The "I" Word

By -
Is now "Imus." The controversy about the senile radio host brings to mind a distinction I long ago made between funny jokes that happen to also be offensive and "jokes" that are merely offensive. I can tolerate the first category quite often. Anyone telling jokes from the second category should be shunned. An example of type 2 (for X fill in some ethnic group):
A: What do you call it when a busload of X's goes over a cliff?
B: I don't know.
A: A start.

There is simply nothing funny about this. I'm not saying this in the sense of "We should restrain our laughter because this is offensive." No, the above isn't a joke at all: It's an excuse to share your hatred of X's under the disguise of telling a joke.

And so was Imus calling the Rutger's basketball team "nappy-headed hoes." Where's the joke? What's the punchline? No, this is "funny" in the same way the previous joke is.

Comments

  1. John Goes10:51 AM

    This post just isn't complete without an example of the first.

    ReplyDelete
  2. gcallah12:31 PM

    Example of first:
    A: What is Irish foreplay?
    B: I don't know.
    A: Drink a six-pack and yell, "Bend over, Bridget."

    ReplyDelete
  3. Christian G. Warden2:06 AM

    A: What do you call a black guy who drives a bus?
    B: What?
    A: A bus driver, you racist.

    ReplyDelete
  4. John Goes7:41 AM

    Ha, great jokes!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anonymous4:19 PM

    The sample joke works fine iff you replace X with "lawyers."

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more