Is It Acceptable To Joke About Tragic Things?

Well, Seth Mcfarlane is getting to the point where his jokes are pretty much "look, here's this horrible thing!" rather than making any point or commenting on it. It's... humor based on entirely on being shocking.

Seth McFarlane hasn't had very much creative influence over Family Guy for a while now. It's not really fair to blame him for everything that happens on the show.

edited 29th Jan '14 2:26:19 PM by DrStarky

HAHAHAHAHAHAH oh you're serious.

So he's a hack as well as unfunny. I stand corrected.

You know, some of us were watching the show back in '05 in college. The humor hasn't changed dramatically since then. He took aim at the same easy targets. Any time the show took the piss out of Penelope Cruz for being hideous (news to me), or fat people for being repellant, or old people for being disposable, you can safety bet that Seth at least co-wrote that segment. He doesn't have that wide a range.

edited 29th Jan '14 9:57:15 PM by johnnyfog

Wait, there was a Family Guy episode where they treated Penelope Cruz as being hideous?

What. Tha. Hell.

She's gorgeous. In fact...

edited 29th Jan '14 2:57:40 PM by Quag15

I'm not of the opinion that it should be forbidden to joke about something. But I still find "jokes" about victims and the "weak" in general to be tasteless and unfunny. Jokes about Nazis are okay even a positive, jokes about their victims not so much. Mocking rapists is good mocking rape survivors is just distasteful. The first is calling out and mocking bullying the second is simply bullying itself.

Joking about something is having (soft) power over it. And like any power it can be used for good or ill. You can mock the powerful who abuse their power and thus eroding it or you can perpetuate the current power structures and inequalities.

You do have a point there. Jokes about Holocaust surviors and the mentally ill are really jokes about people who can't joke back or defend themselves.

One of the rules of comedy is that you should never punch down. The butt of your joke should always be someone who has a higher social status than you, and never lower. Kicking your equals is also OK.

It's generally accepted that when a comedian is doing a routine they're doing it as a character, and not speaking their own opinions. While comedians can joke about their real selves, it's more common that when their jokes seem directed at themselves they're actually directed at the character, and things that the character represents.

This is how I see people like Frankie Boyle, Jimmy Carr, and Ricky Gervais. For some jokes they become a character that has traits that should be mocked, and the joke is about mocking that character and those traits. They can adopt racist, misogynist, elitist, or nihilist positions for a joke and while the audience might be laughing at the shock some of them are also laughing at the character played by the comedian - with the understanding that the comedian is actually making stupid attitudes look silly.

If someone in the audience is actually laughing at the superficial outer layer of the joke - the one that usually contains the punchline - and agreeing with the attitudes delivered by it, I would argue that they're not really getting the joke. They might be getting the punchline, but they're not getting the joke.

I think that's tricky, describing Boyle and Gervais as characters.

Putting aside that I don't think Ricky's playing a character at all — he claims people have fallen for his "arrogant" schtick, but is just as brutally honest in public — often those personalities are lauded for "saying what everyone's too afraid to say!" Boyle is something else again. He's more of an out-and-out hatemonger, kind of like Andrew Dice Clay but with better fashion sense.

And of course those guys are the ones getting pushed, because (like you say) they're punching below their weight, at the targets most maligned by society.

Ricky Gervais hasn't done anything worth watching since The Office, although since he gets money for all the spinoffs, of which there are hundreds, he never has to make anything worth watching again.

Boyle's an interesting case. He was fairly unknown until he went on Mock The Week, and he was so popular there that he got his own shows and tours. His problem is a classic one, in that he ran out of material. He could usually churn out a sick-but-funny quip on MTW, because they fed him lines, but his standup routine rapidly deteriorated in quality, because he knew how to be shocking but not funny. His most recent one had a couple of lines cribbed from George Carlin's "Rape Can be Funny" skit.

I liked The Office and Extras but I haven't seen any of the other TV shows he's done. I've seen 3 of his stand-up shows and I think they're really good. Also, to me it's obvious that he's playing a character, but I suppose YMMV.

I don't know about Boyle being fed lines - I know that his comedy career started as a line writer on various comedy shows, and that continues to be his favourite profession. He writes jokes for some Jimmy Carr shows, for instance - and I think it really shows. There's a Q&A with Boyle and Carr where they frankly discuss their careers, and Carr makes the point that when they say horrible things they're playing a character. I don't remember for sure if Boyle said he agreed, but I'm almost certain he did.

Anyway, I don't find Frankie Boyle all that funny. I get that we're supposed to laugh at the idea that someone would make fun of underprivileged people, and sometimes it really works, but many of his punchlines are too weak for me, or just not the kind that I tend to like.

By now you'll probably have noticed that Jimmy Carr is my favourite comedian. Well, him and Stewart Lee - and I don't think that's a very common combination (or at least I think Stewart Lee doesn't want it to be.)

edited 18th Feb '14 3:19:47 PM by BestOf

I like Stewart Lee a lot, though I do sometimes find the general smugness of his "set" of alternative comics to be off-putting, that of their fans to be doubly so. He at least seems to be aware of it. Billy Conolly has some good stuff, especially from his younger days. He suffers from major Seinfeld Is Unfunny syndrome these days, as his brand of observational comedy is now pretty commonplace.

