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Comment by jacobkg | Hacker News Reader

Relatedly, I have certainly had the experience of remembering something as being hilarious only now to be turned off by how clearly sexist it is (which I never noticed at the time). This is especially uncomfortable when recommending content to a friend that I haven’t watched in a long time.

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>Relatedly, I have certainly had the experience of remembering something as being hilarious only now to be turned off by how clearly sexist it is

That's part of the humor.

Plus a lot of people conflate sexual with sexist -- thinking about sex and working towards humping is considered automatically sexist in protestant-derived cultures (who'd rather we were all asexual and only interested in sex and in the other sex under very specific situations -- marriage, back in the day, a relationship, today).

Agreed, though the game is quite sexist and not merely sexual.

I look so forward to humilate all those culture warriors with there unripe opinions on cartoonish over the top humor. If history taught us one thing it's that those without humor are bad company

It is about someone who is sleazy. I don't really understand the modern trend that if story that is about (or includes) a character that is sexist/racist/etc, that then makes the story or it's creator sexist/racist/etc. It's quite absurd.

Lolita is about a pedophile, does that make Vladimir Nabokov a pedophile? Othello's Iago was incredibly racist, does that make Shakespeare racist?

That's not to say this game is on the same level as Shakespeare, but the point applies to any number of movies that include contentious character motivations.

I recently had to turn off Eddie Murphy's stand up special and a series of Norm MacDonald SNL skits because of how homophobic and sexist they were. They were iconic when they were made so I tuned in expecting some laughs.

Comedy keeps pulse of social norms. We've made progress over the past 30 years.

Eddie Murphy was considered offensive back then as well the only thing that changed is a different group of people are offended for different reasons. That's why its art.

This. Eddie was never mainstream but he was not offensive for the homophobia jokes. He was offensive because he said shit fuck pussy in a time this was not considered socially appropriate. It wasn’t until this became more “normal” that the underlying message could be considered offensive.

>Eddie was never mainstream

Oh please. I had a "Raw" poster on my closet door I got from the video rental place in Portsmouth, Rhode Island in the '80s. He was pretty mainstream at that point. It's hard to tease apart the fact some of "Delirious" is about how crappy he was as a comedian at the start because he just made poop jokes vs. him talking about Mr. T rodgering people.

Eddie was as mainstream as mainstream can get, how old are you?

Not really in his prime. You are conflating popular and mainstream. I’m old enough to have watched delirious and raw when it was released on video. Eddie was popular but the mainstream didn’t embrace him until the dr Doolittle years. That’s well beyond his prime.

Popular is literally a synonym for mainstream, they aren't being conflated. He went mainstream before Raw with Beverly Hills Cop, by the time Raw came out he was already a star. Doolittle was long after his prime, and long long after he went mainstream.

> Eddie was never mainstream

SNL, 48 Hours, Beverly Hills Cop series, Coming to America, Golden Child, Trading Places, Nutty Professor, PJs...

He wasn't "mainstream" with respect to G and PG audiences, and wasn't on "regular" TV shows much. He did tours and cable specials like "Delirious" and "Raw" for the 'adult' market. But he was pretty much everywhere in the 80s, in multiple hit movies and cable specials (and radio charts!) in pretty much every year of the 80s in the to 90s.

Another way to put it - he was about as 'mainstream' as a black entertainer was allowed to be in the 80s. That he dealt more in 'adult' stuff vs 'family' stuff (like Cosby) was his own choice, of course, but he no doubt broke a hell of a lot of barriers in those years.

Norm Macdonald is one of my favorite comics, and you're right, a lot of his older material hasn't aged well. He doesn't do that kind of material anymore either, so he's making progress along with everyone else.

Norm recently did an interview with Caitlyn Jenner on his YouTube channel [1]. I found his candor and willingness to see humour in the situation was actually more respectful than the typical white-gloves approach, and it lead to some pretty interesting stories and answers to questions.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuldL1m6FAs

As a gay person born in the early 80s, I vividly remember how "normal" gay jokes were in movies all through my childhood and teen years. Although I didn't fully realize I was gay, a subconscious part of me did, because I remember how uncomfortable it made me each and every time. It was such a standard trope:

Gay joke happens in movie

Entire theatre groans, goes "Ewwwwww"

It was just standard formula. It started changing right at the end of the 90s / early 2000's with televisions shows like Queer as Folk, and Will and Grace, that treated gay people like normal human beings.

