If this were a better joke, I’d be on Ricky’s side, but it’s not even really funny. He says something controversial, and then immediately sets it up as a strawman so he can play the victim of the outrage the joke is supposed to generate. The article is basically a continuation of the joke. I’m on the fence on if the woman who started the petition is actually real. This all feels like an ad to generate controversy and get people to watch the special, which, based on this clip, isn’t very good.
So you can remove the timing and delivery inherent to joke telling and say “yep that sucks” to a transcript? Would you also read the script to a movie so you can say the acting sucked? Not picking on you personally, just saying.
Its a mediocre joke in the scheme of jokes, its pretty good if you know Rickys brand of comedy. Watch it or dont but form your own opinion.
George Carlin famously made a joke about rape to show that anything could be a joke. In the right context and with the joke being about something other then the terrible thing, anything really can be included in a joke.
Ricky's delivery doesn't work for those kinds of jokes because his deadpan delivery reads as mean and cruel. He either does a really good job of acting like an asshole, or is an asshole, and it ruins the delivery.
I'm disappointed in George for that one too, and don't find Elmer Fudd violating Porky Pig particularly funny myself.
Still, that was a misstep by Carlin, and he never made a career out of specifically "triggering" the targets of his bigotry, unlike a certain unfunny englishman.
It's not an issue of what subjects can be joked about either, but rather who should be making a specific joke and if the joke reinforces or subverts oppressive hierarchies.
Carlin told the joke with the context of having been arrested for saying specific words and a lot of comedy being shut down due to moral crusaders. Unlike today's comedians that complain about cancel culture while being paid millions for Netflix specials, Carlin was actually trying to make sure that comedy was not being literally canceled. The point wasn't that rape was funny, but that people should not have assumptions about what is and isn't something that can be part of comedy using fictional characters.
Without that context it isn't the same thing and might seem like a cheap joke.
I still don't think a cis man raping a cis(?) sentient pig is funny and I don't feel a cis man suggesting it is is entirely cognizant of the power dynamics in which they take part even if I agree "7 Dirty..." is classic comedy.
Context is very important, I agree, and who is telling a joke is a part of that context.
Porky telling a joke about his personal trauma can be cathartic, Elmer telling a joke about having raped Porky is a furtherance of the violation, George Carlin saying it's funny to imagine one sentient being raping another with a stutter contributes to societal attitudes that would see us not address prison rape we've been conditioned to accept as a valid punchline.
Have you ever laughed at a joke at Hitler's expense? He was bad.
Have you ever laughed at a joke about cancer? Cancer is bad.
It is possible to joke about anything when done right was the context. George Carlin's wacky thought process was the joke, but you would need to see the whole bit in context to understand that Elmer raping Porky wasn't the joke or the punchline. Many people have dark thoughts, and being able to laugh at ourselves about those thoughts was the joke.
Have you ever laughed at a joke at Hitler's expense? He was bad.
A joke where something happening to Hitler is the punchline is very different from a joke where Hitler happening to someone is the punchline. The second one is fucked.
You seem to be conflating "a joke at rape's expense" with "a joke at the expense of a raped personig.
George Carlin's wacky thought process was the joke
I don't think rape is funny, no matter how wackily it's talked about.
I haven’t heard the Gervais joke so I’m not weighing in about that but I agree with your comment about not “reading” stand up comedy. Jim Jefferies did a skit about this. The joke he was referring to is also controversial but the point is, delivery matters. Here’s his bit about writing jokes
“What this lady did was she wrote an article about me, and she did a transcript of the actual routine in the article, wrote down every word I said. Now, I hate this. And I’ll tell you why. Because my whole skill in life is being able to say horrible things and still seem likable. [audience laughing] You take the whole… [grunts] out of it. See, if you read my material… it’s a bad read.”
I’d agree that it’s almost certainly fake controversy to act as an ad. What kind of petition has ever been made to remove individual jokes from a show? Angry people would demand the whole special be taken down, which frankly I’m all in favor of just taking down all of his shows and material. It would raise the overall average humor level of the whole service.
it’s sad to see a comedian who was once at the top of his game reduced to farming outrage on the internet
he says in the interview that people shouldn’t view his jokes as conveying any deeper meaning, which is just a depressing stance for a comedian to take
Miming a kid masturbating a pedo and saying that he’ll give a blowjob, implying the kid is both agreeing and enjoying it, and concluding the whole “joke” with “I miss the local pedo” seems hard to justify.
