The liberal side of me agrees. But equally I feel for the people who have been the butt of these jokes and the harm it has caused.
I was in a boarding hostel with 110 boys, in the 90s. Those jokes were there every day (and still persist today). I’ve often thought how awful it must have been to be gay in that environment. No wonder gay suicide rates are so much higher than straight.
That’s where this tips over from being offensive to being harmful. Something I’m prepared to lose a little bit of freedom to help those offended and oppressed by it.
In your joke quotation, it’s the Irishman that’s inferior though right?
Being both Irish and Chinese I fear I’m allowed to jest but this is the issue right there. Romesh and a lot of other commedians joke about themselves and their race/culture. It can be funny but seems this is only possible if you’re referring to your own race/culture.
Oddly enough I find it mildly offensive when people joke about the Chinese eating dogs, bats and stuff, when clearly not all of us have the stomach for that kind of thing. Yet I find amusement in the local Chinese takeaway that has a ‘no dogs’ sign next to the menu on the wall.
My kids were abused incessantly at school about their dog eating habits and it drove them nuts. Clearly it was funny to a lot of the class but it grated on them. It’s unsurprising that they now find it quite offensive. I don’t particularly but that in itself is the thing right there.
Should I tell them that their offence is any more/less valid?
Haha! Good point. It is hard to get it right isn’t it. (I wouldn’t actually say either thing, I was just trying to think of a suitable example.)
That’s an example of the naïvety I mentioned above. Where we can say something without awareness of how it might be interpreted. Someone explains why it offends. Writer learns and does it differently next time. Both parties gain from the experience.
That’s not censorship. That’s tolerance and kindness.
Which illustrates why people need to be careful. Who knows what people will assume? I always assume that people who post platitudes culled from the internet are lazy thinkers, but that may well be wrong. They may simply think they are being clever.
But the harm is real. Why should @Takoyaki’s kids have to put up with this crap?
Isn’t it time we told people, you know what? Jokes about the Chinese eating dogs are not cool.
That’s where I support society being less tolerant of these tropes and jokes, because what people are saying others should put up with actually causes real harm.
No - a wife (or child, or husband) is an expense. And maybe expensive. I suspect that you are inserting a silent ‘just’ in front of ‘an’. It is often true, of course (and I hope is usually true) that a wife or husband is not only an expense, but also an asset. And I don’t mean this in purely financial terms. There is certainly no doubt that a single person has fewer necessary outgoings than a married person - and if they are the only earner, then some of those outgoings would not happen if they were single. How is it misogynistic (or misandrist) to recognise this?
I agree with that, but i would be a proponent of a healthy discussion about it and explaining to other kids why it is problematic, and perhaps a discussion about the eating of animals in general.
Instead of outright banning or censoring the subject and punishing those who mention it – which would seem more like a Chinese thing to do – just kidding.
I’m just saying that censorship or muzzling can be harmful too, instead of using it as an opportunity to educate. When you only punish other kids for sarcastically mentioning the eating of dogs, it’s likely that they would only feel resentment for it.
I agree, but I’m conscious too that despite decades of knowledge of the harm this stuff causes, progress on reducing it is extremely slow. And meanwhile it continues to cause harm.
At the school hostel I mentioned, it is still the worst possible thing for a boy to be labelled gay. Boys are terrified of being thought of as gay, let alone actually being gay. So despite thirty plus years of awareness of the damage this causes it is still very prevalent.
Patience is a virtue, but perhaps it’s no wonder some advocate for being a little more heavy handed rather than waiting for society to grow up.
And that goes the other way - look at all the brouhaha over Adele’s divorce settlement, in which Simon Konecki gets something like half of what she earned while they were married (or together, or whatever). Though apparently this is totally unfair, and he shouldn’t get anything much.
I agree that humour seems to have declined in quality. But I’m not sure to what extent this can be attributed to bans on topics. Would Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, The Good Life etc. be subject to these bans if they were produced these days?
But come on. You’ve heard the jokes down the pub about how much the ex ripped away from me in our divorce, how much she’s cost me, blah blah. My beef is with those people (men, in the main) who refuse to acknowledge the unpaid work that their spouse did that contributed to their ability to earn income/have kids etc.
No, but they’d get a bit of editing. Rather than singing about the Chinese being short in stature, our Lord Palin might have sung about something else. And what would be wrong with that.
Trouble is I doubt that they would get made at all based on their scripts and jokes today.
Neither would the wonderful Hancocks half hour, or Up Pompeii etc. Pretty soon the world will stop making comedies as we all cow too the loudest minority’s
