Monday, October 22, 2012
My New Political Ad
Fade in. A banner that looks like someone ate a bunch of American flags and then puked out my name appears. I say
I'm Sean Jacobson, and I approve this message.
I appear in a field, next to a dog, or a horse, or whatever. I say
Hi, I'm Sean Jacobson. Are you tired of Congress/The President/The Government telling you what to do? When I'm elected, I'll make sure that government remains small, like God intended. And you can be sure that my attitude will be so arrogant, rude, and dismissive that you'll feel even better about thinking I am right. After all, you're not an idiot, are you? Are you??
(Cut to me holding a pistol)
I'll stop the government
(cut to me holding a shotgun)
from taking away your
(cut to me holding a rocket launcher)
second amendment rights.
(cut to me sitting on top of a tank)
<my opponent> wants to take away your right to defend yourself from poor people, ghosts, and super-Nazis. I say that this is America, and the second amendment is as valid today as it was during the revolutionary war.
(cut to me in front of a church)
When elected, I will make sure that abortion remains illegal. If we don't allow people with low socioeconomic status to continue to have unwanted children, how are we going to keep taking advantage of that group of people by giving them money to join the armed forces? Are you going to join the army? Me either. Fuck that. Also, I'll support our troops by keeping them stationed in the shittiest countries in the world for no reason.
(Cut to me in a huge truck)
<my opponent> wants to raise gas prices to pay for gay marriages and planned parenthood so that he can force everyone to have abortions. This is my truck, and since I don't believe in global warming, I'll pollute everything as much as I damned well please, and if you have a problem with that, you can go fuck yourself.
(Cut to me on top of a hill with a giant American flag behind me, with two horses, three trucks, five dogs, nine crosses, and two gun racks. I'll be holding two shotguns and three pistols. Can we fit all that on a hill in front of the flag? Of course we can, fuck you.)
Vote Sean Jacobson for <whatever>. I definitely don't have a small penis.
Cut to a banner that says "Sean Jacobson" decorated with a ton of flags. Have a bunch of flags in the background. Put the banner on a flag. Play "God Bless America," "This Land is Our Land," and "America the Beautiful" at the same time. Underneath my name, put the phrase "I don't have a small penis."
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
Why I Am a Vegetarian
I get asked this quite a bit, so I thought I would write all this out for anyone who is interested in reading. I recently attended a talk given by Colleen Patrick-Goudreau, who talked about veganism, and the moral reasons for that. I will address the veganism/vegetarian issue later, but it’s something worth considering.
I’ll start out by giving reasons I think vegetarianism is a good idea. Basically, I’ll give all the reasons I might give if I were asked “Why are you a vegetarian?” Next, I’ll go into common arguments against vegetarianism that I have heard, and my responses to those arguments.
The original reason I became a vegetarian was for this reason. Not necessarily because I was eating unhealthy food constantly, but there are a lot of health problems associated with eating meat. Cancer and heart disease, are big problems - http://huff.to/pPSfmA. For me, the reason I started was because I was getting bad stomach aches after consuming large amounts of meat, and I had a good friend who was a vegetarian, so it seemed easy enough to try. I stopped eating meat, and I felt better, and to this day, I’ve continued the trend.
Here’s one with which most people will disagree. I think it’s wrong to kill animals for food. It’s not super cut and dried with me, though, so let me elaborate. I think that, in our modern society, we give people the opportunity to avoid an ethically dubious dilemma, considering how easy it is to not eat meat. That dilemma is as follows: if you are not willing to personally kill an animal, then you shouldn’t eat the meat that comes from someone else doing it. While I’m aware it’s a worse offense, ethically speaking, eating meat is to killing an animal as paying an assassin to murder someone is to murdering that person yourself. Again, I’m not comparing murder of people to murder of animals, but eating meat is essentially like hiring an animal assassin. Someone has to kill it, even if it isn’t you. Hunters are, of course, exempt from this argument. Hunters do indeed kill their own food, and they are ethically fine with killing an animal, which is fine. I wouldn’t want to kill a cow, a chicken, or a pig, so I don’t want someone else to do it for me. I think that if you eat meat, you have to be able to kill the animal yourself. If you couldn’t bring yourself to do that (like I can’t), then you shouldn’t be eating meat.