I hate it when people are smug about their tastes in comedy. You like what you like, and if a joke works for you it's good for you. If it doesn't work for me it doesn't mean that I'm somehow smarter or better than you; nor does it mean that I'm inferior to you or more stupid than you. It just means we have different tastes.

That said, if you don't like Tim Minchin you're an idiot.

Sarah Silverman is another strange case (I mention her because she's popped up again in the movie thread). She is most definitely playing a character, but the audience either finds it too obtuse or doesn't pick up on the satire.

Something about the medium, I guess.

I've seen at least one stand-up show form Sarah Silverman and I liked it a lot. She makes it abundantly clear that she's playing a character (a very stupid racist) and thus her character is the butt of her jokes. So when she says something outrageous we're supposed to laugh at her character, and not the "obvious" target of the joke.

I don't think that any subject is inherently inappropriate for humor. One should keep their audience in mind, though.

I've wondered a lot about this myself.

On the one hand, one could argue that tragedy should never cross paths with comedy, because that makes the tragedy seem both less serious and less worthy of corrective action. It is easy to imagine outrage at a "starving Ethiopian" joke: somewhere along the lines of "Where do you get off, you ignorant, arrogant prick, typing such a sick joke on your fifth internet-capable device while you cram your face full of pizza and ice cream? People are STARVING and you think you can just JOKE about it?!"

On the other hand, comedy can be said to lessen tragedy as well. Imagine what it may be like if, in the years following the September 11 attacks, there was no Gallows Humor about the ordeal. No bin Laden jokes, no airport security jokes, nothing. Think of how solemn, and yet borderline jingoistic, some Americans come across as they observe the anniversary each year- and now imagine that times ten, because we'd have never moved on. That's what humor does: it allows us a way to acknowledge our hardships and failures, and to work through them rather than be dominated by them. It is one of the great forms of acceptance.

So, I must throw my support to the latter group- so long as we remember to consider our audience, and we each bear in mind that we are dealing with something fragile and real. Because sometimes, laughing is all you can do.

edited 31st Jan '14 9:50:38 PM by BrainSewage

I adopt the mantra of Gladstone when it comes to this kind of thing. It's okay to joke about anything...as long as you can make it funny.

Obviously the bar is set much higher for sensitive or tragic issues, but if the comedian makes a genuine success out of it, more power to 'em. Dime-a-dozen hacks, however, will probably not succeed in this venture.

It's important to remember that humor, while enjoyable, is not necessarily always a "happy" thing. Humor helps us to overcome real setbacks and dark spots in our lives. This joke, for instance:

has its genesis in a very dark and real problem our society faces. But it does not make light of it, it sheds light on it, in a way that is easy to understand and through a language we are all familiar with: humor.

edited 31st Jan '14 11:29:56 PM by somerandomdude

All in all, I think we can all agree that it's not really about what topic the joke is about, but how and what exactly the joke makes fun of that said topic.

Sounds like pretty much every other genre, really. Writing about September 11 is ok. Writing about September 11 praising the terrorists is not. Etc.

This, pretty much. It is a minor pet peeve of mine when sertain feminists insist that any kind of joke that mentiones rape is unacceptable, for example. While I'd draw the line specifically on glorifying it.

I'm with several others here. It can be done and actually be funny, but it has to be done very carefully. I personally think mocking victims isn't cool at all unless it's clear that the comedian is playing a character and making fun of stupid people who actually come off with this crap. This can backfire though, if the audience doesn't get it.

Then you have to consider the audience. George Carlen and others like him could get away with it and be successful because they were performing to their fans who enjoy that type of humor, which definitely is not for everybody. And then of course we have these comedians who aren't really funny, but just think it's cool to be as shocking as they can be just for the heck of it.

Consider also that the "I'm an asshole" style of comedy is quite popular right now, where half the joke is how terrible of a person the comedian (or more commonly the character they're portraying) is.

As an example, everyone's favorite comedian Daniel Tosh, for instance, had a gag in one episode of his show where he was standing next to a guy about to jump off of a building, and proceeded to throw all kinds of insults at the guy telling him to jump off and kill himself. Tosh then turned to the camera and said, "I am great at talking people down from ledges."

Thing is, if you got the joke, you're not laughing at the suicide victim or the fact that he killed himself, you're laughing because Daniel Tosh is an asshole (or at least is portraying one).

There are less extreme examples of this, of course, but the principle is the same, and I think a lot of people misinterpret these kinds of jokes as "mocking sensitive issues" when in reality they're mocking insensitive people.

Yes. Tragedies are funny. Comedies are sad. Everything is both silly and serious in simultaneous superposition.

Iff you can laugh at yourself, you can laugh at anything you want.

It's not just acceptable to joke about tragic things, it's essential. People need to release the tension that comes with things like that and laughing is a shitload better than the alternatives.

Old joke variant:

I think it's okay to joke about horrific tragedies, and my grandfather died in the Holocaust! He fell off a guard tower and broke his neck.

"Comedy is tragedy plus time." — Lester, Crimes and Misdemeanors

edited 14th Feb '14 2:07:20 PM by TroperFour