[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Graywolf, I was actually hoping to make some uncomfortable. Put the shoe on
> the other foot. Make it obvious that some jokes are belittling because they
> are
> so stereotypical. Sure, they might be funny, but they are based on certain
> premises that aren't very funny at all. I tried to make a point by
> illustration.
> I think most got it.
And then there's my favourite blonde joke, which is not funny
because it plays on a stereotype or a disparaging out-of-group
view of a group (which it does), but because it confounds the
audience's expectations, so that it's the turnaround rather
than the meanness that elicits the laugh. It doesn't make it
perfect or completely innocuous (because your complaint about
belittling a group and the ripple-out social ramifications of
doing so still applies), but it does play with the fact that
humour has multiple bases/sources.
Why are blonde jokes always one-liners?
So men can understand them.
The last time I tld that one, it was to defuse the tension
in the room from someone telling blonde jokes and disregarding
a (blonde) woman's stated discomfort with such jokes. His
smugness was deflated, and so was her irritation. If she'd
stopped to contemplate the fact that it was a mere reversal of
what she'd complained about, she probably would have been annoyed
at it for being the same kind of thing she had been complaining
about, but the expectation-setup/unexpected-substitution thing
drew her attention to the incongruity instead, while the group-insult
and the ease with which he was led into it took the wind out of
the first joker's sails.
(Of course, usually when I tell it I'm just trying to be funny,
not trying to apply armchair psychology to defuse a situation.)
And that's sort of what I see in the tax-collector joke: you're
not sure who's going to be the butt of the joke until the punch
line arrives, and when it does, it gets there suddenly, throwing
the pacing off deliberately (or rather, showing the pacing until
then to have been a feint). And the butt of the joke is the
person being a jerk -- the person who is in a position of power
and thus can't simply be told "get out of my face" -- at the
hands of the apparently-powerless character. It's important to
the joke -- that particular joke -- that the butt be portrayed
as somehow deserving the put-down; his merely being a tax collector
wouldn't be as funny, he has to be a smug pain-in-the-ass tax
collector.
Oh, and I analyze stuff way too much.
-- Glenn