The farming situation in the United States is bad. Even if you’re okay with killing an animal (see above, Ethics) you have to make sure you’re okay with subjecting an animal to awful conditions, crowded stables and pens, disease runs rampant and the animals are given antibiotics (which gives humans resistance to antibiotics, by the way), and the conditions are generally reprehensible. Cows and chickens are forced to sit in a cage and are unable to move for their entire lives, and a lot of times, chickens are given hormones to plump them up, so that there will be more meat, although a lot of times, there is just more water in it.
Also, cows are often fed corn, which their stomachs are not equipped to process. Cows are supposed to eat grass. Corn makes cows sick. Mad cow disease, as is my understanding, started with cows being fed the brains and other parts of of other cows - http://bit.ly/NiwBe5. What it boils down to is that we are actively hurting animals, and that is wrong.
Global warming is probably real. A lot of people don’t think so, and they’re probably wrong. I’ll grant the possibility that global warming isn’t real, but it’s a slim possibility. The vast majority of scientists in the climate field agree that global warming is a serious problem, and even if it isn’t, the overwhelming evidence that it is real is a good enough reason to try to do something about it. Eating meat is a serious contributor. I’ll only briefly mention that cow flatulence is causing more greenhouse gases to be emitted, which is true.
A problem which I think is bigger, is transportation. With plant based food products, the only time they need to be transported is from the farm to the grocery store. Meat, on the other hand, comes from animals, who need food of their own. Thus, more greenhouse gases are emitted by vehicles which transport food from farms to other farms for the animals there. Then, of course, the animals, once slaughtered, have to be transported from that farm to the grocery store, and meat is more easily perishable than plant based foods, so it has to be refrigerated, and that takes even more energy. It’s a very arguable possibility that the huge amount of meat we eat in the US is a significant contributor to global warming.
Here’s a reason with which I wouldn’t agree, but I’ll include it because it is a reason that some people have. Interestingly enough, I suspect that, despite the fact that this is the reason in this list which is by far the least logical (I don’t want to eat meat because I want to impress my magical invisible friends), it is the one that, in polite discourse, would be met with the least counter-argument. However, I won’t argue too much with it, because although it’s a silly reason for doing the right thing, it is still the right thing.
If you ever get the opportunity, and you know of a Hare Krishna place of worship, a lot of them give away free vegetarian food on Sundays, to promote vegetarianism and celebrate their religion. A little silly, but it sounds awesome to me, so who am I to judge?
No one knows what protein is. Yet, somehow, we all seem to think that without it, our bodies will wither and die like an unwatered plant. I recently had to learn about the process of RNA synthesis, which involves RNA coding to create proteins, which naturally occur in your body, and then serve some biological function. I was talking to my biology-majoring roommate about this, and I asked him what is the difference between RNA-synthesized protein and dietary protein. He had no clue. He was a BIOLOGY major. Yet, somehow, everyone is convinced that we humans absolutely CRAVE protein.
As someone who has been a vegetarian for three years, I assure you that protein is no problem. Rice and beans, soy products, wheat gluten, and quinoa are excellent sources of vegan protein, and they are not super hard to come by. Also, it’s worth it to mention that people in this country generally eat quite a bit more protein than they really need. Of course we need protein, but we don’t need a huge amount of it, and we can easily get adequate amounts of protein from plant-based foods.
Of course there are other nutrients. Iron (leafy greens), calcium (also leafy greens, plus it’s in OJ and soy milk these days), omega 3 fatty acids (walnuts, flax seeds). Colleen Patrick-Goudreau came up with a good argument. Apparently farmers are supplementing the diets of cows with calcium so that there is more of it in milk. Well, you can supplement your diet with calcium. Why go through a cow? For that matter, we all want these nutrients that are found in the meat of these animals, and the animals are herbivores. Where do you think they get these nutrients? Their food. You can be an herbivore, and much like a cow, you’ll have iron in your blood.
This is an argument I hear a lot. Essentially, the argument is that if I don’t want to eat animal meat, it’s hypocritical of me to eat dairy and eggs. One aspect of this argument which I’ve heard is that eggs are meat. Well, no, they’re not. It would even be easy to convince a dogmatic pro-lifer of this, since life begins at conception, and I’m fairly sure I’ve never eaten a fertilized egg. Eggs are not meat, they are just an animal byproduct.
