Something I’ve been thinking about today: no amount of declaring a joke “not funny” for political reasons will make it actually cease to be funny.
Humor is a really primal thing. You can have the best, most thoughtful politics in the world and still find your funny bone tickled by horribly offensive shit. That doesn’t make you problematic. It makes you a human being with human neurology, which means what trips your laugh wire is pretty damn arbitrary and often not within your control.
Have you ever tried telling someone who’s losing it at an inappropriate time to shut up and stop laughing? It doesn’t work. That’s the human brain for you. You don’t have to enlighten yourself out of basic physical responses.
This is exactly why the whole SJ emphasis on “stop finding *ist jokes funny!” baffled me even when I was a feminist.
I get that SOMETIMES a person’s sense of humor can reveal that they are bigoted, but I’m baffled by the assumption we can tell that about most people by what they find funny.
Yeah. Personally, I don’t mind any joke as long as I’m sure it’s a joke. Offensive jokes with an undertone of “haha but actually” make me terribly uncomfortable, but jokes I’m positive are jokes are fine. Context really matters.
I never got the whole “people are never kidding when they joke about [thing],” either. Like, do people who make 9-11 jokes secretly support terrorism?
People who make 9-11 jokes probably do think taking terrorism-increasing risks is more acceptable and terrorism is less of a major problem than people who don’t make said jokes.
…I find “stop being amused by that!” to be perfectly intuitive. It’s…basic conditioning, isn’t it? If a stimulus (a bigoted joke) is routinely followed by a punishment (exposure to Discourse), one soon ceases to feel positive emotions toward the stimulus. My visceral reaction to someone telling a bigoted joke is something like “you fool, you’ve doomed us all! shit, I’d better get out of here before the enforcers arrive”.
(This means that “don’t be around people who laugh at bigoted jokes if you can avoid it” also makes sense. If they haven’t even been trained out of laughing at forbidden jokes, what else haven’t they been trained out of? (And what training might they have received instead?) If you don’t know what culture someone is from, you’re going to have a much harder time predicting their actions, and it’s often best to avoid people when you don’t know what will set them off.)
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#reply via reblog #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #this is not the first time Skye has made a post #that seems to rely on an underlying assumption #that people’s emotional ranges are much richer and more complex and more resilient than mine actually are #mostly I find reading funereal-disease reassuring but occasionally it makes me wonder if I’m incomplete #*sigh* #*shrug*
Brinens and Things 
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