Patton Oswalt's epic Twitter rant about Trevor Noah, and the fair weather ally

boing
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People used to be outraged over plenty in the past. Instead of yelling online about it, they went out and dueled. Commenting on line is less bloody, so progress!

http://www.librarypoint.org/dueling_days_in_early_america

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At least we vet our late night comedy news show hosts.

It’s a very serious responsibility.

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I was looking at one SMS log yesterday and there is a particular friend which we mutually try to wind each other up. And if those transcripts go public I will never be able to be a senator (or a janitor).

I think this is a simple misunderstanding of audience. Because that audience has quickly and wildly changed.

I also can’t recall a ‘funny’ rape joke at all. I can recall several that make me infuriated (which at the time I guess was the point).

So I guess that is a long winded way of saying I Generally Agree.

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Fair enough. I feel like it’s pretty easy, in these kinds of discussions, for the line between “what we wish would happen/what some people have appropriately done in response” and “what this specific person actually did” to start blurring, especially when it comes to apologies. Like, a really common sequence seems to be

[person does offensive or discriminatory thing]
“Hey, knock that off. It’s not OK for you to do that.”
“I wasn’t doing that.”
“You were, you really did that, and it was not OK.”
“But that wasn’t my intention.”
“Intention is not fucking magic - you still did the thing.”
“Well I don’t think I did. But I don’t know what you want me to do.”
“Well you could apologize, and then not do the thing next time.”
“Well if you took this thing in a way that upset you, I’m sorry.”

And then said person’s PR machine starts talking about how they apologized, and the mainstream media starts referring to the apology, and meanwhile the original complainant is going “that was not anything like an apology, what the hell?”

I’m reminded of the story unfolding in Indiana right now:

[Legislature introduces bill that allows anti-LGBTQ discrimination]
[Minority party offers amendment that says “this doesn’t allow discrimination”]
[Legislature rejects amendment, passes bill, bill becomes law]
[Public outrage]
“This bill doesn’t allow discrimination. It has nothing to do with discrimination. Definitely not against LGBTQ people.”
[Governor desperately tries to save face by getting a bill passed saying “this law doesn’t allow discrimination.” Also refuses to entertain the idea of passing state non-discrimination bill including LGBTQ people]

“We are sorry that that misinterpretation hurt so many people,” said the House speaker, Brian C. Bosma. “I think the national concerns that were raised, that we’re all hearing about, are put to bed.”

So now the national outrage can die down, and Republicans can say “We didn’t pass a bill authorizing discrimination! That was a misunderstanding on the part of the people who had hurt feelings! You can’t discriminate against LGBTQ people in Indiana! Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!” And a not-insubstantial amount of the electorate, grateful for the relief of their cognitive dissonance, buys it and files it under “yesterday’s news.”

Must be nice to not actually have to do the right thing, just get people talking as if you’ve done the right thing, you know?

Anyway, this is me musing as much as responding, FWIW. :slight_smile:

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Classic straw man. No one attacked Noah’s right to make the jokes. Instead, they demonstrated their right to respond to them.

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No idea why my reply shows up as a reply to myself instead of to you, but the system is now mad at me for making edits I think so I’ll just comment to say: I replied. :non-potable_water:

(why is there a system icon for “non-potable water???”)

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You have a point there, I can’t really either. Perhaps its because rape isn’t a “social” issue? Your not going to be telling jokes to rapists, and rapists aren’t generally accepted… But then again I’ve heard hilarious jokes about pedophilia (in the context of religion, mostly). Maybe rape isn’t something that needs to be “defused?”, like race and the sexual misuse of authority?

The only time I’ve ever laughed at a rape joke that I can remember was because it was so transgressive and distasteful that laughing was pretty much the only reaction you could have. To this day I’m not sure if it was funny, or if there is a deeper social/psychological aspect to it.

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To who? The network? Nah man, you don’t have to defend those guys! They thrive on controversy.
You should just make it in issue if you can’t stand the guy yourself. That’s fair.