It’s like what Frank Zappa said: “I once wrote a song about dental floss and didn’t see anyone’s teeth getting any cleaner.”
Thinking that someone saying whatever thing in any context is like a command to the mindless masses to go forth and do whatever thing, is quite an infantile way of seeing the world.
One time that idiot from the website formerly known as twitter, tweeted the following tweet: “DOGE, DOGE, DOGE, DOGE, DOGE”
And some poor simple-minded fellow was outraged and alarmed: “Elon’s pumping Doge again!”
What a cartoon view one must have of the world to think that one idiot saying “Doge, Doge, Doge, Doge, Doge” compels other idiots to “BUY DOGE NOW” like mesmerized or frenzied zombies.
Many people seem to have little-to-no perspective about the tools and situations of humanity and the world, in depth, magnitude and/or priority. Narratives distorted to a weird abstract flatness.
Offensive jokes are jokes. What he did is supporting pedophilia under the excuse of it being a joke. Adding “lol” at the end of an unacceptable statement, or saying it in a funny way, or making an exaggeration of it, does not transform it into a joke.
If I say “lol immigrants are selfish so they deserve to die anyway” (another of his “jokes”) it’s not a joke, it’s just an obviously shitty statement coming from a piece of shit. Pretending that it’s a joke is pure hypocrisy and a very common way for people with shitty opinion to start screaming about cancel culture and censorship when they’re asked to stop.
Let me say things in another way. Even if you assume that it is a joke, then what is the joke about? The " joke" shows a character of a kid very, very explicitly and in details being raped by a pedo and enjoying it. Not only enjoying it, but asking for more and concluding with the idea that the kid ends up really happy with “a puppy, a kitten, and cum on the face”. With as I mentioned before the conclusion of “Oh, I miss the local pedo”. Not a single element of this “joke” pointed out that any of this is against pedophilia, or even just not supporting it. Dark humour is fine by me, but the point of dark humour is to mock horrible things by making jokes portraying the causes of those horrible things in a mocking manner. You can make a dark joke about racism, if the joke is made to mock racist people. If you mock black people, it’s not dark humour, it’s just racist. That’s it.
But go on, tell me what is funny about this “joke”. Is it to show pedophiles as not bad people? Or to show kids as enjoying rape? Or maybe to say that in the end, kids don’t mind pedophilia as long as you “pay them” enough to compensate?
Or maybe I should just not have bothered writing all this, just answered “you’re retarded and deserve to die lolol” and if someone complains, I’ll say it was just a joke.
Sorry, your opinion on the quality of the joke aside... are you unironically suggesting that Ricky Gervais is pro-pedophilia? That he literally thinks it should be legalised?
I don’t know his thoughts. But I know that he could not make that kind of jokes without at least being very complacent about pedophilia, and I would say that he probably considers that it’s not such a big issue.
But what he thinks ultimately doesn’t have so much importance, compared to what he is saying. No matter what he thinks, he is still normalising the idea that kids can be sexual, sexualised, and can enjoy it. These are basically the things that the worst pedos say as a justification (I’d randomly drop a name like Matzneff if you want to have a little wikipedia reading) to rape kids.
If you say that jews should be exterminated, are you a nazi? I would say that whether it’s the case or not, the impact of what you say serves the nazi ideology either way. And that’s enough for me to consider it a problem, especially if like in Gervais’ show, this message is completely unilateral and not defused at all.
I don’t know his thoughts. But I know that he could not make that kind of jokes without at least being very complacent about pedophilia, and I would say that he probably considers that it’s not such a big issue.
This is highly speculative. It is possible to make what might be considered revolting jokes about anything without actually endorsing it. Plenty of comedians have done this in the past.
If you say that jews should be exterminated, are you a nazi? I would say that whether it’s the case or not, the impact of what you say serves the nazi ideology either way. And that’s enough for me to consider it a problem, especially if like in Gervais’ show, this message is completely unilateral and not defused at all.
I've seen plenty of grim jokes about Jews in relation to the holocaust or nazi germany from people, but at no point did I think that they were literally endorsing the holocaust. Also, Gervais jokes about all sorts of things. Are you suggesting this 'pro-pedophilia' joke thing is some sort of continual theme or just a one-off joke?
Plenty of comedians are supporting plenty of shit. Being a comedian isn’t a free “say anything without any consequences” card, but many people consider it as such. There are ways to say things, and the way he did was, intentionally or not, endorsing pedophiles.
