Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!mailrus!uflorida!novavax!twwells!bill From: bill@twwells.uucp (T. William Wells) Newsgroups: news.admin Subject: Re: Expansion of rec.humor.funny to other networks Message-ID: <791@twwells.uucp> Date: 24 Mar 89 06:59:53 GMT References: <439@corpane.UUCP> <3100@ddsw1.MCS.COM> <9773@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> <784@twwells.uucp> <3459@ficc.uu.net> Reply-To: bill@twwells.UUCP (T. William Wells) Organization: None, Ft. Lauderdale Lines: 174 Summary: Expires: Sender: Followup-To: Distribution: Keywords: In article <3459@ficc.uu.net> jeffd@ficc.uu.net (jeff daiell) writes: : In article <784@twwells.uucp>, bill@twwells.uucp (T. William Wells) writes: : > Bullsh*t, Jeff. Racism is a property of an individual. Individuals : > are racists. Jokes are not. If *I* tell a joke, ostensibly "racist", : > it is because I find some factor in it amusing. It is not because I'm : > a racist. : : Nonsense. The statement, "All blacks are lazy" is racist. Period. : Full stop. If you agree with that stereotype, you're a racist, too. : And if you find racist humor funny, what does that say about you? But you are arguing a circle here: the point *I'm* making is that the thing you are referring to as racist humor is not necessarily so, and that we can only call something racist because a *racist* does it. Consider what you just said: If I agree with your statement (I don't, obviously), I am a racist. If, on the other hand, I use the "lazy black" stereotype for some purpose, I may or may not be a racist. Suppose that I use the stereotype to contrast with a particularly industrious black, for the purpose of clear demonstration that stereotypes don't apply to individuals. Is that racist? Hardly. Suppose that, on the other hand, I use that stereotype to justify putting down blacks? Is that racist? Obviously. The use of a stereotype *must* be considered in the light of the goals of the user. If the user is using the stereotype in a racist way, he's being a racist. If not, he's not. Your claim that humor using racial stereotypes is racist amounts to the proposition that the only reason one would use a racial stereotype in a joke is for racist purposes. But that is clearly incorrect. Some alternate purposes: emphasis of a particular human characteristic, putting down stereotypes themselves, using the incongruity of the stereotype as applied to a situation to create surprise, etc. : > Let me put it this way. I am Jewish enough that Hitler would have sent : > me to a concentration camp. (My mother was born Jewish; : : You *can't* be "born Jewish", any more than you can be "born Presbyterian". : You can be born to persons who believe in Judaism; that doesn't make : you Jewish. I think you have some misconceptions about Jews and Judaism that you really ought to fix. For example, a Jew is a member of a (now rather ill defined) race; one can be Jewish without believing in Judaism. It is true that the two are very strongly related, but they are not the same. My mother's parents were both Jews; that makes my mother, racially, a Jew. She also believed in Judaism as a child but converted to Catholicism when she married my father. My wife was born and raised a Jew, believed in Judaism, and a Jew she remains. She no longer believes in Judaism. Ok? Have I adequately established that one would have to consider me to be part of the racial group called "Jewish"? A relevant point is that the Jewish stereotypes are generally not dependent on religion but rather a supposed Jewish culture. : So, let me tell you an old joke. It is to be : > told with the appropriate Jewish accent, of course. : > : > This boy is given two shirts by his mother and goes to his : > room to try them on. He returns to the living room and says : > "Mom, how does it look?" The mother says "What's wrong, don't : > you like the other shirt?" : > : > Why do I enjoy this? First, using the stereotype dramatically points : > out the thing I find incongruous. Without the Jewish accent to make : > it clear which stereotype is being invoked it looses quite a bit of : > its impact. : : Why, Bill? You don't think Christian children -- or Islamic : children -- find themselves in this no-win situation? Sad! Of course not. *I* found myself in this kind of situation. In a Catholic home. But the point is not the Jewish, it is the stereotype. And for the purposes of this joke, any stereotype in which guilt and catch-22s played a significant part would do, even a non-racial one. As it happens, I know of no other such stereotype, so, to make my point in this joke, I use this particular part of a Jewish stereotype. : > Second, it pokes fun at a kind of stereotyped behavior : > that deserves a little censure. : : The operative word here is stereotyped. Enough! When are we going : to mature, to put away religious/racial/national stereotypes and : judge persons as individuals??? When people don't get bent out of shape about stereotypes. And there isn't a smiley there. I mean it seriously. When we all believe that we *are* individuals, we will *know* that stereotypes don't define any person. So why get upset? In psychology, we would, if it were a science (flames to /dev/null please), have definite (testable and not philosophically vacuous) theories about motivation, intention, etc. and knowledge of which kinds can be profitably considered together; such would be very useful when understanding a person for the same reasons that classifications in the sciences makes understanding easier. This would not remove the burden of using the classification correctly, nor would it permit us to ignore the specifics of the individual in question, but when a person was demonstrated to fit a classification, we could save ourselves a lot of effort in understanding the person and the situation he finds himself in. Absent a science of psychology, we have to make do with what classifications are available, as poor as they may be. It is unfortunate that such classifications (we've been calling them stereotypes) have been linked with racism but that is hardly a necessity. I, for example, got a real chuckle when my wife, being ill, had to be cajoled into eating some chicken soup. She referred to me as her "Jewish mother". I found this funny since I don't think of myself as Jewish and I'm certainly not a mother! In short, a stereotype is a primitive and poorly formed concept. : > Third, I laugh at it for the same : > reason that we, later, laugh at all disasters that we manage to : > survive and grow from (my childhood, in this case). : : And for this you need the joke to be told in a "Jewish accent". : Sigh. No, I don't. I heard the joke a long time ago. Now, my reaction to the joke is intellectual: I understand the incongruity of the boy's position and the accent is irrelevant. However, when I heard the joke the first time (told to me by a Jew, natch), the accent made it instantly obvious what was going on. I immediately caught the incongruity, and was amused thereby. Without the accent to clue me into the stereotype I wouldn't have had as much pleasure from the telling of the joke. This is the same phenomenon that occurs when one has to have a pun explained in order to get it: one enjoys more (if one enjoys that sort of thing in the first place :-) the pun if one gets the impact all at once. Having to have it explained leaves one with only the intellectual enjoyment of the word play. : > The : > stereotype provides a shorthand for an entire collection of : > characteristics; these enable us to quickly enough grasp what is going : > on that we are struck by immediately by its humor. Without the : > stereotype, the joke, and its wider implications, would have to be : > explained. It wouldn't be funny any more. Merely sad. : : And that sort of shorthand leads to discrimination. To segregation. : If carried far enough, to even worse things. Think again of what you just said: "And that sort of shorthand leads to discrimination". Always? Without fail? Even mostly? Perhaps never? Perhaps you have just engaged in "collectivist generalization"? I'll rehash: individualism implies that the moral stature of a thing must be classified in terms of the goals of the individual and not in terms of supposed intrinsic properties. : I'm proud of my distaste for stereotypes and bigoted humor. I see : nother irrational about distaste for collectivistic generalizations : and other manifestations of unreason. As one of my three favorite : writers once said, Bill ... "Check your premises!" I do. Frequently. If you'd like, I'll give you the step-by-step version. But not on news.admin; this topic is far enough removed from the usual news.admin that I feel a little uneasy about posting it, but Objectivist philosophy would clearly be out! --- Bill { uunet | novavax } !twwells!bill (BTW, I'm going to be looking for a new job sometime in the next few months. If you know of a good one, do send me e-mail.)