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Did someone just respond to a [citation needed] with evidence? I thought this was an internet argument.

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Do you even history, bro?

Context matters. Among rapist, holocaust survivors, 9/11 survivors, Sandy Hook parents, orphans, and the Irish circa the mid-1800’s, not all this suffering is equal. Only some of those groups have been systematically de-legitimized when they seek justice for the crimes against them. So when a comedian makes a joke about the holocaust and makes a joke about the Potato Famine, their context is different.

These things are not the same, so you can’t make up one rule that covers them all.

I know, I know, it is hard to live in a complex reality.

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Well please, citizen, draw up a ranked list of the relative suffering of all these groups so that comedians can be sure to write their jokes appropriately. THE FUTURE OF COMEDY DEPENDS ON YOUR WORK, COMRADE! Hurry, peoples is getting their fee-fees hurt!

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I believe the request for for relevant statistics.

Which were not provided.

see also:

see, THIS is what happens when you let people wear pajamas to court.

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Let me tell you about my friend Angus McTavish, from Inverness, who takes sugar on his porridge…

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“Ranked?” I dunno what kind of pathological outlook you have where people’s sufferings can be measured like it’s some sort of pissing context, but in the world of people who don’t have an ignorant axe to grind, suffering not being equal doesn’t mean that it’s greater or less, merely that it’s different.

And if you want to argue that it’s not different, you’re going to have to show me the last time a 9/11 survivor was brought into a court after accusing someone of trying to kill them and told that they were asking for it because of how they were dressed.

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You: “Not all this suffering is equal.”

Me: “Well, if they aren’t equal then some must be greater than others. Which ones?”

You: “YOU CAN’T MEASURE PEOPLE’S SUFFERING!”

Remind me not to be in a car that you’re driving.

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Wanda Sykes has a very successful rape joke. Watch the video at the bottom.

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It’s where I get all my news.

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That was good!

And there’s a few more (mostly male comedians) here: http://jezebel.com/5925186/how-to-make-a-rape-joke

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You’re not illiterate, so you can fully appreciate that “not equal” means that the experiences are not equivalent, not the same, not identical. This doesn’t imply that any are greater or lesser, simply that they are not equal - not the same as each other.

You’re clearly not illiterate, so I can only guess at your ulterior motives for pretending to be a complete dink.

But now I’m trying to educate a clever chimp on the meaning of words instead of discussing how Patton Oswalt did something dumb, so I suppose trolley SUCCSESSFUL, you dink.

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First off, “equal” and “identical” are not different spellings of the same word, they are different words for a reason. “Equal” implies value; identical implies characteristics. I’m not responsible for your crap word choice in the original post.

Now, we can get to your cognitive dissonance: It’s a bit rich for you to try to chastise me for ranking the spectrum of human suffering when in the next para you do EXACTLY THE SAME THING. To wit:

That statement CLEARLY carries a difference in the experience – one of EMOTIONAL QUALITY AND QUANTITY – and I defy anyone reading that sentence to claim otherwise with a straight face. (Unless you really are expecting me to argue that rape and having a building fall on top of you are identical experiences, in which case I might question if you are driving trollies me, clever chimp.)

So, let’s take it as paid that every experience is, to choose a phrase, “separate but equal”. So what topics can we joke about? Well, we certainly can’t make some topics taboo and others not, because that would imply that we are assigning a binary value to the grand pool of human suffering – this topic is okay, this one is off limits. But assigning value to any individual one of them STANDS IN DEFIANCE OF YOUR DECREE OF THE EQUALITY OF ALL SUFFERING. So that means either every topic is available for comedy, or that none of them are. I kinda get the feeling that you’d fall into the latter camp.

And as a postscript, I will drive the discussion back to where you pretended you wanted it all along. Patton Oswalt did not “do something dumb”. He illustrated how one particular aspect of the controversy can end up in an ouroboric wankfest of trigger-word oneupmanship.

Your turn.

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