being antisemitic myself, and not endorsing that view in any way whatsoever. People, I’d like to think, can understand subtlety, and be able to separate liberalism from context. A joke with an antisemitic punchline is very different from listening to a Aryan screed, the joke, while being prima facie antisemitic might even be contextually contrary to that topics.
A lot of my friends who “aren’t like me” (a majority of them), constantly trade racist, sexist, and straight/gay slurs. To an outside observer this could be a hate rally, but in the context this is both innocent humor, and a way of actually poking fun at, and diffusing harmful stereotypes. But if these exchanges ended up on Twitter, the internet would burn all of our houses down.
