I wish to register a complaint...
Now, I know that I will laugh at something genuinely funny even if it is slightly dodgy, and that all jokes do indeed have a butt, but coming over all PC with me about something and then calling the alleged abused parties ‘weak’ strikes me as a bit hypocritical if not downright confused. Which is what my one and only complainer last week managed to achieve in her very huffy and patronisingly personal email to me in response to 'Old Jokes Home' (a play on words around 'joke' and 'folk', i.e. old people and old jokes that are a bit dubious).
I’ve seen this many times before and I have to say (I apologise here and now for this ageist remark, but it is true) it is often people who are slightly advanced in years and are struggling with what is and is not politically correct who make up the main body of ‘the confused’. Often they have been the least politically correct (reverse that and say ‘most prejudiced’) people for most of their lives, and have suddenly decided to become ‘outraged of Orpington’ to vehemently protect minorities from being lampooned in any way at all. This because many of their views were already set in stone when the PC movement happened in the 80's, the 80's. What is really amusing is that their PC-ness sometimes slips just at the moment they are proclaiming another to be a bigot.
Political correctness, in the UK at least, began with some ‘right on’ comedians in the 80’s shunning racist or sexist jokes because they were what everyone did and were getting boring. So they reinvented comedy and made it more political, more sophisticated and less about mother-in-laws and what people looked like, sounded like or where they came from.
Once the PC movement began to take hold people started taking it further and further still, and a lot of what came out of it was obviously very good for society. Like positive discrimination and equal opportunities in the workplace. But there still lurk those who will pick up the phone to the BBC in an instant to denounce some ethically questionable but undoubtedly funny humour.
It’s like people saying they aren’t racist because one of their ‘friends’ is black.
I did reply to my accuser at length and offered to publish her email and my reply but she has not replied to me. Maybe because I highlighted her use of the word ‘weak’ to describe people, like her friend that she mentioned, who unfortunately suffer from epilepsy. Or maybe it was because I concluded my email with a quotation from Bill Hicks.
You might have gathered by now that she really pissed me off! :-)
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