fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2551 ]

[ SECRET POST #2551 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2551 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.

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02.

[Resident Evil movies]

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03. http://i43.tinypic.com/bg9zlf.gif
[moving .gif]

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[ ----- SPOILERY SECRETS AHEAD ----- ]

04. [SPOILERS for something but idk what]

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05. [SPOILERS for Frozen]

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06. [SPOILERS for Bioshock Infinite]

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[ ----- TRIGGERY SECRETS AHEAD ----- ]

07. [WARNING for rape]

[Martin Freeman]

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08. [WARNING for rape]

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09. [WARNING for domestic abuse]

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 000 secrets from Secret Submission Post #363.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 1 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Damn I wish I could find this damn article... but some one made a good point once. Rape jokes AREN'T off limits. The problem is when the joke is at the expense of the victim. I've heard hilarious rape jokes, mocking the mere idea of the mindset of rapists, jokes that give a voice to the victim rather than making them the butt of the joke.

So yeah EVERY bad thing can have a joke made out of it, but it's not okay to joke about it from the standpoint of "it's not a bad thing". A rape joke is okay if it's ACKNOWLEDGED that it's actually bad and we're turning it around on that. What Martin did was NOT that. He made light of it, said it wasn't rape at all, mocked those who would say it was. That's not how to do a good joke.

(And this also covers things like violence, war, murder, etc... don't make jokes that claim those things aren't real, don't make jokes saying the victims deserved it for some reason or that it's "not a big deal"... it's really not that hard to keep a sense of humor without belittling people who have already been through enough)

What is a rapist's favorite pick up line?

"Does this rag smell like chloroform to you?"

I always love continuing that joke when some one says it. Like...

"Hey, does this rag smell like chloroform to you?"
"What? No. Is that perfume?"
"... Shit, wrong rag."

I don't think jokes should somehow "acknowledge" that this or that thing is problematic. That's why black humour is a thing. The whole point of black comedy is in not treating human suffering as something bad. It may rub many people the wrong way, but it is a literary technique that has existed for thousands of years now; it is not a tool of oppression but merely a means to reflect on our way of thinking.

Now, there is a difference between people who do not hold harmful beliefs but make black jokes and those who do hold harmful beliefs and joke about them. But it's a more subtle difference than the simple distinction between those who acknowledge the harmfulness of some particular action or situation in their humour and those who don't.

Here's the kicker though, HOW DO YOU KNOW? When you mock victims, how do you KNOW if the person is "just joking" and if they truly believe that? You can't know. That's the key difference in humor. Black humor does not have to be at the expense of suffering, but showing a different side of things. There's a difference between seeing a starving person in the street and going "lol starving kids, isn't that funny" and "this new celebrity diet is getting out of hand". In the first you're JUST mocking the suffering, there's no real humor or anything in that. In the second it's still making light of starvation BUT by turning it around to mock the societal worship of it and pointing out the irony and darker side of the obsession with skinniness. But the second one DOES NOT point at the starving person and make them the butt of the joke. IT IS STILL DARK HUMOR. But it's humor meant to lift up the spirits of the suffering rather than kicking them while they're down. And when a person makes a joke that kicks some one while they're down, those being kicked have no way of telling that person REALLY thinks that way or they're "just kidding".

The way you can usually tell if a person likes you or not, if their smile is genuine or fake, if their sympathy is sincere or insincere. Granted, some of us aren't good at this, but it doesn't meant that people should assume that they absolutely cannot tell if somebody really means something they say or not. In the majority of the cases, they can. In the majority of the cases, they are even correct.

And I really don't think that jokes about babies in microwaves lift anybody's spirits

Absurdity is its own category. Generally the idea of babies in microwaves is so rare and absurd that pretty much no one is going to have a rough experience to color their view of that joke. When you add that level of ridiculousness, it helps.

And if you're not good at telling jokes without upsetting people, you could easily take a step back and question WHY you're telling the joke. Do you want to make people laugh? Well clearly that's not working. Change your approach.

When people make an assumption for the worst you say they shouldn't, but why should they make an assumption for the best? I've heard jokes from men about abusing and hitting women and I just figured it was a joke, until I found out they actually do those things. So I don't think it's out of line when some one makes jokes at some one's expense to think they're in support of that person suffering for their own amusement.

Many people have experience with dead babies, though. The "baby in a microwave" joke series includes all kinds of jokes about dead babies that end up pretty much everywhere. It is a very unpleasant topic to many folks out there, especially those who suffered miscarriages.

And if you're not good at telling jokes without upsetting people, you could easily take a step back and question WHY you're telling the joke. Do you want to make people laugh? Well clearly that's not working. Change your approach.

That's true, but it has nothing do with harmfulness/harmlessness of any particular type of jokes. Besides, not all jokes are told in order to make people laugh.

People shouldn't make any assumptions. People should just look and make judgements based on what they see. Sometimes they will be mistaken, yeah, but sometimes!=always. In fact, sometimes!=often. Those not suffering from any kind of disorders are normally pretty good at determining these things.

