Echidne has one of her rather regular posts on why feminists aren't funny, or, rather, why jokes against feminists aren't funny.
To a certain extent, I can understand the point she tries to make: that jokes which victimize some particular subset say more about the speaker than about the subject.
So why are feminists not funny? Or rather: Why is accusing someone of not being able to take a joke a legitimate form of defense? A lot of jokes are boring or contrived or just not very funny. A lot of jokes base the laugh-line on a shared understanding that Other People are stupid. Take the Blonde Jokes, for example. Those jokes are only funny if you really think that women with fair hair are very stupid people. I might not laugh at them for a very personal reason, a reason which has nothing to do with my sick sense of humor. Or its absence. Or hair color.
Can funniness be analyzed and understood? Probably not in the sense of creating a formula that would always work, and the very work of doing so would be extremely unfunny. But all humor depends on surprise. How that surprise is delivered varies, and different folks laugh at different sources of surprise: slapstick, situational comedy, word puns, story jokes and so on.
The surprise is needed. It also needs to trigger the laughter reaction. Why feminists don't find certain surprises funny is for the same reason that you throwing a cake in my face might make me surprised in a way not conducive to laughter. You, on the other hand, might get a nice belly laugh out of that. At least until you have figured out what happens to people who throw cakes in the faces of goddesses. Burp.
It was interesting that she should bring up pies in the face, considering that it is the method of attack liberals like to use to silence conservative speakers. I can agree with her there that pies in the face are, indeed, not funny. They are designed to be insulting.
And there is all sorts of humor which this group or that might not find particularly funny. Sure, there are feminist jokes and blonde jokes and religious jokes and racist jokes and sexist jokes and liberal jokes and conservative jokes. There are jokes about short people, fat people and bald people. There are jokes about doctors, lawyers, engineers, hairdressers and jokes for practically every profession under the sun. And this isn't including redneck jokes and husband and wife jokes. (I don't vouch for the funniness of any of these jokes, btw)
Echidne usually complains about female and/or feminist jokes because there is a stereotype of feminists as not funny. But that's largely because of the strident tone of much of feminist writing. So, for example, this Jonah Goldberg column from 2002 in which he explains why feminists aren't funny is exactly why she complains about feminists not being "humorous" today.
What studies and polls do show is that most young women don't want to be called "feminists." Why? Because the term has become synonymous with "unreasonable ideologue," "chronic complainer," "crypto-lesbian," and perhaps most of all, "humorless toothache of a human being."
This annoys professional feminists to no end — but then again, what doesn't? Their main gripe is the ingratitude of young women who "betray" the cause of the "founding sisters" who brought us so much. When you read feminist junk — and most of it is, quite simply, junk — there's a lot of guilt mongering about "continuing the revolution" and "finishing the work of our foremothers." But, the unfinished work invariably involves such picayune and marginal issues as "transgender equality" and homosexual adoption. Insisting these are the same issues as women's suffrage doesn't make it so. This desperation to infuse the cause with new passion is the chief reason feminists are so humorless. Because there are so few specific meaningful issues, all sorts of minor or nonexistent issues get injected with outsized and outlandish meaning. See the letter Ramesh received yesterday for example. Make a joke about women or use the word "chick" in the wrong company, and you will likely receive a barrage of dragon breath about how "the degradation of women is no laughing matter!" You will be educated on the great chain of oppression, which begins with a dumb-blond joke and ends in female circumcision in Africa.
Are there jokes one group or another will find offensive? Sure. That's why I don't watch The Daily Show or Stephen Colbert. But I don't think funniness is necessarily tied to Otherness or putting down some other groups. Some jokes are just funny.
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