Also, how is it speculative to consider that miming child rape for easily 1-2 minutes (at least) non-stop means at least being complacent to it? If you are not complacent with rape, you wouldn’t mime it, and especially not for that long.
–
This is highly subjective. If you don’t see it as a problem, it doesn’t mean that there is no underlying problem, simply that it doesn’t affect you. If you had been threatened by nazis as a jew, or if you had been a victim of pedophilia, I would expect that you’d have a different sensitivity about these jokes, considering that their concept is often to mock victims (and as such, supporting the authors of those acts).
As for the joke, I would say that a joke that lasts 5 minutes, casualizing child rape, then switching to saying that if a pedo doesn’t look crooked, everyone is fine with not arresting them, is enough to qualify it of a continuous theme. And either way, not being a continual theme wouldn’t make it less “pro-pedo”. If you support pedophilia in one joke, that’s one too much, and we’re talking about a celebrity, not about uncle Georges saying drunken shit at a family dinner with everyone around hoping he would die soon. It doesn’t matter if I “suggest” or not, the fact is that this guy depicted as funny and nice a scene of a kid being raped in a very graphic matter. Or maybe I should ask if you are suggesting that depicting child rape for entertainment can be tolerated?
I never said that there shouldn't be any social consequences. He can be removed by Netflix, lose job offers, be boycotted - but suggesting he is pro-pedophilia is a particularly nasty, slanderous allegation. Being deliberately offensive or nasty in your joke telling routine doesn't mean you endorse the topics you joke about actually happening.
You are free to think he is a dick for hid chosen themes of joking, but it doesn't mean he endorses pedophilia.
And I have no problems with child rape being the subject of a joke. It is obviously a hard MA, and not for everyone - but then that is part of RG overall point.
But how would that be logical? Admitting that there should be social consequences means that you admit that there is a problem with his content, yet you say that it’s bad to say it? And if you mock victims of pedophilia, once again, you are supporting pedophilia. Whether you are, in your thoughts, liking pedos or not doesn’t matter as it doesn’t change your actions.
What point? From what I’ve seen, his point is to spread racist and discriminatory stereotypes, the pedo thing was just the culmination of the shit he said. Because I didn’t mention other particularly nasty things about his “jokes” such as normalising the “africans with aids” thing that serves no purpose, and is one millimetre away from the 40 years old “africans are animals who fuck monkeys” racist propaganda. What is his point? That instead of mocking people who are having power and influence (such as him) you should attack victims, discriminated people, and show them as inferior? I’m sorry but if RG has a point, then this point is very nazi-like. Making everything I said even more true, and making his “jokes” even more problematic.
But how would that be logical? Admitting that there should be social consequences means that you admit that there is a problem with his content, yet you say that it’s bad to say it?
No, I'm saying that me objecting to you calling him pro-pedophilia doesn't mean I necessarily object to Netflix removing his material, or others cutting him off professionally. They are different things. People have the right to associate with who they want.
And if you mock victims of pedophilia, once again, you are supporting pedophilia. Whether you are, in your thoughts, liking pedos or not doesn’t matter as it doesn’t change your actions.
This simply does not follow. The context of the joke matters, the situation in which you do it. If you are known for black comedy, or doing it as a part of it, then that is part of it.
What point? From what I’ve seen, his point is to spread racist and discriminatory stereotypes, the pedo thing was just the culmination of the shit he said.
Yeah, that's always somewhat been part of his thing.
Because I didn’t mention other particularly nasty things about his “jokes” such as normalising the “africans with aids” thing that serves no purpose, and is one millimetre away from the 40 years old “africans are animals who fuck monkeys” racist propaganda. What is his point? That instead of mocking people who are having power and influence (such as him) you should attack victims, discriminated people, and show them as inferior? I’m sorry but if RG has a point, then this point is very nazi-like. Making everything I said even more true, and making his “jokes” even more problematic.
The "point" here being if you don't like his jokes, don't watch his material. That was his point.
I reject the premise that there are inherent rules to comedy.
I don’t want to live in a world where private corporations are the arbiters of appropriateness, even when I don’t agree with or like what’s being said. Censorship is dystopian.
Apparently I need a refresher on the rules to the party games kids play these days like "ha ha racism" or "kick the tranny", but people don't seem to mind my company.
Add comment