The one part of this argument that is hard to get around is that I am against cruelty to animals when they are being used for meat, but by eating dairy and eggs, I am supporting cruelty. In the United States, this is true, but there’s no reason it has to be. It would be possible to harvest milk and eggs from chickens and cows without killing them and still guaranteeing that they live a life without pain and discomfort. The costs would be high, but I would be willing to pay for those higher costs. In the talk I recently attended, the speaker, Colleen Patrick-Goudreau, brought up the point that in order to harvest milk from cows, one has to get the cow pregnant. It’s then common practice to murder the cow’s offspring if it is a male (because it can’t make milk) and keep it alive for milk if it’s female. Also, cows that are used for milk are eventually killed and made into meat. Ms. Patrick-Goudreau made a remark which was akin to “There’s no retirement home for these cows.” Obviously I don’t know if these claims are true, and I’ve found it’s pretty tough to find out exactly what goes on at these factory farms on the internet (I guess they must not want you to know, for some reason). Even so, these are still good arguments to cut down on milk and eggs.
It’s the natural order of things for us to eat meat! This is my favorite argument, because it’s the easiest to refute. Not that I’ve ever had the chance, but it would be great if a creationist presented me with this argument. Someone who thinks science is made up by God to fool us into thinking He isn’t real arguing for natural order would be the height of absurdity, in my opinion. Interestingly, vegetarianism is condemned in the Bible:
“For one believeth that he may eat all things: another, who is weak, eateth herbs.” -Romans 14:2. Take that, heathens! In my opinion, just another great reason to consider vegetarianism. But, I digress.
Arguing that eating meat is the natural order of things and therefore we should do it is tantamount to arguing that we shouldn’t be wearing clothes because it’s the natural order of things to be naked. Of course, you’re welcome to flaunt your nudity if you want to, but if you like wearing clothes, go ahead. As humans we have the capacity to do things like refrain from eating meat, wear clothes, and defecate directly into toilets. Talk about unnatural! Not to mention that, if you are talking about eating meat because it’s the natural order of things, you should be hunting your own meat (see above, Ethics). Lions don’t have grocery stores, refrigerators, or chicken nuggets.
This is something that doesn’t really fall under either category here, but it’s something that I’d like to mention. People in the United States (not, interestingly enough, in some other countries) don’t eat dogs, cats, or horses. I’ve brought this point up to many people, and their counter-argument is that they are out pets, and that’s why we don’t eat them. This argument would only make sense if you are talking about your own pet.
Basically, the argument is that a large number of people have cats and dogs as their pets, so that species is safe from the grill. Well, how large of a number does it have to be? Plenty of people have chickens and pigs as pets. There are probably even people who have a cow that they love. Why don’t these people stop you from eating those animals? Keep in mind here that I am not arguing for eating cats, dogs, and horses, I’m just saying that morally there is no difference between that and eating cows, pigs, and chickens. So basically, if you eat meat but you would never ever eat a dog, then you are a hypocrite. I will grant you the right to not eat your own dog, but that’s it.
Recently there was a lot of press when people found out that Obama ate a dog when he was in Indonesia, and it also came out that Romney put his dog in a cage on top of his car and drove around. Different people were pissed at different candidates, but in a society where we habitually kill animals and eat them, Obama's actions are essentially the norm. Obama eating an animal that was killed in order to be eaten is hardly a capital offense. Romney, on the other hand, was treating very poorly an animal that he’d taken on the responsibility of taking care of, so his offense was greater, as far as society should be concerned. If Obama had eaten his own dog, that would be different. Of course, killing and eating a dog is worse than forcing it to partake in a very unpleasant and windy car ride, but Obama (and, presumably Romney) eat animals that have been killed for the purpose of eating all the time. What difference does it make if it isn’t a dog?
Hopefully anyone who reads this won’t take it as me telling you that you have to be a vegetarian. At best, I hope I have convinced any readers to consider vegetarianism, or at the very least, trying not to eat very much meat. At worst, I hope I’ve convinced people to be more tolerant of vegetarians, and if you own a restaurant, (unlikely), throw some more veggie options, and maybe even a vegan option. I’ve been pretty fortunate in that all the meat eaters in my life have been totally tolerant of my vegetarianism, with one exception who will remain nameless, but he’s gotten over it since I’ve been veggie for like 3 years. I, in turn, am tolerant of meat eating, in that, I don’t think that eating meat translates to a desire to torture animals. I do, however, think that it’s wrong to eat meat, but it isn’t my place to judge. I’m always happy to tell you how I feel about it if you ask me, or if you happen to want to read any of this, but I won’t shove the fact that I won’t shove meat down my throat down your throat.