I probably laughed at some of those jokes and as a person who (much later) majored in psychology and realized that "appeal to disgust" is a fallacy (also that almost EVERYONE's secret sexual fetish grosses almost everyone else out... that's just the peculiar nature of sexuality), on behalf of all 80's teens, I apologize.

Never heard of the "appeal to disgust" fallacy before, looked it up. Interesting. :)

now that you know of it, you'll see it everywhere. I'm sorry, in advance. :)

Closely related is the https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Appeal_to_shame which is part of a general category of fallacies called emotional appeals. You'll also note they're used constantly in debate ("pathos", it's called), because (unfortunately) they are effective, despite being wrong (as far as rational arguments go, at least). The only way to immunize yourself and others against these sorts of tactics is to understand these fallacies so that you can recognize them before you are irrationally swayed.

The worst, looking back on it, is the first Ace Ventura. Possible spoiler I guess, but near the end Ace realised he’s kissed a trans woman; cut to a 1m long scene of him burning his clothes and screaming in a shower. It’s really bad in retrospect.

https://youtu.be/alPQgx7SGms

That scene is a pastiche of a sequence in The Crying Game though, so that's the actual joke.

What are the odds that after several additional years you will look back at today and think, "wow, how was I so overly sensitive to humor?"

This is life. We should do our best to be right even though we are probably not. It's that or throw our hands up and quit trying.

I agree. But it's also folly to have the too-common attitude of "wow, that thing I did in the past was wrong -- and I know it because today I'm 100% correct."

Okay, but if I find something I enjoyed in the past now makes me uncomfortable, I'm not going to force myself to feel comfortable with it out of some sense of pride. Similarly, I would likely be bored today by many of the TV shows I used to watch as a kid. Tastes change.

I rewatched the original Blade Runner earlier this week in preparation for the new movie and the love scene between Deckard and Rachael is surprisingly rapey (he overpowers her). It doesn't hold up well over time, and wouldn't be written like that today.

Totally agreed that societal mores change over time and you can retroactively realize that something wasn't OK.

The reason he overpowers her is because she's a thing, not a person. Deckard doesn't kill replicants, he retires them.

The guilt, along with his confrontation with the other Nexuses and the (ambiguous) realization he's the one doing the dangerous work because he too is not a person, is what changes him.

One possible introspection is to ask what fundamental change happened between then and now. The difference can help amplify life's progress. Just a thought.

Whoso belongs only to his own age, and reverences only its gilt Popinjays or smoot-smeared Mumbojumbos, must needs die with it. - Thomas Carlyle

Every time I read, chew, and fully digest a Carlyle sentence, I feel full.

Most contemporary writing feels like cotton candy that dissolves easily in the mind, when compared to the rack of lamb you take in from Carlyle.

Well said.

Ironically, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/05/matt-l...

The comedians themselves are contradicting you.

Re-watch many comedians from the 80s and 90s and they're just being close-minded rather than actually being funny.

The worst I remember was when in the office we'd all call each other gay for silly things. "You not coming out tonight drinking? Are you gay?".

Then we hired a homosexual.

For months we still all made 'gay' jokes. He said he didn't mind. They would just slip out, that's how we talked to each other. "ah man, who would write a function like that? It's so gay!".

I still feel ashamed today thinking back on actually how hostile that workplace actually was to him. Even if he really didn't care, we were still basically constantly saying Gay Is Wrong. We were idiots. We were wrong.

It's not being sensitive, it's simply being close-minded.

There is a lot of irony in accusations of close-mindedness when they come from people who think all the past generations and everyone outside of Western middle-class left-wing cultural sphere are "wrong" about humor.

>Re-watch many comedians from the 80s and 90s and they're just being close-minded rather than actually being funny.

