Acceptable Targets Discussion - Television Tropes & Idioms

Origin story from YKTTW

Oh, one more thing. Am I just crazy, or does ageism seem kind of acceptable on TV? Just, you know, things like all the old characters on The Simpsons being curmudgeonly and senile, the Florida episodes of Seinfeld...it seems as though there's more freedom to be blatantly offensive in this one area. I don't know, maybe it's just me.

Oh, definitely. Ageism, and don't forget, it's okay to make fun of the fatties! (mutter grumble)

Whogus The Whatsler: Age, weight and more — I think I'll create an entry about the Acceptable Targets out there.

Ununnilium: I don't know about The Simpsons. Homer's mom was well-portrayed, Grandpa has had some good character moments (the Hellfish Bonanza episode), and there's probably some I'm forgetting now. Certainly it has its examples, but the worst instance on television?

RedBeardSean: What about rednecks? It seems that anyone who doesn't live in a metropolitan apartment/condo is fair game to be ridiculed as a backwater hick (with or without Deliverence references).

Ununnilium: That works, though it's an American trope; I have no doubt, however, that other countries have their own examples.

Idle Dandy: Sixties is not elderly. I propose changing that to seventies. I also nominate adding fundamentalist Christians to the list.

Ununnilium: It's not, but TV acts like it is. As for the latter... hm. For one thing, I can't think of any examples of that off the top of my head. `.` Except for the shows that make fun of everyone, viz. South Park.

It seems to me that white male fathers in family sitcoms have for a very, very long time been portrayed most often as lazy, stupid comic foils for everyone else, and not just on television programs. Peter Griffin, Dagwood Bumstead, Homer Simpson, Al Bundy, and hundreds more all serve as their respective programs' Butt Monkey. Change the race of any of these characters to anything else, and the network would get lots and lots of angry letters.

osh: I dunno, that's more because the Butt Monkey depiction was a deliberate subversion of the Father Knows Best treatment of white middle class dads as proper heads of the family.

Dark Sasami: "Change the race of any of these characters to anything else, and the network would get lots and lots of angry letters." I would counter this argument with George Jefferson and that Sanford guy, off the top of my head. Bet there's an example with Wayanses in it, too, if anybody ever watched those shows.

Ununnilium: I disagree on the "straight white men" one. Nobody's insulting them for being straight white men, which is the case with all the others.

Ununnilium: How about furries? They seem to be the new point-and-laugh-at-the-weirdoes.

LTR - For that matter, folks who have even minor and non-illegal sexual fetishes (i.e. not pedophillia, necrophilia, rape, etc) seem to be marked as having a tenuous grip on both morality and sanity.

Brickie - I'm going to agree with Idle Dandy above - in fact [i]any[/i] practicing Christian in fiction is likely to be a scary fundamentalist preaching at everyone they meet, a brainwashed cult victim, a sad naive sap just waiting to be killed or at best disillusioned or a smarmy corrupt televangelist. Bizarrely, Ned Flanders is about the most sympathetic Christian I've seen on mainstream TV. Possibly Harold Bishop on Neighbours many moons ago, but even he was a bit of a pompous holier-than-thou type. Then again, any time anyone is shown to be a practicing Muslim it's a fair bet they're about to hijack something or blow it up, so it's not all one way. But I think Christianity's the religion it's OK to have a go at for the same logic as the rest of the White Heterosexual Middle-Aged Middle Class Male set-up: They're the ones who've had the power in the western world historically.

Robert: The Vicar is almost always an ecception to this generalisation.

Looney Toons: It also doesn't hurt that the most vocal and extreme Christians in the real world practically demand to be lampooned viciously because of some of their outrageous demands to control the culture. (I swear, the next time I hear that Christians are singled out for special abuse on The Simpsons, or that no one should be allowed to make jokes about Christianity at all, I'm going to scream at that person. With a handheld loudspeaker.)

Scream your head off. While you're at it, go ahead and have a nice, loud chuckle over those Danish cartoons and pay an especially noisy visit to Theo Van Gogh's grave.

August Derleth: Sure, when Christians in America and Europe are killed for being Christians. Until that horrible day comes, the Christians can stop acting like an oppressed minority.

Ununnilium: By the way, the original source for that quote says it's a paraphrase from Austin Powers, but I can't find it, so if it is, feel free to fix up the attribution.

