He does? I guess I’ve just never seen any of it.
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Wah wah wah, look if he didn’t want to work 80 hours a week for ten cents an hour and get one his hands ripped off in a machine while trying to clean up the blood from that child laborer who was too slow, then he wouldn’t have taken that factory job! That’s what happens at Smith and Smith’s Combopulator Factory! Everyone knows that!
See how stupid that sounds? Just because people are abused in an industry doesn’t mean it should be tolerated.
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Altenative viewpoints to sexual assault? You did a great job validating every single reasonable person’s outrage at this situation.
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Yeah, see, if it were me, I’d find it pretty tedious getting my BS called out every time I opened my mouth and it happened to fall out.
Part of personal growth means considering things differently. That’s really what “alt” means. Or at least, it should, but it never seems to with some folk.
No, for them, “alt” means they just want to get away with being assholes. I get the appeal of that, but why not do it on behalf of things that matter or deserve it instead? It’s not like anyone benefits as a whole from a world filled with sexual predators.
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What bothers me is that it was also tolerated and covered up in every decade that followed until nearly the end of this one. The number of people who knew about it and remained silent is chilling. In other cases it’s been alleged that the staff not only knew but some were complicit in procuring for their bosses. In the end, all the perpetrators lose is some of their money and reputation. Unfortunately, that’s not enough of a deterrent to keep younger people from following in their footsteps.
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Agreed. And while I understand the desire to believe the dinosaur rationalization because it would be great if rape culture would die with baby boomers, the reality is that it’s alive and well among younger people, and plenty of boomers somehow manage not to rape and harass women. Just another way the generation myth monetizes horrible behavior with a comforting us vs them false narrative.
I can honestly see both sides of it. Jokes are an integral form of under-the-radar social protest and commentary. But humor can also serve to normalize bad behavior by showing people it’s so openly tolerated that comedians can crack jokes about it. In this case though I’m not inclined to be disgusted with MacFarlane. I just wish his joke had had the same impact Hannibal Buress had on the enabling of Bill Cosby. Maybe we wouldn’t have had to wait as long for Weinstein to be removed from his position. That said, my disgust is with the climate MacFarlane’s joke encapsulated, not with MacFarlane or the joke itself.
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That’s the thing. I’m sure we’d all like to sit here at our keyboards and play “I would have said something”, but the fact is that when you’re talking about a peer who has a long list of awards, a few million in the bank, donates to a half dozen senate campaigns, and has an elite team of publicists, lawyers, and media contacts on speed dial, you’d better be goddamned sure that anything you’re going to accuse them of is going to hold up in court. And even if it does, understand that there is a very good chance that that childhood dream you’ve spent the last 20 years pursuing singlemindedly, making endless sacrifices for, is over- Because it’s entirely possible that mister fame and fortune or his sycophants is going to make it their life’s mission to end you for your transgression. We all like to think we’d make that sacrifice. Only one in a hundred of us actually would.
So you still have a couple options to do SOMETHING without risking your life in the process.
You can quietly pull people aside and tell them something like “listen- Be careful around that guy, because I don’t want anything to happen to you. No, it’s just rumors, but there’s a lot of them, so seriously watch yourself.”
And you can make jokes. Because if anyone calls you on it, you can either say “it’s just a joke”, and have the full weight of a dozen SCOTUS rulings behind your freedom of speech, or you can say “yeah, I mean, you’ve heard about that, right?”
And the fact is, that when you reach a certain critical mass of people doing those two things, the next time someone comes forward, they WILL be believed, and more people will see that and come forward themselves.
It’s a far from ideal system, but it DOES work.
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I’m enjoying the hell out of it.
It feels like I went aboard Deep Space 9, booked a room, flopped down on the couch, and turned on the big sitcom of the day. Like I’d literally hear watercooler talk the next morning at Quark’s with dockers saying “yeah- You know, they want you to think those Starfleet types are all perfect and everything, but I bet they’re actually regular guys like us…”
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See, I agree with what you’re saying have addressed this upthread already. 
Just wanted to add to @anon50609448’s, @MikeTheBard’s and @ficuswhisperer’s points that, in hindsight, I stared at this video and thought “Fuck, he’s serious. He doesn’t even smile while saying this. He only switches on that empty grin after the laughter.”
I think we should discuss @GulliverFoyle’s point.
I had discussions with a lot of people from all sorts of backgrounds about humor, especially about satire. Since I am mostly discussing this with people who grew up speaking German, most of the times someone short-quotes Tucholsky at some point, and the discussion is over. Not because there’s nothing left to say, but because everybody just stops thinking and burrows in to their position. I don’t want that to happen here, hence the lengthy explanation.
My stance on that is: there is no single litmus test which kind of humor is acceptable, and which jokes are off, out of line, or even unbearable. They do have a context. In fact, all humor is all about context. Humor has temporal and cultural context, for example. Personally, I have a huge problem understanding West African humor, especially Rakiire and cousinage a plaisanterie, and even some some anglo-saxon humor eludes me. However, some prinicples of humor quite widespread also between cultures. I won’t go for “universal” here, since I don’t know shit about most humans on this planet - but I suspect that is is a truely human streak to laught at someone, as well as with someone, about something. Which in many, many cases means that it is a way to cope with stress and problems you otherwise feel unable to resolve. This is the framework I am thinking in, at least, so you know.
Long introduction, short but difficult question: what would I have thought of that joke in 2013?
I think I would have silghtly frowned, but I am not sure. I would have frowned because this is a man, making a comment towards women which sounds demeaning, from a position of power. And thus I would have missed the joke was probably on Weinstein.
This post is too long already, so I won’t comment on normalisation issue. But this is an open wound, no less.
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Consider that he was souless to begin with, which allowed him act the way he did, and profit as much as he did. OR maybe he is just an asssoul.
I get that was a joke, but sadly the reason Trump is so bothered by late night comedians has more to do with the fact that he’s a thin-skinned man child who goes into a blind rage when criticized, and who is incapable of letting anything go. All his comments about not having small hands stem from a joke made in Spy magazine in the 80’s. Trump has been harassing the author of that joke ever since.
This person has access to nuclear weapons.
We’re all doomed.
Maybe he can start sleeping with one of them. That should speed things along.
Not really his style, nuclear weapons require codes and won’t just let you because you’re famous.
Just grab em by the detonator!
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Their production time for an episode is super low. They built a cottage industry (really more like a software stack, or ecosystem) tailored to making South Park. They can crank out an episode in a few days, and often do, ensuring the episodes are always current. So they have a unique ability to just throw a lot of stuff against the wall with very little risks, and see what sticks.
Also, South Park only has to be wary of the FCC, not so much advertisers. Family Guy was on prime time broadcast TV and so has additional risks with regards to advertisers.
Just my two cents on why in part Family Guy has waning appeal where South Park is still going strong.
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If i recall correctly, the raunchy jokes in the show are tailored specifically to get the FCC to censor them or tell them what’s not fit to air or not (they submit the jokes in question to the FCC ahead of time). Often it leads to really peculiar comments and objections. Like a character sodomising someone is ok but nipples must be covered, or they can’t say some vague word but they can totally say something that definitely sounds worse.
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Exactly. It’s part of the gag. A meta-comedy layer for those paying attention.
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