Are jokes always 'in' or 'on'?
I can quite see that a lot of 'itsajoke!!!' is merely a feeble cover for something that is not funny at all.
I also observe that there are people who do things for their own amusement and that of others that is cruel and unusual to somebody somewhere.
So, I was thinking, but are there not jokes which are simply harmlessly entertaining? e.g. the somewhat Carrollian whimsy of #Ravenswap, which I thought was rather charming, and in the fine old tradition of spaghetti farming and San Serife.
I don't think that's a joke on anyone, but maybe, just maybe, there is a bit of in-jokeness to it that might be exclusionary?
(Okay, I still have wincey memories of what I think was still a funny shared absurdist joke on a scholarly listserv some considerable while ago, which ended up with some people saying it wasn't funny and some people saying some people might believe it and some people feeling somehow got at by people having a larf together, and, okay, there might have been a little in-groupy thing right at the start, but did quite proliferate beyond the originators, people took it up and ran with it.)
And after all, one does come across things that have got into the water, as it were, that started out as jokes and parodies or just somebody's assertion -
And people can be really really bad at fact-checking or just looking stuff up and I will concede that I go in some concern that one of these days I will find somebody, who has not read as far as the disclaimer at the end, taking the memoirs of one Madame C- in all earnestness as riveting firsthand insights from a Regency courtesan. (Because people have done just that with 'Cleone Knox' (Magdalene King-Hall)'s Diary of a Young Lady of Fashion in the Year 1764-65 and the woman who cited a fictional work as the actual secret diaries of Louis XIV) This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2904225.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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