Paul A: "There are only two things I can't stand in this world. People who are intolerant of other people's cultures... and the Dutch." — Nigel Powers in Austin Powers in Goldmember

Ununnilium: Ah, that's it. I was looking for "xenophobic". I'm-a put that version in, since it's the original.

Ununnilium:

Teenagers. Unless the show in question is a Teen Drama, the teenage children of the main (adult) characters will only exist to get in trouble (though they'll never break the law unless it's a Very Special Episode) and antagonize their parents. Oh yeah, and they Cant Get Away With Nuthin.

...no, this doesn't work. First of all, they're not usually made fun of for being teenagers, which is what this trope is about. Second of all, there's about a b'jillion different shows out there with teenagers as the main characters.

Tzintzuntzan: I think that's more a matter of the Competence Zone — in a show based around adults, teenagers are scum (and thus, Acceptable Targets), just like all people over the age of twenty are Acceptable Targets in the Teen Drama. BTW, I don't think Christians are always attacked on TV. While they're certainly fair game for shows that want to pick on them, there are plenty of shows like Touched By An Angel and Seventh Heaven in which Christianity (or The Theme Park Version thereof)is praised.

AK47x2: Do you suppose that making fun of the blind, deaf (and hearing impediments) counts?

Ununnilium: But does anyone actually do that, other than Dead Baby Comedy shows?

Ununnilium: I'm pulling out...

The Kinky. Sexual peccadillos are funny. Even the minor, legal, relatively common-place ones. If it can get past the censors, it'll get past the viewing populace. The classical example would be anyone in a gimp suit. On the Internet, the most acceptable target seems to be furries, the official "point-and-laugh-at-the-weirdoes". Note that this is the one place where normal protections against mocking homosexuality fall flat; you can't note a gay guy's limp wrists, but joke about being tied up is fine.

...because, on TV, at least, it seems to me like the only people who will even reference kinks are the "make fun of anything" guys.

Kizor: CSI isn't Dead Baby Comedy, but had quite an impressive fursuit fuckfest.

Kizor: What did I just type?

Gattsuru: Interesting word choice. I dunno about major TV references, but both Law and Order and CSI referenced bondage as joke material, the later of which is where the gimp suit reference came from. It's a pretty specific audience, I'll admit that, but I think it comes around every so often.

Ununnilium: It's not Dead Baby Comedy, but it's the dramatic equivalent, IMHO. What would you call that?

Seth: Dramatic Shocker?

Ununnilium: ...and then it was added back in? >.>;

Ununnilium: Took out:

(the heroic French soldier, not so much)

...because it doesn't really add anything to the entry. (The main reason for this, BTW, is probably because America didn't get into the war until after France fell.)

Except that nobody cracks jokes about the French Resistance, people do crack jokes about how the French government surrendered so quickly in WWII. All the time, in fact. It may also have something to do with the fact that there's no real ADL specifically for the French. Once a group of people come together to whine about how they're portrayed, stereotypes tend to go away.

Ununnilium: Good point on both parts.

Captd I think the Redneck stereotype is actually getting stronger. In part, because one of the stereotypes is that rednecks are racist; therefore, if you point out that they are all inbred and stupid and incestuous, you are fighting racism. Strange that you can fight racism by pointing out that a large group of people are genetically inferior, but there you go. (To counter an obvious counterargument: yes, many Southerners *are* actually racist. But many young African-American men *are* actually street gang members, too.)

Ununnilium: I'm cutting out both of these, since they're only very tangentially related to the subject at hand:

For instance, in Star Trek The Next Generation, an accident with a cultural observer duckblind and the Enterprise's response inadvertently gets a native from the planet's Vulcan-like, but primitive (and thus under Prime Directive restrictions) culture thinking that they are gods. This misapprehension plants the seed for the revival of religion on the planet, and Capt. Picard is determined to nip that development in the bud.
In The Stainless Steel Rat, main character Jimmy diGriz believes, like the main culture, that death is the end of everything; this makes him ultra sensitive to the taking of human life, even of villains, since each person only gets one shot. He has killed, but only very rarely and in extreme circumstances. And, hey, his first case was tracking down a mentally unstable serial killer... whom he later married.