DA
Why would you be telling jokes if it wasn't for the intent of making people laugh? I'm genuinely curious here.

Sorry for being epically late, but

- sarcasm, for one, is usually not a means to make people laugh, and neither is irony. Many jokes are told in order to express one's feelings regarding something (unpleasant). Some are used as a way of coping with shock or stress. They may also be employed to formulate one's ideas in a paradoxical and elegant way.

They may just be there to remind people of those aspects of our existence that seem ironical - in fact, this function is the one many jokes used to carry prior to the seventeenth century (see perspective jokes in paintings, for one. I don't think people laughed at that).

Generally the idea of babies in microwaves is so rare and absurd that pretty much no one is going to have a rough experience to color their view of that joke

this also applies to the idea of a hobbit date raping an elf

agreeing with capitals anon here
+ lol at the second joke

Also in that moment when you're not sure if they mean it or if it's just a joke, it still hurts the same. Nothing is different. And that sting doesn't magically go away when the person insists they don't really mean it.

Well, one's personal attitude towards rape jokes has little to do with their overall harmful effect. There are topics that hurt me like hell, and I hate hearing some particular types of jokes, but that's like?? A thing that happens to people? It doesn't mean that everyone should stop joking about potentially triggering topics (which include death, abortion, and other popular black comedy themes)?

I think you're still missing the key difference in jokes. I wasn't saying dark humor can't be good, or that everyone needs to stop making jokes at all. I'm saying it shouldn't be that hard for black humor to NOT just be an excuse to mock people for their pain. You mock the circumstances, the act, the bullshit excuses murderers and rapists make for their actions, you don't mock people just for having those things happen to them. I'm not exactly sure how I can explain this better. What I am saying is, black humor is great. But it's not just "lol being raped is funny, those whores"... that's lazy "shock" humor, NOT black humor. Black humor turns the darker parts of society in on itself and mocks it and uses its own awfulness against it. It calls the world out on its bullshit and has no limits in what it can mock. But it doesn't mock the people HURT by it. Just the IT.

I didn't say I was in favour of mocking people for their pain? I just didn't hear anything like this in Freeman's comment.

But black humour doesn't mean good black humour, either. Black humour is black humour. It may be very good and it may be spectacularly bad.

Not to mention that black humor is also something that is often used as a coping mechanism. A lot of my extended family is in various branches of law enforcement, and trust me, black humor is a really, really common thing there because it has to be. When you see dead bodies on a regular basis, you have to have some way of dealing with it, and in most cases that ends up being morbid humor.

And the thing is, you have no way of knowing if someone making a morbid joke is using it as a coping mechanism or not, so by trying to police what people are and aren't allowed to joke about, you might end up hurting the very people you're trying to protect.

^this

"The whole point of black comedy is in not treating human suffering as something bad. It may rub many people the wrong way, but it is a literary technique that has existed for thousands of years now; it is not a tool of oppression but merely a means to reflect on our way of thinking."

This needs to be repeated 100000 times and hammered into the foreheads of everyone ITT who have missed the point completely.

That said. Dry to the point of being hydrophobic gallows humour is not my thing. If I were to personally be able to stop other people from making jokes with that particular style of humour, that makes ME evil. Which SJWs just don't get. They want to take our freedoms away from us. Even if it's the freedom to be an idiot and say things they disagree with.

Yeah yeah I am way late to this thread and I'm the anon who always makes 1984 jokes about SJWs. But this is the first time any of them have legitimately started to frighten me.

This might be the article in question: http://jezebel.com/5925186/how-to-make-a-rape-joke

Personally, for me, it's not even about "OK" or "Not OK." It's just that I think the best comedians are making insightful observation/commentary on the world, and if your observation/comment seems to side with the perpetrator and not the victim in this kind of situation, then I probably don't think it's very good.

I don't see Freeman's joke being that different from Louis CK's joke, except not as extreme = not as obvious. Sometimes it's difficult to tell irony when nowadays people more or less use "spoiler tags" for jokes; [okay gonna joke now] controversial opinion [/joke].

I think the difference (at least to me) is like, context? Louis was a) In the middle of a set, and B) has, as the article says, long established himself as someone who is on the side of the victim in basically any situation. Freeman's joke came out of nowhere, and since he's kinda known for saying some dodgy things, it feels different.

(Thought I don't actually have strong feelings about Freeman or his joke one way or the other. But if it was meant to be like Louis CK's I think it failed, at least for a lot of people. Mostly because it was so random.)

Which is very reasonable, and would apply to the joke in question, if the joke in question was about real human beings. IT WAS ABOUT ELVES. Unless you're the can't-separate-fiction-from reality-anon above? In that case IDK that anything any of us says to you is going to make any sense.

What Martin did was NOT that. He made light of it, said it wasn't rape at all, mocked those who would say it was.

And he was right. It was a joke about hobbits and elves, neither of which exists, so it wasn't a joke about REAL rape of actual human beings at all. Saying it is and making a big deal over it is what REALLY trivializes actual rape of real human beings. Not a joke about a hobbit slipping a roofie to an elf.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ SECRET POST #2551 ]

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