I’ll start out by giving reasons I think vegetarianism is a good idea. Basically, I’ll give all the reasons I might give if I were asked “Why are you a vegetarian?” Next, I’ll go into common arguments against vegetarianism that I have heard, and my responses to those arguments.
Reasons
Health
The original reason I became a vegetarian was for this reason. Not necessarily because I was eating unhealthy food constantly, but there are a lot of health problems associated with eating meat. Cancer and heart disease, are big problems - http://huff.to/pPSfmA. For me, the reason I started was because I was getting bad stomach aches after consuming large amounts of meat, and I had a good friend who was a vegetarian, so it seemed easy enough to try. I stopped eating meat, and I felt better, and to this day, I’ve continued the trend.
Ethics
Here’s one with which most people will disagree. I think it’s wrong to kill animals for food. It’s not super cut and dried with me, though, so let me elaborate. I think that, in our modern society, we give people the opportunity to avoid an ethically dubious dilemma, considering how easy it is to not eat meat. That dilemma is as follows: if you are not willing to personally kill an animal, then you shouldn’t eat the meat that comes from someone else doing it. While I’m aware it’s a worse offense, ethically speaking, eating meat is to killing an animal as paying an assassin to murder someone is to murdering that person yourself. Again, I’m not comparing murder of people to murder of animals, but eating meat is essentially like hiring an animal assassin. Someone has to kill it, even if it isn’t you. Hunters are, of course, exempt from this argument. Hunters do indeed kill their own food, and they are ethically fine with killing an animal, which is fine. I wouldn’t want to kill a cow, a chicken, or a pig, so I don’t want someone else to do it for me. I think that if you eat meat, you have to be able to kill the animal yourself. If you couldn’t bring yourself to do that (like I can’t), then you shouldn’t be eating meat.
Farming in America
The farming situation in the United States is bad. Even if you’re okay with killing an animal (see above, Ethics) you have to make sure you’re okay with subjecting an animal to awful conditions, crowded stables and pens, disease runs rampant and the animals are given antibiotics (which gives humans resistance to antibiotics, by the way), and the conditions are generally reprehensible. Cows and chickens are forced to sit in a cage and are unable to move for their entire lives, and a lot of times, chickens are given hormones to plump them up, so that there will be more meat, although a lot of times, there is just more water in it.
Also, cows are often fed corn, which their stomachs are not equipped to process. Cows are supposed to eat grass. Corn makes cows sick. Mad cow disease, as is my understanding, started with cows being fed the brains and other parts of of other cows - http://bit.ly/NiwBe5. What it boils down to is that we are actively hurting animals, and that is wrong.
Greenhouse Gases
Global warming is probably real. A lot of people don’t think so, and they’re probably wrong. I’ll grant the possibility that global warming isn’t real, but it’s a slim possibility. The vast majority of scientists in the climate field agree that global warming is a serious problem, and even if it isn’t, the overwhelming evidence that it is real is a good enough reason to try to do something about it. Eating meat is a serious contributor. I’ll only briefly mention that cow flatulence is causing more greenhouse gases to be emitted, which is true.
A problem which I think is bigger, is transportation. With plant based food products, the only time they need to be transported is from the farm to the grocery store. Meat, on the other hand, comes from animals, who need food of their own. Thus, more greenhouse gases are emitted by vehicles which transport food from farms to other farms for the animals there. Then, of course, the animals, once slaughtered, have to be transported from that farm to the grocery store, and meat is more easily perishable than plant based foods, so it has to be refrigerated, and that takes even more energy. It’s a very arguable possibility that the huge amount of meat we eat in the US is a significant contributor to global warming.
Religious Reasons
Here’s a reason with which I wouldn’t agree, but I’ll include it because it is a reason that some people have. Interestingly enough, I suspect that, despite the fact that this is the reason in this list which is by far the least logical (I don’t want to eat meat because I want to impress my magical invisible friends), it is the one that, in polite discourse, would be met with the least counter-argument. However, I won’t argue too much with it, because although it’s a silly reason for doing the right thing, it is still the right thing.
If you ever get the opportunity, and you know of a Hare Krishna place of worship, a lot of them give away free vegetarian food on Sundays, to promote vegetarianism and celebrate their religion. A little silly, but it sounds awesome to me, so who am I to judge?