My sister used to work as a counsellor at a centre near Pioneer Square in Seattle and I once went through a nasty break up after completing my Masters degree that resulted in my being homeless and having to go to food banks for awhile. I mention this because I made a minor edit of removing from the "homeless as acceptable target" that it is true to life that they are largely drunks and druggies.

Most can't afford drugs. Certainly like fundamentalists of various religions, the drunks and druggies are simply the most visible homeless. It was pretty frightening discovering how many just down on their luck people were homeless. So much stigma and shame is attached to this state that they do their best to stay invisible and will often not admit publically to homelessness.

Ununnilium: Makes sense.

Scrounge: Okay, here's an odd, tangentally related story. One night while I was working at Rite Aid, this person comes in, buys some Snickers... And immediately returns them upon noticing they were made in Canada. My co-workers and I were baffled. Apparently, there really are people out there who have something against Canada. I have no idea why, but there you have it.

Looney Toons: Floy Bob, note the garbage characters that appear in "general na�vete regarding technology " from the Redneck subentry. Stop putting them there.

Zeke: Took out this addition to my note about the South: "It's kind of like making Amish jokes; since most of your Acceptable Targets don't actually have cable TV connections and are therefore never going to find out you're making fun of them, it's completely safe." Clever and all, but not true, and the fact that people actually think so is a function of how prevalent the stereotype is.

{Artful}: Conjoined twins? The one hitch is, the kind of conjoined twins usually portrayed (adult with two heads and two arms) barely exists. Usually twins that are that severely conjoined suffer other health problems and don't become active adults.

Peteman: Should the Church of Scientology be added? I've gotten the vibe that they're often portrayed as a bunch of weird money grubbing freaks (South Park is probably my biggest source of information though).

Callista I've been thinking about the geeks/nerds entry, and I'm beginning to think that lately, with all the autism hype in the media, they might actually be moving out of the "acceptable targets" category. At first, you could make fun of them, and it was OK; then we started getting movies where the geek was the target of the "ugly duckling" process; and then finally we're starting to get movies where geeks stay geeks, but are portrayed in a sympathetic manner... The earliest example I can think of is probably the "Freaks and Geeks" TV series, in which the protagonists were definitely social outcasts, but it wasn't always played for laughs. Even Asperger Syndrome, where geekiness becomes so severe that it merges with autism, is turning into something that isn't quite an acceptable target anymore—probably because nowadays, they actually know it exists. (It was officially defined in 1994, according to Wikipedia.) "Mozart and the Whale" is an example of a sympathetic portrayal of Asperger Syndrome. It's probably too early to remove the entry, though... even sci-fi TV shows, aimed at real-life geeks, still poke fun at the over-intellectual scientist sidekicks.

I was wondering about the entry " drug addicts ". I don't have any experience with them—I live in the suburbs!—but don't real life dealers do bad things?

Ellen Hayes: Because, of course, Drugs Are Bad inherently. If you define "bad" as "criminal", sure; so do all prostitutes (except in some Nevada counties), and anyone with milk crates in their house. On the other hand, if you can make a differentiation between selling drugs, and, say, Rape The Dog, then it's not a good correlation. And "I live in the suburbs" is a joke; I knew at least one drug dealer at my upper-class college prep high school, and I know he wasn't the only one dealing.

The Defenestrator: OK, drug dealers I can understand, but Nazis?

Doctor Nemesis: *shrugs* It's good for some things to be Acceptable Targets. How many positive depictions of Nazis or fascists have you ever seen? Quite rightly, no one cares about offending Nazis or fascists by laying into them, and as I understand the trope, that' makes them an Acceptable Target. I could, of course, be misreading something.

Fanra: Joe McCarthy and McCarthyism.

I think that should be removed. It makes as much sense as adding Nixon and Watergate, Warren G. Harding and Teapot Dome (look it up on Wikipedia if you don't know what it is), North and Iran-Contra, Bill Clinton and "I did not have sex with that woman" along with the definition of what "is" is, as well as every other scandal.

Rann: I dunno, seems fair to me. The McCarthyism era is vilified and stereotyped like few other of those scandals are. It is rarely treated with any serious historical attention, and falls back to "McCarthy and anyone who didn't hate him was a bad, BAD man!" It's at the very least portrayed as if it were America's own little flirtation with Nazism, and if actual Nazis get to be listed, I don't see why McCarthy shouldn't be.

