Atheist/Anti-theist/Agnostic Troper Group

As I recall, the "Everyone Draw Muhammed Day" think specifically was in protect of the backlash against other people drawing it. This whole thing actually highlighted how some depictions of Muhammed already existed (from a cartoon, also even a government building here in the US) that no one noticed.

I doubt many people just draw Muhammed to do it. There's always some message behind it from what I can tell, whatever that may be.

I know that there's a lot of controversy about whether or not comedians should make jokes about Islam like they do for every other religion on the planet.

Yeah, the whole thing's controversial. On the one hand, I get it, Muslims face a lot of bigotry. On the other hand, Islam is open to criticism like any other religion.

With comedy, there's also that fine line between poking gentle fun at someone and outright saying something offensive and unfunny, whether intentionally or not.

Reminds me of how Monty Python were actually unwilling to mock Jesus directly when they made Life of Brian because they found it too difficult to write a scene like that without sounding so wrong.

Every religion faces a lot of bigotry. It might be worse because the inexplicable^note *cough* united states intervention *cough* neverending mess in the middle of the middle east happens to be predominantly muslim, but were that not the case, they'd be in the same boat as everyone else.

Also, gotta love those atheism jokes.

The two most important rules of comedy are: never steal someone else's material, and never punch down.

The latter requires a bit of elaboration. The idea is that you (and/or the audience) will have some sort of concept of where you rank in your society, in terms of financial success and fame and other such factors. If you belong to minorities - be they ideological, ethnic, religious, sexual, or whatever - you'll generally be seen as lower down for it. (In this context that's actually a good thing for you.)

Anyone or anything above you is an acceptable target. If you're an obscure comedian and you've noticed that a particular successful comedian always repeats a given pattern in their joke delivery you can do an imitation of that for a cheap laugh, and it'll be seen as OK. (Kind of too easy but OK.) If you're the more successful comedian and you're imitating a less successful one, though, it'll be seen as "punching down" and thus not acceptable. (This is not universal, obviously - it's still possible to mock minorities or regional stereotypes and such without anyone calling you out for it, or even noticing that you did it.)

The usual way that this is circumvented is by having your stage persona descend below your normal social status. Achieving this through blackface or other such means would be very rude, of course, but you can make your stage persona a caricature of you that, rather than having the audience laugh with them, is actually the one the audience is laughing at. Jimmy Carr is a wonderful example of this; but of course there are also other levels to what he does. (Well, mainly it's wordplay, but written in a way that sort of masks that that's what it is.)

Anyway, this rule about punching down is a major obstacle to doing a good joke about Islam. Stewart Lee and Jimmy Carr have both found a way to do it anyway, but for the former the solution is largely about changing the subject (in one routine, and making himself the fool in another), while the latter flips the positions of successful comedian and average Muslim (in the UK, with the celebrity obviously at an advantage) by making the joke be only about terrorists, who are "above" the comedian in the sense that they are armed while he isn't. He basically avoids talking about average Muslims at all. That's a great way to do it, because there's basically no reason why you'd be going against average Muslims, anyway, any more than you'd go against average people of any other faith. (Even in Scientology the masses are generally not doing very well at all.)

When I speak of rules, by the way, I do absolutely agree with both of the rules that I mentioned. They're a good guide to telling a proper comedian from a hack. I know it's popular to say "there are no rules in comedy" but I think the people who say that haven't really thought about it as much as a comedy fan or performer would, and are thus not aware of the rules (even if they would still notice if someone was breaking them - so the rules aren't explicitly understood.)

Anyway, if I was writing comedy about Muslims I'd either make the character the audience sides with the Muslim, or find a scenario where a Muslim with power is being very unreasonable towards someone else. Jokes about scenes in the Koran and in Mohammed narratives would be fine, because the ones you're mocking there have basically the most power of anyone in the universe their stories are set in. (Same with stuff about Jesus and Yahweh, obviously - and the Buddha, etc.)

edited 23rd Jul '16 8:00:59 PM by BestOf

Another problem might be that a lot more people in the western world know about the Bible compared to the Koran. I could make a reference to something in the Koran, for example, and a lot of people might not get it. You have to know your audience and gauge their knowledge, I suppose.