Arguments I Have Heard
Protein
No one knows what protein is. Yet, somehow, we all seem to think that without it, our bodies will wither and die like an unwatered plant. I recently had to learn about the process of RNA synthesis, which involves RNA coding to create proteins, which naturally occur in your body, and then serve some biological function. I was talking to my biology-majoring roommate about this, and I asked him what is the difference between RNA-synthesized protein and dietary protein. He had no clue. He was a BIOLOGY major. Yet, somehow, everyone is convinced that we humans absolutely CRAVE protein.
As someone who has been a vegetarian for three years, I assure you that protein is no problem. Rice and beans, soy products, wheat gluten, and quinoa are excellent sources of vegan protein, and they are not super hard to come by. Also, it’s worth it to mention that people in this country generally eat quite a bit more protein than they really need. Of course we need protein, but we don’t need a huge amount of it, and we can easily get adequate amounts of protein from plant-based foods.
Of course there are other nutrients. Iron (leafy greens), calcium (also leafy greens, plus it’s in OJ and soy milk these days), omega 3 fatty acids (walnuts, flax seeds). Colleen Patrick-Goudreau came up with a good argument. Apparently farmers are supplementing the diets of cows with calcium so that there is more of it in milk. Well, you can supplement your diet with calcium. Why go through a cow? For that matter, we all want these nutrients that are found in the meat of these animals, and the animals are herbivores. Where do you think they get these nutrients? Their food. You can be an herbivore, and much like a cow, you’ll have iron in your blood.
Vegetarian vs. Vegan
This is an argument I hear a lot. Essentially, the argument is that if I don’t want to eat animal meat, it’s hypocritical of me to eat dairy and eggs. One aspect of this argument which I’ve heard is that eggs are meat. Well, no, they’re not. It would even be easy to convince a dogmatic pro-lifer of this, since life begins at conception, and I’m fairly sure I’ve never eaten a fertilized egg. Eggs are not meat, they are just an animal byproduct.
The one part of this argument that is hard to get around is that I am against cruelty to animals when they are being used for meat, but by eating dairy and eggs, I am supporting cruelty. In the United States, this is true, but there’s no reason it has to be. It would be possible to harvest milk and eggs from chickens and cows without killing them and still guaranteeing that they live a life without pain and discomfort. The costs would be high, but I would be willing to pay for those higher costs. In the talk I recently attended, the speaker, Colleen Patrick-Goudreau, brought up the point that in order to harvest milk from cows, one has to get the cow pregnant. It’s then common practice to murder the cow’s offspring if it is a male (because it can’t make milk) and keep it alive for milk if it’s female. Also, cows that are used for milk are eventually killed and made into meat. Ms. Patrick-Goudreau made a remark which was akin to “There’s no retirement home for these cows.” Obviously I don’t know if these claims are true, and I’ve found it’s pretty tough to find out exactly what goes on at these factory farms on the internet (I guess they must not want you to know, for some reason). Even so, these are still good arguments to cut down on milk and eggs.
Natural Order
It’s the natural order of things for us to eat meat! This is my favorite argument, because it’s the easiest to refute. Not that I’ve ever had the chance, but it would be great if a creationist presented me with this argument. Someone who thinks science is made up by God to fool us into thinking He isn’t real arguing for natural order would be the height of absurdity, in my opinion. Interestingly, vegetarianism is condemned in the Bible:
“For one believeth that he may eat all things: another, who is weak, eateth herbs.” -Romans 14:2. Take that, heathens! In my opinion, just another great reason to consider vegetarianism. But, I digress.
Arguing that eating meat is the natural order of things and therefore we should do it is tantamount to arguing that we shouldn’t be wearing clothes because it’s the natural order of things to be naked. Of course, you’re welcome to flaunt your nudity if you want to, but if you like wearing clothes, go ahead. As humans we have the capacity to do things like refrain from eating meat, wear clothes, and defecate directly into toilets. Talk about unnatural! Not to mention that, if you are talking about eating meat because it’s the natural order of things, you should be hunting your own meat (see above, Ethics). Lions don’t have grocery stores, refrigerators, or chicken nuggets.
Dogs, Cats, and Horses
This is something that doesn’t really fall under either category here, but it’s something that I’d like to mention. People in the United States (not, interestingly enough, in some other countries) don’t eat dogs, cats, or horses. I’ve brought this point up to many people, and their counter-argument is that they are out pets, and that’s why we don’t eat them. This argument would only make sense if you are talking about your own pet.
