Guest DrTom Report post Posted October 8, 2002 I found this article in the online version of PC Magazine today. I think Dvorak raises some good points, especially about the appropriateness of certain kinds of humor that some seem to enjoy. ---- The Sociology of Online Humor October 7, 2002 By John C. Dvorak Humor shifts with circumstance. If you've ever worked in an office, you can recall the old photocopy of some lewd or anti-bureaucratic cartoon that gets copied a million times and ends up posted as a formal announcement that the displayer of the material agrees with the content in some way. In this way, people bond. Nowadays, more often than not, e-mails contain a similar kind of humor. If you haven't noticed (and you haven't, yet) the model for all this humor has changed radically over the past year. What happened was 9/11. I'm not exactly sure why no national commentator has picked up on it, but the classic pass-around "sick" jokes that usually follow a tragedy have ceased. You all recall these jokes. They've been going on for decades and became very popular during the blossoming of e-mail and the Web. The mechanism is simple: Some tragedy occurs, then someone comes up with a sick joke about it that acts as a kind of relief valve. The premise for the joke is something like "What do you call blah-blah-blah?" And the answer is something like "A mud hut and a tree stump." Ha-ha-ha-ha! This form of humor in the United States dominated the day-joke scene until 9/11. Day jokes, as I call them, are the quickies that get passed around for a day or so, told by salesmen to clients and by friends on the phone. Few of these jokes hold up for more than a month or two. They are momentarily funny. I'm sure the folklore departments at schools such as UC Berkeley and Indiana University keep track of these jokes. The past year, though, has been comparable to one of those awkward moments when nobody says anything after a bad faux pas. The length of time that has passed since the 9/11 attacks—more than a year—now makes it impossible for any sick joke to appear, because now any joke would be dated and unpatriotic. I can't be sure that such 9/11 jokes haven't been circulated in other parts of the world, but I would guess nobody is talking, since these things are bound to crop up on the Net, and I have not seen them. Even the anti-Americans who relished the attack have developed nothing funny. While it makes sense that 9/11 would not produce any sick jokes, it's kind of shocking that we've seen the sudden disappearance of all types of sick jokes. A few friends and I used to kid each other about the lag time needed after an event before such jokes appeared. Now we don't even suggest that such jokes will ever appear. During the anthrax crises late last year, when various media folks and a few postal workers got infected, I heard no jokes. Most recently, there have been these weird shootings in Maryland, and nothing will come out of that. The only jokes I'm seeing are old-fashioned ones about male-female relationships. Even the economy is not being ridiculed. While I don't think that 9/11 is anything to joke about, are we sentenced to be depressed forever? What I'm seeing is a dourness and a certain nihilism in the humor that gets sent around. Worse, most of the material I've seen over the past year has been recycled. Even jokes about the President leave a lot to be desired. Most of them seem to be rewrites of old jokes about Dan Quayle. Can't we get over Dan Quayle? Yes, he said a lot of stupid things and made a kid put an e at the end of the word potato on camera in front of millions of people. But much of what was attributed to him was fiction, and the same seems to be the case with Bush. These jokes are funny, but only as humiliation. There is certainly no creativity involved with taking someone's botched phrasing and ridiculing it. Personally, I don't think we're ever going to return to the days of laughing off tragedies, as we once did. I was never convinced that this form of humor was all that beneficial, but I do recall laughing out loud once in a while. My fear is that we're going to evolve slowly into a humorless populace. All of these observations, I believe, can be documented if you simply take a look at your e-mail and other online joke systems. Maybe nothing's funny anymore. So my question to you this week is do you see a change, too? And is it reversible, or has society changed once and for all? ------------ Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Guest Frank Zappa Mask Report post Posted October 8, 2002 Well, we had a character called "Anthrax Man" who wore a gas mask on the tv show i co-produced last year right aboot the time of the anthrax scares, so I guess "sick jokes" still exist. Hell, they DO exist, and I'm really not sure where this guy gets that "nothing's funny anymore" just because he gets 5 less e-mails a month. I even had what could be considered quite an offensive wallpaper upon my computer during 9/11 this year, which was basically a made-up cover of Time magazine with a picture of the second tower being hit, with the caption "Where's the World Trade Center?....Oh Yeah, It Blew Up". No one gave me any grief over it, which maybe relates the whole point of that wallpaper, in that there a lot of people who don't give a goat's whit about 9/11 or the War on Terror, and who look at what has happened as just another news story to be forgotten, much less joked about, which is good and bad in a number of ways. "Humorless populace"????? The next thing we know this guy will be blaming it all on the aliens arriving in the year 2012...... Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Guest bob_barron Report post Posted October 9, 2002 Why did you have that as your wallpaper??? I mean good lord Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Guest kkktookmybabyaway Report post Posted October 9, 2002 Attention, perhaps? If I saw that wallpaper, I'd just shrug and move on... Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Guest Frank Zappa Mask Report post Posted October 9, 2002 Attention from the ladies.............errrrrrrrr, in actuality, being the kind of guy who likes to provoke, I put up something that would indeed cause a reaction and gain attention, if only to point out that a lot of people don't react and no longer pay attention to the War on Terror. Everyone can think everyone is all rah-rah sis-boom-bah aboot tracking down the filthy scum of the land, but in reality, 9/11 and the War on Terror is something that does not touch a lot of people personally, and to them, it's just another news story to be glanced at with momentary concern as they go through their busy day in this busy country. It's almost re-assuring in a sense as Orwellian daydreams of eternal war and a populace bound to eternal terror fall by the wayside in lieu of being destroyed in our actual reality of a people already too over-stimulated and too tired to worry too dearly about a war that will most likely never involve them personally. Then again, complacency can be the worst enemy sometimes. Damn this twisted world we live upon............ Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Guest Cancer Marney Report post Posted October 9, 2002 Chris is correct. In many people's minds - perhaps even in a majority's - the threat of war, real war, in which ordinary citizens have as great a chance of dying as any soldier, is still distant. Despite 9/11. I've seen this attitude myself. They think it's enough for them to stick a flag pin on their lapel and go back to business as usual. It isn't. Wake up, please. Please. Before more Americans die. Listen to the President. Listen to him. We are at war and we are in danger. Fear is not the answer any more than complacency, but you have to wake up. We're doing our damndest to keep you safe but we need you to wake the fuck up. I don't want to see any more of you die. Please. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Guest kkktookmybabyaway Report post Posted October 9, 2002 Zzzzzz... wha' wadda miss... Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Guest Midnight Express83 Report post Posted October 9, 2002 I heard a few jokes said about 9'11. Mostly on Arabs. I seen one on pop culture. I seen maybe 1 on the attack themselves. I won't say any of them because I thought they were all equally stupid. And the best way to fight terrorism is not crippling in fear as Marley said. We need to move on with our lives and try to be ourselves. If that means thinking Bush if full of shit with this War on Iraq, then so be it. It isn't like THEY were the ones to attacked us. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Guest DrTom Report post Posted October 9, 2002 If that means thinking Bush if full of shit with this War on Iraq, then so be it. It isn't like THEY were the ones to attacked us. No, they've only been giving millions of dollars to Usama bin Laden since the mid-1990's. And they've only poured money and weapons into Palestine, both in terms of paying the families of homicide bombers and providing arms to the terrorists over there. Yeah, Iraq's had nothing to do with this all along... Wake up and smell the coffee. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