There's also a difference between Othering jokes that highlight differences and jokes that highlight similarities.

And now I have a burning question. Where is atheism on the social ladder? Below or above christianity? Can an atheist joke about christianity? Can a chistian joke about atheism?

According to the pew research centre, atheim is male dominated. This is weird.

Atheism is too diverse to be placed on a social ladder as a single entity. If you had some random atheist youtuber and Richard Dawkins mocking some creationist idiot on Fox News, the former would be seen as the underdog, while the latter would be perceived as lashing out judgment from his ivory tower. (If the creationist was a real celebrity, though, it would be seen as a more equal situation.)

I think generally atheists are othered, to some extent, by mainstream Western society (especially in the US), so usually an atheist mocking a christian would be seen as punching up. (Again, it helps if the target has a bigger audience or more power than the joker.) Again, though, a non-famous Christian mocking Bill Maher would still be OK, because Maher has quite a lot of social power (what with having his own TV show and everything).

I find this pew research fact to be particularly interesting.

Of all the moral theories out there, the one that says that god creates morality seems one of the weakest. And even if god is the source of morality, belief in god still probably has nothing to do with being moral.

edited 24th Jul '16 8:30:27 AM by war877

I wasn't really aware comedy had rules as such. To be fair, I'd heard of the "punching down" thing when Charlie Hebdo was being criticized. It seems pretty hard to decide what counts however. Regardless it didn't seem like the time for that. Even if they were completely bigoted, they'd just been massacred for making a cartoon. If anyone was "punching down" I think it would be their killers.

The problem with jokes about muslims is that the only places it would be "punching up" you'd be punching so far up you'd probably get lynched.

They're not rules in the sense that you get some sort of comedy licence after you've passed a test on them or anything. It's just that generally, if you break them, you'll lose some of the appreciation of your colleagues, critics, and audiences. You might get called out by others and become the subject of boycotts or ridicule.

Just about anyone could do a routine about Erdogan or the leaders and other elites of countries like the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. You could do the conflicts between Muslims in the Middle East, as well. That could include stuff about their political and philosophical positions as Muslims, as long as you can find some sort of conflict between them and their actual conduct or other positions they hold.

What if the minority oppresses another minority? Would be okay for a western straight person to mock Islam's view of homosexuals? Or can they only mock Christianity's?

They don't mock Christianity's so much as the Christians who believe in it.

There are lots of rules of comedy. The punching down one is one I've heard of. They are like the rules of writing. They all have exceptions.

Of course you can mock that. Again, there's no official theory on these rules, but from what I've observed I'd say, just like you can shift the target of your joke, you can move the source, so to speak. If you take the perspective of an oppressed minority, even without being a member of it, you can mock the oppressor.

edited 24th Jul '16 12:37:56 PM by BestOf

Yeah, but lost of people have found this isn't the case. Even those that are Muslims or ex-Muslims themselves are labeled bigots for criticizing Islamic doctrines (this isn't usually comedic, mind you). I recall a blog post from one Muslim women writing on Islamophobia, with pretty much everyone that had ever criticized Islam in any way called Islamophobic. So someone in the comments asked "How do we criticize Islam then?" Her answer was basically "Well why do you want to?" You can't win with that attitude.

edited 24th Jul '16 1:02:51 PM by Fireblood

That's a real problem, but one that it sometimes exaggerated. Obviously, not all criticism of Islam is ignorant and malicious, and this should be acknowledged. Then again, there's quite a lot of criticism of Islam that is very malicious and ignorant. You know, connecting all Muslims to terrorism and all that.

Islam is a little bit more difficult to talk about than most major religions because it tends to take the exceptionalism bit further than others. (Not always, obviously, but very often.) When you have people claiming that actual scientific discoveries about topics that are currently the as-yet unachieved goals of various fields of science can be made by studying the Koran, there's no way you could have any sort of intellectual honesty without rejecting those claims. I would certainly advocate some good-humoured mockery, as well.