Basically, the argument is that a large number of people have cats and dogs as their pets, so that species is safe from the grill. Well, how large of a number does it have to be? Plenty of people have chickens and pigs as pets. There are probably even people who have a cow that they love. Why don’t these people stop you from eating those animals? Keep in mind here that I am not arguing for eating cats, dogs, and horses, I’m just saying that morally there is no difference between that and eating cows, pigs, and chickens. So basically, if you eat meat but you would never ever eat a dog, then you are a hypocrite. I will grant you the right to not eat your own dog, but that’s it.
Recently there was a lot of press when people found out that Obama ate a dog when he was in Indonesia, and it also came out that Romney put his dog in a cage on top of his car and drove around. Different people were pissed at different candidates, but in a society where we habitually kill animals and eat them, Obama's actions are essentially the norm. Obama eating an animal that was killed in order to be eaten is hardly a capital offense. Romney, on the other hand, was treating very poorly an animal that he’d taken on the responsibility of taking care of, so his offense was greater, as far as society should be concerned. If Obama had eaten his own dog, that would be different. Of course, killing and eating a dog is worse than forcing it to partake in a very unpleasant and windy car ride, but Obama (and, presumably Romney) eat animals that have been killed for the purpose of eating all the time. What difference does it make if it isn’t a dog?
Conclusion
Hopefully anyone who reads this won’t take it as me telling you that you have to be a vegetarian. At best, I hope I have convinced any readers to consider vegetarianism, or at the very least, trying not to eat very much meat. At worst, I hope I’ve convinced people to be more tolerant of vegetarians, and if you own a restaurant, (unlikely), throw some more veggie options, and maybe even a vegan option. I’ve been pretty fortunate in that all the meat eaters in my life have been totally tolerant of my vegetarianism, with one exception who will remain nameless, but he’s gotten over it since I’ve been veggie for like 3 years. I, in turn, am tolerant of meat eating, in that, I don’t think that eating meat translates to a desire to torture animals. I do, however, think that it’s wrong to eat meat, but it isn’t my place to judge. I’m always happy to tell you how I feel about it if you ask me, or if you happen to want to read any of this, but I won’t shove the fact that I won’t shove meat down my throat down your throat.
Monday, January 9, 2012
Not Funny?
Offensive, or Cruel?
You may have noticed that, although I claimed the lack of a correlation between jokes being offensive and funny, I defended the first joke (which I thought was funny) while I tore the second one apart. This illustrates an interesting point: both jokes were offensive, but the second one was offensive in an unfunny way. The first one seemed cruel, but I argued that it wasn’t, and the second one seemed cruel, and I argued that it was. It is, however, possible for a joke to be both clever and cruel, and I try to appreciate the cleverness of such jokes while ignoring the cruelty. For example, think of any “blond” jokes you’ve ever heard. Such jokes can often be funny, although cruel. If you want to turn them into social commentary, take any blond joke and replace “blond” with “republican,” or if your audience is composed mostly of conservative people then replace blond with “liberal,” but it’s unlikely you’d ever find yourself telling a joke to a republican because they don’t have a sense of humor. Ha! Another example of topical humor!
In Defense of Offensive Jokes
Recently I watched a comedy special by a guy named Wyatt Cenac. He told the following joke: “I’m going to open a racist bakery called K-K-cakes.” I thought it was funny, so I set it as my facebook status, properly citing Wyatt Cenac as the source (I mentioned I take comedy seriously; I would never allow someone to think that I came up with a joke on my own if I didn’t). My Aunt and cousin, after reading this joke, expressed to me the fact that they were offended by it because they felt was disrespectful towards black people. If my Aunt or cousin is reading this (unlikely) then my message to them would be a deeply sincere apology for offending them, but the assertion that it wasn’t my intent. Certainly the joke was offensive, but was it disrespectful towards black people? I would argue that, if anything, the joke was disrespectful towards the KKK. Here’s an organization that takes their cause very seriously, and Wyatt Cenac was using the fact that the KKK are racist, something which everyone knows, and turning it into something silly. Who in their right mind would go to a racist bakery called K-K-cakes? What sort of ridiculous baked goods would be sold in such a bakery? If anything, this joke conjures up the image of some asshole in a white pointed hat sitting alone in a bakery filled with racist cakes that no one wants to buy, pissed off that their stupid idea wasn’t working. Part of what makes this joke funny, however, is the edginess. The edginess and ability for us, as adults, to look at it with a political perspective, are what make it slightly more clever. To illustrate my point, I’ll give an example of a joke that’s exactly as clever but is completely and utterly inoffensive: I heard that some of the deer in the forest are playing football. They’re calling it N-F-elk! The cleverness of the joke was that “L” sort of sounds like “elk,” much like “K” sort of sounds like “cake.” The absence of any trace of offensiveness and political statement makes the joke rather impotent. It is, by all accounts, a lame joke. It’s the sort of corny joke you might hear when you’re in first grade. However, the only difference between it and Wyatt Cenac’s joke is that his joke has an added element of humor which really makes the joke: the edginess and political statement.
