[at-l] kelly's and skeeter's posts about tennessee -kindaof a2001 hike...

[cballs at verizon.net (Curtis Balls)]

Wow, I didn't mean to sound anti-humor.  I'm not a Lesbian feminist.
(That's an inside gay male joke.  Ellen, we love you!)  But humor is like
water.  We need it to sustain life and we can drown in it.  We can drown
others in it too.  Depends on how you use it.

Humor is a highly evolved human trait.  Evolutionary biologists are a little
befuddled about how and why our ability to crack jokes, poke fun, make light
of, engage in witty repartee comes from.  What's its purpose, evolutionary
speaking?  One thing is certain, you don't feel like fighting when you're
laughing.  But what if they don't laugh?  Very risky.

I love a good queer joke.  And while it's true that people who are living in
the gay mode sometimes tell blisteringly stereotypical jokes about queerdom,
they also tell these:

'Why can't they have gay people in the army? They're afraid of a couple
thousand guys with M16s going, "Who'd you call a faggot?" '

Here's an even better one:  "Soldiers who are not afraid of guns, bombs,
capture, torture or death say they are afraid of homosexuals. Clearly we
should not be used as soldiers; we should be used as weapons."

If homosexuality is a disease, let's all call in queer to work: "Hello.
Can't work today, still queer."

Most straight people, especially straight-aligned men, don't tell these kind
of queer jokes.  They tell the other kind of queer jokes as a signal to
their male friends and family members (although exactly which signal is
being sent isn't always clear) and as a signal to females, or so they think.
Bless their hearts.

I've heard people laugh at the stupidest, most incredibly cruel, nasty,
bigoted stuff just because it comes out the mouth of a professional comic.
Black comics get away with the most incredibly racist jokes on stage, aimed
at blacks and whites.  Just one of the reasons I don't much care for
contemporary stand-up.  I don't think Eddie Murphy is all that funny.  I
find him racist and earlier in his career a vicious homophobe, usually
relating somehow to AIDS.  AIDS is not funny.  Neither is cancer. As I
understand it, his Hollywood producers and friends told him to cool it.

Southerners love to tell funny stories and jokes on themselves.  They have a
long tradition of it.  Southern literature is full of it.  Hee-Haw, Verne
(last name?), and Jeff Foxworthy all have had a good run of poking fun at
aspects of Southerness.  Some of it I thought was funny, some of it not,
some of it depended on my mood.  I don't care for humor based on denigrating
or ridiculing entire sets of people or places, with the one exception of New
Jersey.  Fire at will.  They grow up in the shadow of NY, the white
suburbanites, and they never get over it.  The smart ones move away.  The
black Jerseyites are fine.  My New Jersey bigotry has been hard-won.  But
the networks were not planning on taking a New Jersey family and moving them
down to the remotest mountain community of eastern Tennessee or North
Carolina and watch them try to fit in.  They were planning on taking a
Southern Appalachian family out to Hollywood and holding them up to
ridicule, a la these dumbass "reality" TV shows.  I understand that there
was a well-orchestrated campaign to stop them from doing it that I
understand was successful.   

The best humor jars you out of your preconceived notions, your prejudices
and assumptions.  It doesn't just reconfirm them.  It enlightens as it
entertains.  Which is why the joke about the Mainer telling the Southerner
that they suffered from the same problem, "Too many God damn Yankees," is
funny.  It uses the familiar prejudice in an unexpected reversal coming out
of the mouth of a Yankee.  It no doubt accurately represents some Mainers
attitudes about other people from New England. It isn't predictable.  Most
of this holding up dumb Southerners to ridicule is totally predictable and
so not very funny. (I was prepared to absolutely hate "O Brother Where Art
Thou?" It's so cleverly and sweetly done and so American that you can't help
but love it. It should have won Best Picture but it was set in the South and
it wasn't about race relations.  Some of the humor in it was lost on my New
York native friends.  The Busby Berkley/Wizard of Oz KKK rally for instance.
Hysterical!)  Ghandi was a great jokester but he didn't tell kike jokes,
nigger jokes, polack jokes, queer jokes, stupid straight man jokes (love
'em!*) or dumb Southern jokes.  Although one suspects he might have told a
good anti-Raj joke or two and like everyone else a few dumb blonde jokes.

Bada-boom Balls!

BTW, New Englanders are no more or less kind and generous than Southerners.
Great people.

* Both. ;-)




-----Original Message-----
From: greyowl@rcn.com [mailto:greyowl@rcn.com] 
Sent: Thursday, July 03, 2003 7:45 AM
To: Dave Hicks
Cc: greyowl@rcn.com; Curtis Balls; at-l@mailman.backcountry.net

Unfortunately very true.  Bigotry is born of ignorance and 
unfortunately there are a lot ignorant people out in the 
world.  One way to break down the wals of bigotry is through 
Humor.  I always think of Gandhi who had a wonderful sense of 
humor and was able to use it to make someone feel 
uncomfortable and forced them to think about situations that 
they did not want to think about.  

It has never been my intention to defame anybody.  In my 
younger days I was a civil rights activitist working to 
reigster voters in Oxford Maryland.  I was also one of the 
few white faces in the crowd in the civil rights march on 
Washington DC.  Yes, I open my mouth and stick my size 14 
feet in there.  I am just human, and unfortunately my parents 
were and still are racists.  So I have to work at it every 
day.

Grey Owl