Humor can be painful because there's a grain of truth in every joke.
For example, think about some of the jokes that are considered crass and offensive in American culture: bits about black people being poor; women being treated as housewives.
While the stereotypes are false, they relate to deep-rooted societal problems. Income inequality is still associated with racial inequality. Women are still underpaid and underrepresented in some industries.
Political correctness is not noble. It's a form of cowardice, a band-aid that prevents us from using humor as a vehicle for thinking about uncomfortable problems.
The harder an issue is to joke about, the more it requires jokes.
One could also argue that your examples of crass humor normalize these stereotypes, and therefore perpetuate them.
If I were to constantly make jokes about how black people were all burglars and rapists, and women should spend all day in the kitchen, at some point I might blur the line between irony and implicitly endorsing the generalization.
I don't claim that I haven't made the types of jokes you describe, but at the same time, I don't consider it "cowardly" that some find such jokes categorically offensive
So just to be clear, literally no joke can be offensive? I guess I'm stupid then, because I have fairly high tolerance of irony, but I would never such a sweeping claim.
> Political correctness is not noble. It's a form of cowardice
What the fuck? Shall I make a joke about your stupidity to soften the blow of the fact that you don't get it?
Political correctness originated in the form of referring to people in the manner that the subjects wish to be referred to. Shall we refer to people by the color of their skin or their origin? Shall we refer to people by their physical abnormalities? Et cetera.
I agree that there is something anarchic, sometimes cruel, inside humor. However, though pain is a useful ingredient, it ought to be one's own--the difference is comparable to the difference in cooking between butter and margarine. Richard Prior telling his own jokes was great; a white guy doing Richard Prior's material is just uncomfortably weird.
I'd be interested in how it differs internationally. The US must be one of the countries least comfortable about black humor.
[cultures which have gone through the worst seem to have the blackest jokes. Israel and Bosnia leap to mind, though much of eastern Europe has something similar going on]
> McGraw believes the spread of social media has imposed new limits on what comedians can get away with.
> “Comedy is a space that has its own set of rules,” said McGraw. “Then it gets posted on the Internet and broadcast to people sitting at their desks— people who weren’t intended to hear it and aren’t in the mindset to appreciate it.”
I've noticed this lately with people taking comedian set jokes out of context via a recording or second-hand party blowing them out of proportion. It's a real shame. If a joke isn't funny - don't laugh at it - that's the worst response a comic will ever get. But don't blow them up on a twitter, try to make them apologize for making a joke that wasn't particularly funny.
Funniest joke about a tragedy was told to me and others by a friend's wife about 20 minutes after the friend died. It was very near the worst day of a group of people's lives and we really needed to laugh because it was going to suck for a long while.
These kind of jokes are a time honored coping mechanism. I can remember that it wasn't long after the shuttle disaster in 1986 that I first heard the "Head & Shoulders" joke.
"What did Christa Mcauliffe tell her husband before getting on the shuttle? You feed the kids, I'll feed the fish."
Was the one I remembered. I also remember walking into my 5th grade class and finding the teacher crying. She'd applied for the spot on the shuttle, and had made it through several rounds of the selection process.