Humor is something I really enjoy, and in spite of its whimsical nature, something I take very seriously. So, I’ve decided to analyze the nature of humor, and the reactions of certain people which deny them the opportunity to fully appreciate it in all its glory. When I talk about denial of the opportunity for enjoyment of humor, specifically I’m referring to offensive humor. A lot of really funny jokes are offensive, and a lot of people are easily offended, and I think the less easily one allows oneself to be offended, the more one can enjoy humor, and I think refusing to allow oneself to be offended is not necessarily detrimental to sensitivity, as you might believe. Throughout the course of this writing, when I say something is “offensive,” I mean it has the capacity to offend people. The distinction is between having the capacity to offend people and whether it should offend people.
When someone tells an offensive joke, there are many possible reactions. My least favorite is when someone gets offended and asserts that the joke shouldn’t have been told, using the reasoning that “it’s not even funny.” This drives me absolutely up the wall, because the argument the person is using is so diametrically opposed to what is obviously their initial objection to the joke. Allow me to clarify: a joke can either be funny or not funny, and it can be offensive or not offensive. There is not and should not be a correlation. If I tell a joke that you find offensive, and you think that it shouldn’t have been told because it is so offensive, then your objection should be “that joke is offensive, and I think you shouldn’t tell it.” Logically, this is an acceptable reaction to an offensive joke, but in my opinion, it doesn’t mean the joke is morally wrong. I’ll get back to that, though. A joke can either be funny or not funny, and a joke not being funny is a good reason not to tell it, but a joke being offensive does not imply at all that it is not funny. For instructive purposes, I’ll give a couple examples.
Today my office mate noted that I was wearing new shoes, from a company called “Toms.” I told him that every time you buy a pair of shoes from this company, they give a free pair of shoes to a child in a developing country. He said, “well that’s good, but the manufacture of my shoes give a job to a child in a developing country.” The implication here being that his shoes were probably made in a sweat shop. This is an example of a joke that is both offensive and funny. I think that most people would agree that this joke is offensive, but not everyone would agree it’s funny. It’s fine not to think it’s funny, but I’m arguing that the offensive nature of the joke shouldn’t affect how funny it is. I think the joke is funny because it’s clever: I made a comment about my shoes being beneficial to youth in other countries, and he satirically made the claim that his shoes were similarly beneficial, as if “giving jobs” to kids in other countries was something that’s good, rather than something akin to slavery, and certainly not benevolent. The next thing to address is whether the offensiveness of this joke means it shouldn’t have been told. I would argue that it isn’t the case. The wording of the joke doesn’t imply that my office mate doesn’t care about the plight of kids who are forced to work in sweat shops, rather it implies a definitive awareness of a real social problem and satirizes the tendency of people who live in affluent countries such as ours to act as if this problem isn’t there. It works in much the same way as Stephen Colbert does; he satirizes people whose point of view he doesn’t agree with by taking their belief systems to a blatantly absurd extreme, which satirizes the nature of those beliefs.