That Other 1 Dude: The thing about Republicans (and politics in general) falls under Strawman Political.

sporkpimp: At its current rate of growth, I predict that this topic will contain the entirety of every other article on the wiki by the time of President Kucinich's inauguration in February, 2009. His vice president, the distributed AI buried within the source-code of the future's #1 selling software application, Duke Nukem Forever, will make this page its new stronghold. Now, admittedly, my ability to predict the future has been called into question in the past, so I might be making a small error here or there, but I'm pretty sure we should (just in case) stop adding every single one of our pet-peeves into this topic, even on the (tiny!) chance that I'm wrong about this page being the future home for the AI that will enslave mankind.

SomeGuy: I'm afraid sporkpimp may have a point. This article really is getting too big for its own good and should probably be split just for the sake of convenience. Unfortunately, the topic listing is so broad that I honestly have very little idea how we can go about this. Alphabetical? Sure, except some of these won't go easily. Where the heck would we put those who still live with their parents? Categorical could get ridiculously hairy, too. I mean, categorically based on what? Lifestyle choices, things people were born with, cultures..? Where would elderly go? In any case, yeah, something we should be discussing, methinks.

Doctor Nemesis: I was just coming on here to make that observation myself.

Rann: Categorical would probably be the best way to go. The categories might take some general fudging, but just off the top of my head, "Nationality", "Ethnicity", and "Personal" would seem workable. Nationality for the "some other country" stuff, Ethnicity for the "some other skin color" stuff (since there's actually not a lot of crossover, the acceptable target status of, say, Asians isn't restricted to any particular Asian country), and "Personal" for all the stuff that involves the individual like Rednecks, the Wealthy, the Homeless, and so on. A fourth one, "Historical", might fit for acceptable targets from prior time periods like Mc Carthyism. (Might even need to add one, since now that I think about it, a lot of TV shows and movies like to portray anyone born before 1950 as a gullible moron.) Or Mc Carthyism and Nazism and so on could be moved to the Strawman Political page as a sub-section or something. (Though it's hard to call it a strawman for portraying Nazis as genocidal madmen when, uh, they kinda were, so that one might not work.)

Some Guy: I still think this is a little iffy, but I like your framework. All right then, form of...obsessive-compulsive wiki editor!

Andyroid: I don't care if this bit from the entry on Americans is sarcasm or not, I still say "Fuck, no":
"It should be noted, however, that all Americans are like this, and therefore the stereotype is 100% correct. Really, Americans are lucky that they don't simply get killed on sight when they leave that mudhole of a country."

Rann: Wow. Just wow.

Kinitawowi: I'm desperately trying to remember which stand-up declared that the only Acceptable Targets left were Americans, redheads and the middle classes. (It was on a British TV show, if that helps.)

Prfnoff: Citizen just did another category split, one that I don't think was well-considered. Can it be improved?

Valantis: I was thinking of adding science to this page. If a story had a gender or race as misrepresented as science is in a Science Is Bad tale, there'd be a lot of angry letters. There is some overlap with the intellectual as a target, but Science Is Bad stories have more in common that the 'scientist'. However, I couldn't work out which section to put it under.

Glooble: I've never heard anyone in the United states use the word Yankee except in reference to the civil war. Do people in the South still call Northerners that?

Gentlemens Dame 883: Under which category do warlords go? The fact that no one's raised any moral panic over Far Cry 2 having you fight against African Warlords suggests that these are Acceptable, but they don't really fall into "political" do they? :?

T Paradox: It occurs to me that Fruitcake is an Acceptable Target (in America, anyway), but there's no subclass where it would fit. Fruitcake is - as is widely known - best used as a doorstop if not a gift for people you hate. I've had fruitcake. It's not that bad. Maybe a new page for food (Arby's, Olive Garden, Fresca), or Other (Ikea?) should be added, after some further Wiki Magic? I'll YTTKW it.

Praetyre: You know, I'm thinking of adding a couple of examples, but I'm not sure where they fit. The first one is "Anyone with a negative opinion of homosexual behaviour, or involved in the 'ex-gay' movement". The second one is "Children of dubious figures", such as Max Moseley in the United Kingdom or the Hitler/Schicklgruber family.

Deuxhero:What do mother-in-laws go under?

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