That is an important MEME. A joke is an art form not dissimular to the poem or the popular song. This item speaks cogently against targeted jokes which we have all put up with.
Dumb blonde jokes would be better described as dumbass jokes. still a put down, but exactly who identifies with been a dumbass? Only the hyper secure smastass.
The real takehome is that we need to pay better attention to this art form. It is way more important than we admit. After all it provided a coded form of comms during the Soviet Union.
Yes, Mark. Jokes that choose a group of people to treat as stupid (or greedy or otherwise flawed AS A GROUP) are inherently a othering and best left to the graveyard of abandoned premises along with minstrel shows and Polock gags. You can turn Polock jokes into Blonde jokes and Jew Jokes into Lawyer Jokes, they’re still problematic because they are blanket insults to a group.
As a person who makes a living carefully fashioning and presenting jokes to make points that matter to me, as a person who sees the joke as, word-for-word, possibly the most powerful literary form currently in use, I would say that when society evolves beyond a form of verbal violence and divisiveness, it must be celebrated, as we all have the opportunity to find new avenues to explore and more progress to inspire with our work.
Thank you for this incisive point you make. Precisely. If it would be wrong to make the joke about people with darker skin, it’s probably also a bad idea to make it about people with darker hair. Or different sexual preferences or nationality or what-have-you.
I urge you to take a look at the lecture I did on this very topic in an instructional experimental film called Diagramming a Joke.
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