Obviously not a Carlin fan! Its very easy to be open-minded and completely insensitive. Emotional sensitivity is not a desirable attribute, despite its current popularity.

I have this feeling too, especially around the sci-fi of my teenaged years (Niven, et al). It's important to remember that this is the expected result of progress; it would probably be worrisome if middle-brow media from a generation ago didn't seem sexist.

It also seems like we apply current-generation standards most acutely to the N-1 generation. Somehow, a 1980 novel where a woman needs a man to save her from a monster is more offensive than a 1780 novel where a woman needs a man to have an identity or own property or leave the house. Perhaps that's just a matter of emotional distance.

I remember after reading Ringworld on a friend's recommendation, saying that it had one too many alien species with non-sentient females for me. One, okay, interesting idea I guess, two, now you're doing a thing.

Ringworld: Adventurer Louis Wu visits the titular megastructure along with three amazing aliens - Nessus, the two-headed Puppeteer, Speaker-to-Animals, the felinoid Kzin, and Teela Brown, the Wo-Man.

For the Puppeteers, both the sperm and egg producing sexes are sapient, it's their surrogates (a different species) that are non-sapient. Doesn't seem much different to humans hypothetically developing artificial wombs and losing much of our sexual dimorphism over time. If humans gestate their young in non-sapient artificial wombs in the future, would that make us sexist?

Well, except they explicitly call the non-sentient ones female (also stupid, and property), and the sentient ones are both referred to as male.

Well that's a semantics issue. Niven might argue that since the egg-producers don't gestate the young they're fulfilling a "male" role of merely producing gametes. But I'd argue that the female role is defined more by producing egg cells than by gestation: female fish produce eggs but don't gestate their young, and we still call them female. Therefore the "male" puppeteers that produce eggs are still truly "female".

The sentient ones are famously docile, cowardly and manipulative. I don't think calling them female would've been striking a great blow for progressive literature.

I think that's true. The 1780 stuff can usually be dismissed as being something that no-one seriously believes any more. The 1980 one can't.

It's not just the cultural stuff, though. I read Dream Park and the Barsoon Project when I was a kid. Loved them to bits. Recently I found a copy of The Voodoo Game in a second hand book store and finally finished the trilogy. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed it, but it was like watching an original series BSG episode and expecting it to be as good as... modern BSG.

This is an interesting subthread. Humor and social taboos have a fascinating relationship. A lot of old Monty Python sketches spoofed British uptightness and reverence towards Queen and country in a way that may have been somewhat subversive at the time, but the taboos have disappeared to some extent. Meanwhile, other taboos have been introduced into our society that make humor from previous times more uncomfortable.

We’re also developing bubbles, to the point where a comedian like Dave Chappelle, whom no one would consider to be on the right hand side of the spectrum, releases a comedy special that’s uncomfortable to watch for those of us who grimace at rape jokes.

Maybe we just need to forgive creative works that came from less enlightened times, and realize that we ourselves are in a less enlightened time than someone else will possibly be.

Remember, in King Lear the Fool was the only one able to speak truth to the King.

You're allowed to try to be funny about anything. Whether or not you succeed is dependent on how good you are. A non-funny joke is not funny. However, any joke is funny depending on how you execute it.

If you don't like a game, stop playing. If you don't like a TV show, stop watching.

It is not in fact generally the accepted standard among professional comedians than it's legitimate to attempt to be funny "about anything" so long as you have a decent chance of getting a laugh.

Really? I'm not sure if I could think of a single off-limits topic in standup comedy.

There are many. The Holocaust is definitely off-limits. That's just one example.

Really? Tell that to Mel Brooks and Sarah Silverman. [1][2] Comedians routinely joke about the holocaust, and have for decades.

1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/national/the-thing-abou...

2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8z5wBwY5Zw

What about child porn? Pedophilia? Human trafficking?

I'm utterly confident that if I looked I could find examples of comedians telling jokes about those subjects and audiences laughing.

For example, I just searched Google for "comedian pedophilia joke" and the first result is about Louis C.K. doing one during an SNL monologue.

Nothing is off limits in comedy. Plenty of stuff is in bad taste, but as long as the comedian is actually trying to be funny I think most or at least many other comedians will back them up.

There’s plenty of jokes about the abuse of children by the church.

You'd be surprised. Tons of major professional comedians have jokes about the holocaust.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGfDXMnQw7g

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewY3xgqlKPY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieDNGCIZogA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6E9sJ6B-u8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2_HbqPpQDk

You've definitely been added to a list somewhere for all those searches, lol.

There's a long-running Holocaust denial joke in most episodes of Norm Macdonald Live that's hilarious. You're just not watching enough comedy if you don't think anyone makes Holocaust jokes.

Mitchell and Webb sketch about nazi SS death squad is one of the best one, and often quoted by other comedians.

any recent tragedy. eg, the vegas shooting would probably not fly too well.

Sure it can. One joke was about how there was a video of the vegas shooting, and there was a guy running out of the frame with a full beer, as if shielding the beer was the most important thing in that situation. "The beer must've been pretty expensive... But the shots were free."

It's tasteless, yeah. But it's comedy. It's hard to say there are limits.

If someone tells a joke and nobody laughs, was it a joke?

Well, judging by the upvotes, I'd say it got a few. :)

IIRC Gilbert Gottfried made a 9/11 joke very soon after it happened (though that was generally agreed to be in poor taste).

[edit] It was 18 days after 9/11 at the Friars club roast of Hugh Hefner

Also, I recall a celebrity had a dead crocodile hunter costume for Halloween (Irwin died in September).

[edit] It was Bill Maher.

> IIRC Gilbert Gottfried made a 9/11 joke very soon after it happened (though that was generally agreed to be in poor taste).

So it didn't fly?

Norm McDonald also made a routine about Steve Irwin's death in the Daily Show a couple days after it happened.

I think that bit was awesome. Norm MacDonald is a great comedian, and he can deliver everything just perfectly.

That's a perfect example of a comedian taking something supposedly solemn and turning it funny. Kind of like when a chef takes an off-cut of meat and turns it into something delicious.

I've seen professional comedians joke about the holocaust, war, abortions, slavery, cancer, kids dying, pedofillia, incest, serial killers, 9/11, torture, religion, and lots of other things besides.

What's exactly off limits?

George Carlin and his sketch about rape would have begged to disagree.

Gilbert Gottfried would beg to differ.

Everyone downvoting this doesn't understand comedy. So some comedians make (for example) Holocaust jokes. They are careful about doing it in a way that doesn't disparage Jews, even though it might be shocking, off-the-cuff sounding, &c. Professional comedians can do this because they're experts at telling carefully crafted and targeted jokes in a way that sounds natural. It might be very shocking, but not shocking in a way that fosters racist feelings in the audience.

If a comedian showed up to a mic and started making the sort of Holocaust joke that an insensitive person would make after a few beers, they might get some laughs, but laughs aren't the goal--the goal is to have a good set that people like and remember. Their set would likely flop and they would likely not invited back. I dabble a bit in comedy and, yes, I have seen this happen.

This example holds for most sensitive subjects. So no, it is not acceptable in comedy to say anything for the sake of getting a laugh.

Actually, take a look at this Patrice O'Neal clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cwk-BQ4Mc0Y

His point is that you're allowed to try to be funny about anything, and if you bomb, you pick yourself up and dust yourself off. You should be allowed to make the attempt.

I will agree that the more sensitive a topic is, the funnier you gotta be. The joke should have an insight and good timing and delivery and all that. If you're just saying shocking things for the sake of saying shocking things to try to elicit a reaction, sure, you won't get asked back.

However, that shouldn't be a reflection on how sacred the topic is, but how unfunny you are.

The rape-by-deception scene in Revenge of the Nerds immediately springs to mind.

He's a sleazy dude trying to get a date. As others have said it is part of the humor and part of the difficulty.

As long as the friend you suggest it to isn't actively discriminated in the content you suggest there shouldn't be problem big enough to bother. Are you this kind of person who likes to overthink things?

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