November 9, 2002
DROPPED BALL (via Ed Driscoll):
That's Not Funny: What makes us laugh. (John Derbyshire, November 5, 2002, National Review)P.C. has, of course, cast its great wet blanket over a lot of harmless jokes. I once made the mistake of telling a Wall Street joke in mixed company. The joke was: "Two traders are going up in the elevator to work on a Monday morning. First trader: 'Do anything at the weekend?' Second trader: 'Yes, I got a dog for my wife.' First trader: 'Hey, great trade!'" One of the company, a fierce feminist, took exception to the joke, and delivered a finger-wagging lecture about how jokes of that kind demean women. Oh, yeah, right: Guys who hear that joke are going to go home and beat up on their wives. What is far more likely is that they will go home and tell it to their wives, who will laugh out loud, as mine did.
Mr. Derbyshire is on the edge of the great truth but lets it slip away. Considerations of Political Correctness are just part of the reason that humor is necessarily conservative. Posted by Orrin Judd at November 9, 2002 9:08 PM
The two funniest jokes I know are both anti-
conservative. Here's one:
New family moves into Southern town. Neighbors
across street watch with interest, and the
wife says, "Let's go across and introduce
ourselves to the new people."
So they go up to the door, but the new folks
have gone off. The husband peers into the
front window, and the wife says, "I wonder if
the new people will go to our church?"
"No," says the husband, "they're Methodists."
"How in the world can you tell, just by looking
in the window, they're Methodists?"
"Because I can see a bottle of whiskey on the
mantle, and if they was Baptists, they'd ahid
it in the kitchen."
Assuming for the sake of argument that it's funny, how's it anti-conservative? First, it's classist. Second, it's premised on all men being evil. Third, it scores points--assuming again--at the expense of others.
Posted by: oj at November 10, 2002 2:34 PMNot all men. Just Southern Baptists.
Who are conservative.
Harry:
Exactly. The conservative insight is that each of us is evil, to one degree or another, even the most conservative among us.
I'm not evil. I guess that makes me a Liberal.
Lonely, though.