What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry

melancholic romantic comic cynic. bi & genderqueer. fantasy writer. sysrae on ao3.

A Note On “Ironic” or “Edgy” Humour

Dear fellow beneficiaries of white, straight, cis privilege, non-fellow beneficiaries of male privilege, and anyone who can’t understand why making offensive, politically incorrect, stereotype-based, supposedly-ironic “jokes” about groups who don’t share your privileges should be any different to individuals within those groups making seemingly identical remarks about you:

Imagine you’re being told a joke where the punchline is that someone gets guillotined. Nothing wrong with that, right? It’s just a joke.

Now imagine you’re literally strapped to a guillotine when someone tells the exact same joke - and not only that, but they still expect you to laugh. It doesn’t matter if the blade never actually falls: for you, the risk of death by beheading is infinitely more likely than for the person telling the joke, and what’s more, you have to live with the constant stress of wondering if today will be the day it happens, fearing death every time the blade slips or the rope creaks, watching as others around you are killed in turn - sometimes because their guillotine breaks, and sometimes because a cruel or clueless onlooker triggers the blade, but always and ultimately because they are strapped to a fucking guillotine and cannot get away.

Under those circumstances, you probably wouldn’t laugh, and anyone who expected you to? That person would be an assbag of epic proportions. Which doesn’t mean that nobody in your situation would laugh; just that the basis of their humour would be wildly different from that of the person telling the joke. Human beings laugh at things that threaten or scare us for all sorts of reasons: as an act of defiance, as gallows humour, as a coping mechanism, as a way to avoid reprisals from people who think we shouldn’t feel threatened in the first place, as a means of denying that we’re actually under threat. But that laughter shouldn’t be taken for granted, nor should it be misconstrued as indicating that the threat in question doesn’t actually exist. 

Because context matters. Context always matters. 

But let’s take our guillotine metaphor a step further, because if I stop here, you could easily draw the conclusion that, well, beheading jokes themselves aren’t the problem, and nor is the desire to tell them, provided you only do so when nobody present is actually strapped to a guillotine. Because while there’s certainly such a thing as context-sensitive humour - jokes that aren’t inherently problematic, but which shouldn’t be told at certain times or to certain audiences, like (for instance) refraining from telling dead baby jokes around someone who’s grieving the loss of a child - there’s also such a thing as humour which actively exacerbates, perpetuates or otherwise contributes to the negative situation on which it’s based or to which its premise refers, regardless of whether that premise is mentioned overtly or implicitly. The existence of jokes about dead babies, while undeniably offensive/inappropriate in some contexts and certainly not to everyone’s taste regardless, is not itself related to the actual deaths of actual children. 

But this isn’t true of everything.

The people strapped to guillotines in our metaphor - let’s call them strappies - didn’t choose to accept that risk: it was imposed on them by others, and no matter how recently or how long ago the practice began or under what circumstances, the strappies are still threatened in a very specific way. Maybe this state of affairs is considered a step up from how things used to be; maybe the strappies used to be tortured, too, or actively killed in droves rather than dying (for the most part, as they do now) as a result of guillotine-related accidents and associated negligence. But clearly, this is still not an optimal situation, because even if the rest of society now believes that strappies were treated unjustly in the past, the fact remains that the strappies are still suffering.

And naturally, even if it’s better than being tortured and killed, being strapped to a guillotine is still a considerable handicap. The more you shout and twist and agitate  about the threat of beheading and how wrong it is, not only are you increasingly likely to incur the displeasure of anyone who:

a) secretly thinks you deserve it;

b) openly thinks you should concentrate on the positives of your situation, like the lack of torture;

c) doesn’t think your complaints will have any effect and therefore resents hearing about them; and

d) thinks your complaints are a way of denying that they, too have problems,

not only that, but you’re also shaking the very structure which threatens you, and thereby heightening the risk that the blade might come loose and fall. And if you go even further - if you point out that non-strappies are not only less likely to be beheaded than strappies, but are actively participating in a system that hurts you? Then that ups your risk even further, because all of a sudden, you’re daring to assert that people who think of themselves as blameless might actually be guilty after all, and self-professed Good Guys seldom take kindly to being told they’re the opposite.

The point being: the social mechanism through which people are strapped to guillotines doesn’t self-perpetuate in a vacuum. If someone tells jokes about beheading even when no strappies are present, they’re treating the threat to strappies as normative rather than as an undesirable situation that both could and should be changed. But if a major obstacle to that change is the widely-held belief that strappie problems are both normal and inevitable? Then telling jokes that rely on referencing those stereotypes - and which therefore serve to both normalise and perpetuate those stereotypes - is just another way of keeping strappies tied to guillotines. Because if it’s seen as inevitable that strappies get beheaded; if guillotining is deemed funny in a context where strappies constantly run the risk of having it happen to them; if it’s easier to laugh at negative strappie stereotypes than it is to talk about getting rid of guillotines; then in that context, there is no way to tell guillotine jokes that doesn’t normalise, and therefore contribute to, the suffering of strappies.

And how much worse would things be if the guillotines were invisible? If you still lived daily with the threat, but were constantly being told that the danger was all in your head? If even bringing the subject up saw you accused of bias against non-strappies, or accused of wanting to fit non-strappies with guillotines of their own?

Would you still think jokes about getting beheaded were acceptable, let alone funny?  

Would you still think the right of others to tell them was more important than getting rid of guillotines? 

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  14. li-chuntao reblogged this from fozmeadows and added:
    umm I was in a similar situation once and the joke was fucking hilarious because I was so scared and it fit my position...
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