This. by the way, is almost certainly what Dawkins was trying to do with his Tweet about how Cambridge university alone has more Nobel prizes than the Muslim world as a whole, but of course that actually was quite a stupid way to put it. It ignores the biases of the Nobel committee and the social and economic factors in less wealthy societies where Islam is the dominant religion, so it's not possible to compare them fairly to the extreme privilege of Cambridge. Dawkins was probably trying to say that the Koran hasn't led to any Nobel-worthy discoveries, but he framed it in terms of people and intellectual achievement by a fairly controversial measure, so it was definitely a miss on his part, even though he probably doesn't realise it.

I think criticism of Islam, and mockery of it, has to come from a good place, and it has to be informed. Talk about the consequences of harmful policies and ideas, and don't disregard the majority of Muslims who are completely ordinary people and capable of rational thought. The recipient, of course, would also have to be able to take it in good faith, which is very difficult when they're constantly barraged by wave after wave of ignorant, racist attacks that are barely even trying to pose as intellectual criticism.

If you think Trump has been an idiot about everything he's been saying about Mexicans over the past year, note that it's almost exactly the tone and content of the majority of negative discussion about Islam recently.

Yes, it can be, and of course you're right. The problem is some like to lump all this together.

That's a particularly silly bit of nonsense that thankfully seems unique to certain Muslims.

Yes, Dawkins has a bad habit of putting his foot in his mouth, especially on twitter. I'm perfectly willing to say he's also strayed into actual Islamophobia at times.

True, but on that note we would never tolerate Trump saying things which are in the Quran or hadiths which Muhammed himself said.

edited 24th Jul '16 2:53:54 PM by Fireblood

Well, allegedly said - I'm not sure we can actually believe any reports about Mohammed's actual words on anything, and even the general points would probably only be at all verifiably his if they're ones he made a bunch of times to different audiences that all reported it similarly.

That, of course, is already an unacceptable view for many (probably most) Muslims, just as doubting the veracity of the reported actual words of Jesus are to many Christians. There's also some double think with claims of infallibility, if they're attributed to things Mohammed is claimed to have said and done (presumably under divine guidance), and the modern moral standards that they violate.

An academic response from a believer would typically start with talking about how those things were said in their time and context - which immediately removes the claim of eternal infallibility. This, and the historicity of various people and events described in holy books, tend to be among the most significant rifts between the average believer and the academic experts on a given religion.

It's worth noting that you could do a similar video with Trump issuing talking points directly from the Bible - or, for that matter, from the central works of many highly appreciated scientists and philosophers, although latter category comes with the caveat that they're generally not claimed to have had any sort of divine guidance or infallibility.

True, but don't tell the fundamentalists that.

The problem is the same for Christians I guess. If you start down that road, the whole thing's put in doubt.

It's quite amusing just how quickly they turn into cultural relativists over this.

You certainly could. One like that was done in The Netherlands, with Bible quotes supposedly from the Quran. It fooled everyone (in fairness, this is Dutch people whom I'm told are far less religious anyway).

The problem with modern day Islam, which my sister (a speech pathologist at an Islamic school) has pointed out, is its isolation from the rest of the world.

Like, there are certain suburbs of Melbourne where literally everyone speaks Turkish, save a few, and they all go to the same mosque, and don't need to rely on speaking English or speaking to Christians or Jews or Atheists to get around because they can just stay within their own little pocket of the world.

My sister has students where she's literally the first non-Muslim person they've met. Many of her students and colleagues don't even trust non-Muslims at all.

And it's made me think, if the community's so insular, of course some people are going to be self-serving and, for lack of a better word, "backwards". And that's probably why Islamic terrorism is such a big problem, because Muslims are so cut off from the rest of the world and full of so much mistrust, not because the Quran is any worse than the Bible.

Ghettos are a problem that affects everyone. Like every chinatown ever. One can say that these individuals are cutting themselves off from the world. One can say that they are doing the easy thing, by sticking to people they can interact with and understand easily. One can say that the outer community is forcing them into a ghetto, by creating employment barriers through mistrust and socialisation barriers through mistrust and lack of understanding. One can say that Ghettos prevent the free exchange of ideas, squishing out the growth and mental health of both the internal and external community. One can say that ghettos protect the culture of the people living in them, a culture that is at risk of being overwhelmed and overwritten by the force of the external culture.

But one cannot say that the problem with china is chinatowns in north america.