Here is an example of an offensive joke that isn’t funny. In one of my classes, my teacher said something about how much she disliked working in an environment in which she had to deal with drunk people, and one of the students said something to the effect of “well, you don’t have to be nice to them anyway, since they’re homeless.” The joke was satirizing the fact that alcoholism is common among homeless people, but not in a clever way. Really, it was just a cheap, uncalled for shot at homeless people. It’s not clever to point out the fact that alcoholism is common among homeless people, and in the way this person did it, it was really just making fun of a group of people for a genuine problem they have. You may have noticed that, although I claimed the lack of a correlation between jokes being offensive and funny, I defended the first joke (which I thought was funny) while I tore the second one apart. This illustrates an interesting point: both jokes were offensive, but the second one was offensive in an unfunny way. The first one seemed cruel, but I argued that it wasn’t, and the second one seemed cruel, and I argued that it was. It is, however, possible for a joke to be both clever and cruel, and I try to appreciate the cleverness of such jokes while ignoring the cruelty. For example, think of any “blond” jokes you’ve ever heard. Such jokes can often be funny, although cruel. If you want to turn them into social commentary, take any blond joke and replace “blond” with “republican,” or if your audience is composed mostly of conservative people then replace blond with “liberal,” but it’s unlikely you’d ever find yourself telling a joke to a republican because they don’t have a sense of humor. Ha! Another example of topical humor!
In Defense of Offensive Jokes
Recently I watched a comedy special by a guy named Wyatt Cenac. He told the following joke: “I’m going to open a racist bakery called K-K-cakes.” I thought it was funny, so I set it as my facebook status, properly citing Wyatt Cenac as the source (I mentioned I take comedy seriously; I would never allow someone to think that I came up with a joke on my own if I didn’t). My Aunt and cousin, after reading this joke, expressed to me the fact that they were offended by it because they felt was disrespectful towards black people. If my Aunt or cousin is reading this (unlikely) then my message to them would be a deeply sincere apology for offending them, but the assertion that it wasn’t my intent. Certainly the joke was offensive, but was it disrespectful towards black people? I would argue that, if anything, the joke was disrespectful towards the KKK. Here’s an organization that takes their cause very seriously, and Wyatt Cenac was using the fact that the KKK are racist, something which everyone knows, and turning it into something silly. Who in their right mind would go to a racist bakery called K-K-cakes? What sort of ridiculous baked goods would be sold in such a bakery? If anything, this joke conjures up the image of some asshole in a white pointed hat sitting alone in a bakery filled with racist cakes that no one wants to buy, pissed off that their stupid idea wasn’t working. Part of what makes this joke funny, however, is the edginess. The edginess and ability for us, as adults, to look at it with a political perspective, are what make it slightly more clever. To illustrate my point, I’ll give an example of a joke that’s exactly as clever but is completely and utterly inoffensive: I heard that some of the deer in the forest are playing football. They’re calling it N-F-elk! The cleverness of the joke was that “L” sort of sounds like “elk,” much like “K” sort of sounds like “cake.” The absence of any trace of offensiveness and political statement makes the joke rather impotent. It is, by all accounts, a lame joke. It’s the sort of corny joke you might hear when you’re in first grade. However, the only difference between it and Wyatt Cenac’s joke is that his joke has an added element of humor which really makes the joke: the edginess and political statement.
One unavoidable consequence of being raised by my father was that, while I was growing up, I spent a lot of time around him. One consequence of that was that I inherited his affinity for silly, corny jokes that are a play on words. For instance, when my Dad thought you weren’t telling the truth, he’d say “You lie like a rug!” A silly, inoffensive joke, but I find it classically hilarious. It was this love of the play on words that steered me towards my affinity for “That’s What She Said” jokes. The possibilities are endless: thousands of simple, innocuous statements can be interpreted as being said in sexually explicit situations. All you have to do is watch out for certain key words: suck, big, push, stick it in, hard, wet, etc. Part of what makes “TWSS” jokes so funny is their inherently risque nature, not to mention the cleverness of being able to interpret a sentence in two completely different ways. One of my favorite examples of an inoffensive joke of this nature is a joke my Calculus teacher used to use. I’d say I have class and he’d say “oh, you must be a classy guy!” The concept is exactly the same, but the inherent naughtiness and sexuality is completely removed, making the joke less edgy, and therefore, less funny.
The point is, appreciate humor for what it is. If a joke is offensive (meaning it has the capacity to offend), don’t automatically be offended by it. If you hear a racial joke, avoid the knee jerk reaction of being offended. Rather, assess whether the joke is cruel (something which affects the humor of the joke) and also assess whether the joke is clever. Remember, just because a joke addresses a controversial issue (like sweat shops or racism) doesn’t mean it’s blatantly cruel; it’s possible for an edgy joke to be satirical and clever if it’s interpreted in the correct way. With that, I’ll end with a comic I thought was relevant:
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