I watched the first of the David Chappelle specials on Netflix and it brought something into pretty sharp focus for me: the entire concept of ‘punching up’ is part of why the Discourse is so bad.
Like, I don’t know how many of you are old enough to remember Chappelle’s Show when it first aired. I was in high school at the time, and it was beloved. White kids liked it, black kids liked it, everybody liked it. I’m sure people would find it problematic as hell these days–the usual suspects are picking over those Netflix specials because he does those ‘crosses the line twice’ jokes that you’re not supposed to do these days. But I think why it worked then was why it worked for so many comedians before him who were popular across racial and gender lines, and that is that he made fun of everybody.
You couldn’t complain that you were being picked on or singled out, because everyone got hit. There was even self-deprecatory humor where he made fun of things about men or black people or straight people that he found silly. So the only problem you could have was if you wanted no one to ever make fun of your people, and obviously that wouldn’t be fair, since everyone else’s people were getting made fun of too. It’s almost like equality or something.
So there was a bit of ‘all in good fun’ humor to it. He didn’t mean anything personal by joking about this group or that, just that something struck him as funny. If there was criticism, it was of institutions, not people. So he’d make fun of racism itself by pointing out how stupid it was that, theoretically, someone like Clayton Bigsby could hate a group that they unknowingly were a part of. Not saying white people are stupid or black people are stupid, just that being racist is stupid.
But now with this ‘punching up’ idea, you’re only allowed to joke about people who you deem morally inferior, so the very fact that you’re joking about someone is a moral judgment, no matter what the joke is. And I think that’s contributed so much to how people have less of a sense of humor nowadays and they’re more easily offended, because the internet’s decided that there can’t be good-natured ribbing, there can only be either ‘punching up’ or ‘punching down’*. Even if you’re joking about something as inane as white people being bad at dancing or black people liking fried chicken, the connotation is “you have it too good and I’m taking you down a peg.” Instead of just “I thought up a joke that I thought was funny.”
(*Which is ridiculous in the first place, because it requires a ‘sorting algorithm of oppression’. Like who’s more oppressed, white women or black men? Is a white woman allowed to make fun of a black rapper who writes misogynistic lyrics? You tell me.)
“But now with this ‘punching up’ idea, you’re only allowed to joke about people who you deem morally inferior, so the very fact that you’re joking about someone is a moral judgment, no matter what the joke is.”
Oh my lord. Someone articulated the thing.
I felt much safer when people were allowed to joke about horrible shit, and always felt like the people who said “that’s your privilege talking” were unaware of precisely how much horrible shit I have personally experienced, but I could never say why their rules seemed nastier than some cutting jokes.
And that’s it. That’s exactly it. If I’m joking about rape I might be saying victims are bad… but I might be saying perpetrators are bad, or saying why do things that might well not last long at all give us PTSD forever wow it sucks, or…
But if I joke about a privileged group because they are a privileged group, I ACTUALLY AM saying those people are bad, that is, being cruel rather than maybe just being absurdist.
I am emphatically, gratefully in agreement with all of this.
It’s worth mentioning the flip side, though, the reason that we were expelled from the Paradise Garden of Good-Natured Roast Comedy and thrown into the Wasteland of Discourse…
…which is plausible deniability for cruelty.
Also known as “geez, man, can’t you take a joke?”
Which is, of course, what bullies will say when anyone tries to confront them about their bullying, assuming that they’re allowed to say it.
And so if a given group of people feels like it’s being bullied beyond what it can tolerate – and it gets the power to enforce its social will – it’s going to say “nope, we can’t take a joke, you’re not allowed to joke about us, that’s automatically an Abomination.”
(I have some sense that, in the evolution of such movements, there’s often a brief moment when the Bearers of Received Wisdom are more intent on being fair and even-handed, and they try to deal with this thinly-veiled-bullying problem by proclaiming that no one is ever allowed to joke about anyone. But of course this doesn’t get even a little bit of traction; it definitely doesn’t appeal to the movementarian masses, who love telling mean jokes about hated enemies as much as everyone else does; and so you end up with hollow-hearted distinctions like “punching up.”)
I don’t think there’s a way to square this circle. I think the best answer is the old late-20th-century answer, the one that says “everyone is allowed to tell good-natured jokes about everyone,” and the price you pay is that assholes are going to use this as license to tell jokes that aren’t so good-natured. We’ve seen the price of the Other Path, and it isn’t worth it. But…I wish there were a better plan.
I agree with the description of the trade-off here but completely disagree with the assessment.
“Plausible deniability for cruelty” gave us /pol/ and arguably Trump.
Social justice norms gave us…
abstraction. Nobody actually punches up - we make jokes that broadly can’t be construed as punching anybody, and frankly I’m fine with that. Social justice “ruined” humour like photography ruined painting - forcing its practitioners to abandon an obsolete paradigm that had reached its limits long ago and explore the vast range of formal and expressive possibilities they had been leaving untouched
Yeah, I’m not buying this.
There is, of course, plenty of “surreal dark abstract” millennial humor. Also plenty of popular pre-millennial humor in that vein. It wasn’t the millennials who gave us The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, or Monty Python and the Holy Grail, or Firesign Theater sketches, or (hell) Alice in Wonderland.
And on the flip side, well, it’s just flat untrue that “nobody punches” within the world of social justice norms. That world has as much low-to-middlebrow “have you seen how members of $DESPISED_GROUP do $THING?!?” humor as, well, every other large group of humans that has ever existed. And, no, it’s not just Comedy Central and SNL comedians – although those things have huge millennial followings, you can’t just discount them without a hefty dose of No True Scotsman-ing – it’s every snarky post on SA and Tumblr about mediocre white men, every unflattering neckbeard cartoon.
The mechanisms of humor haven’t changed so much since the halcyon days of Dave Chappelle. In some ways, they haven’t changed so much since Gilgamesh ruled in Uruk.
What’s changed, mostly, is who the targets are supposed to be, and (even more importantly) how the Social Rules expect you to respond. You used to have to Be Cool; you used to have to smile and laugh when someone told a joke at your expense, even if it was killing you inside; you used to lose a lot of status by popping the Humor Bubble, by pushing back in any way other than the semi-mythical Wittily Giving As Good As You Got. Now…now you’re allowed, and even expected, to get offended. That’s supposed to apply only to some groups of people, but such a wildly inconsistent norm can’t be maintained, so you get the balkanization that we’ve gotten.
It turns out that it’s really not better, although I can see why people would have hoped that it might be.
