April Fool's and Comedy
This morning when I was taking the car over to the dealership I was listening to NPR and they were interviewing Garrison Keillor about comedy and April Fool's day.
The host (I forget who it was) read off some examples of listener (I think, maybe other NPR staff?) pranks from past April Fool's. After reading some of them Keillor commented that they weren't really good jokes. Good jokes make people laugh, he said. If you did the prank and the prankee didn't laugh, it wasn't a good joke, it was just cruelty. Laughing with is the goal, not laughing at. Which I completely agree with, I don't like jokes that are cruel.
Now, I haven't been the biggest fan of Garrison Keillor since he showed himself to be a grumpy, mean, anti-semite. So I was very impressed that he said something so open and kind.
Of course, not a minute later he says the best kind of joke is privy tipping and I nearly head-desked on the steering wheel.
The host was a bit surprised, bringing up the point that the person in the privy was not going to be laughing with the pranksters. Keillor basically said "oh? You really think so?" seeming genuinely confused. Then it was revealed that he was never the victim of this kind of prank, only a perpetrator. And justified thinking that it was a good prank because it was done by teenagers to "dignified" older individuals who, it was implied, deserved it in some manner.
Which really annoyed me. I was getting my hopes up that he was advocating truly funny, not cruel, humor, and then he turns around and continues to be grumpy and petty. His argument could be "it's funny when I say it is" and that cruelty is only judged by the people who think it is funny, not by the victim of the mean-spirited act.
Too many people these days feel this way. That if they think it is right and funny then the person who is emotionally or physically hurt by the prank "just can't take a joke." This is victim-blaming in its most common form and it is not okay.
I don't appreciate bad jokes that are based only on one-up-manship. If the whole point of the joke is to make the prankster feel superior to the person they tricked, it is not comedy.
Thanks but no thanks. I don't need privy tipping or cruel April Fool's jokes to feel better about myself.
A few good jokes from today:
Google Changes its name to Topeka
My friend Emily is moving to the South Pole!
Ursula Vernon's new creative project: A tapeworm book for kids!
A Google Topeka solution for finding your stuff
The lead singer of Abney Park starts his solo career in Post-Apocalyptic Western music
The host (I forget who it was) read off some examples of listener (I think, maybe other NPR staff?) pranks from past April Fool's. After reading some of them Keillor commented that they weren't really good jokes. Good jokes make people laugh, he said. If you did the prank and the prankee didn't laugh, it wasn't a good joke, it was just cruelty. Laughing with is the goal, not laughing at. Which I completely agree with, I don't like jokes that are cruel.
Now, I haven't been the biggest fan of Garrison Keillor since he showed himself to be a grumpy, mean, anti-semite. So I was very impressed that he said something so open and kind.
Of course, not a minute later he says the best kind of joke is privy tipping and I nearly head-desked on the steering wheel.
The host was a bit surprised, bringing up the point that the person in the privy was not going to be laughing with the pranksters. Keillor basically said "oh? You really think so?" seeming genuinely confused. Then it was revealed that he was never the victim of this kind of prank, only a perpetrator. And justified thinking that it was a good prank because it was done by teenagers to "dignified" older individuals who, it was implied, deserved it in some manner.
Which really annoyed me. I was getting my hopes up that he was advocating truly funny, not cruel, humor, and then he turns around and continues to be grumpy and petty. His argument could be "it's funny when I say it is" and that cruelty is only judged by the people who think it is funny, not by the victim of the mean-spirited act.
Too many people these days feel this way. That if they think it is right and funny then the person who is emotionally or physically hurt by the prank "just can't take a joke." This is victim-blaming in its most common form and it is not okay.
I don't appreciate bad jokes that are based only on one-up-manship. If the whole point of the joke is to make the prankster feel superior to the person they tricked, it is not comedy.
Thanks but no thanks. I don't need privy tipping or cruel April Fool's jokes to feel better about myself.
A few good jokes from today: