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Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

True, but do you (HN readers) look on transgression only with nostalgia? What would be usefully transgressive today? Much subversive humour is Socratic in just asking (pointing out) hard questions.

In that vein, TBH I find it hard to square a post celebrating famous British humour on a site where any humour, whether good or in poor taste, is mercilessly punished by downvoting and faux outrage. I'm not calling hypocrisy, just pointing to an odd juxtaposition of values.

Do y'all delight in things the Python team said precicely because you wouldn't tolerate it or have the personal sense of security to say it today?

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As per other comments, women being played by men was and is a venerable tradition in British comedy and not actually very transgressive at all. It feels more "transgressive" now than it did then, I think because we imported US culture war stuff in the last decade or so.

I don't think HN actually hates humour, it just has a relatively high bar. Some of my most upvoted comments have been jokes. But I like to think they were reasonably good ones.

Regarding the Pythons and transgression, I think for me it's probably a case by case thing. There's obviously "good" transgression and "bad" transgression, but I suppose you have to have some support for the willingness to transgress, if you want positive social change to be a possibility.

Regarding specific things the Pythons said, the most actually transgressive-at-the-time thing I can think of is probably Graham Chapman's overt homosexuality and support for gay rights, which was no small thing in 1970s Britain.

Edit: Or you could make a case for it being the "blasphemous" Life of Brian, although I don't think the public outrage about that was really in step with mainstream opinion.

Edit2: I'm wondering whether Some Like it Hot, Milton Berle etc were considered transgressive in the US? Were these things not actually quite mainstream in the 20th century, even in the US?

That's insightful though I wasn't pitching that so much as humour being just part of life and removing/excluding it distorts discourse. I've heard many fascinating accounts of how sensitivity to humour indicates the "health" of a society, and when it vanishes that is prelude to conflict, even war.

Yes, I think us Brits defused many of our internal tensions as a mult-cultural AND classist society in the 70s and 80s with the transition from vaudeville racism to new-wave "alternative comedy". It didn't change the status-quo but it did move the dial toward more progressive ideas.

I do think HN is an odd place in it's intolerance of humour, and I don't see that "high bar" because TBH it's the lowborw geeky "knob-gags" that make the grade here in my observation. I think it's actually the old struggle of poets and philosophers (see Republic 2, 3, 5 [0]) is at play. HN adapts to filtering what it can't process. It's a bit like that AI brain in Blake's Seven that Villa causes to explode by feeding it riddles. I'm noticing even this "meta" talk about humour is being downvoted (and I hope those doing so are getting a good ironic laugh from that) :)

[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-rhetoric/

> I do think HN is an odd place in it's intolerance of humour

I've always seen this as a counterculture to Reddit, not as intolerance of humour.

I'm not familiar with Reddit, but assume it descended into total clownery. Hence the rules "don't comment that this place is starting to get like Reddit" I guess.

I wouldn’t say just Reddit. It’s counter to just about every other online forum out there. HN is pretty unique in its strongly enforced taboo against humor and silliness.

> any humour, whether good or in poor taste, is mercilessly punished by downvoting and faux outrage.

I've made my share of (attempted) humourous posts on HN.

The main pushback I've gotten has been from people who want to keep the conversations focused on "serious" discussion.

HN doesn't hate humor in general. Many of us just know what happens if you don't downvote away the easy jokes: all comment sections become more comedy than discussion. It's just too easy to make joke comments compared to the difficulty of making a comment that contributes to the discussion.

in the olden days of slashdot, this was addressed by decoupling "insightful" from "funny". you wouldn't get karma for being funny but you weren't punished for it either.

Good point. Yes I think I miss that of Slashdot too. There's such a thing as a healthy amount of banter, and the good stuff (not overly sardonic) takes the edge off the doom imho.

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