As someone who grew up in an environment where racism was passed off as a joke whenever called out, finding something funny doesn’t make it morally virtuous. The comedians and fans who defend bigoted jokes by appealing to political correctness are uncomfortable with the fact that all comedy is inherently normative. It reinforces group norms on what is viewed as good or bad, favorable or unfavorable, true or untrue.
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Slapstick comedy? - being clumsy is embarrassing and getting hurt sucks.
Dark comedy? - the situation, often relating to real shared experiences, sucks and there’s usually little we can do about it.
Cringe comedy? - something embarrassing that we try to avoid, done by someone else. This one is extremely normative, directly enforcing what is right and wrong in social situations. It’s why every cringe subreddit became cesspits of fascists pushing bigotry. They repeatedly show marginalized people doing commonly accepted bad things, and link the minority group with the cringe behaviors until the minority itself is cringe.
Surreal or absurdist comedy? - agreed upon rules of reality themselves are broken. Surrealist comedy reinforces the norms by showing how the norms must be true, while absurdist humor critiques or pokes holes in the logic of rules that aren’t accurate. Regardless, rules of reality, while not always morally based, are still norms.
Anti-humor? - the norm is that we expect a joke from the setup, but the punchline doesn’t deliver. We laugh at ourselves and the comedian in positive and negative ways similtaneously.
Dad jokes? - often word plays that employ absurdity to point out language having multiple meanings, anti-humor, cringe, or some light hearted mixture of the above.
Political comedy? - do I really need to explain?
sounds like purple’s an uncool person but based Signal chat
