This is not a diary about dying.
It is a diary about "lively" writing, which, as often as not, tries to be funny. I don't expect that this diary will be hilarious. However, if you stick with me, you will find out what kind of joke Chinese university students in the United States in the late '70s found funny, and perhaps a foolproof way to know whether what you intended to be funny is, in fact, offensive.
I'm writing this because of the past weekend's pie fight -- mostly directed at Kos over the phrase "take your meds." But that may not be obvious at first.
We all want our writing to be called "lively." The alternative is "dead." You can write a diary that is chocked full of important information, but if your writing style is pedantic (as mine is often accused of being) people will turn off before they get to the good stuff. Heck, I've probably lost half of my audience already, because there hasn't been anything even vaguely amusing so far.
So, lets get started with a completely safe elephant joke:
How can you tell there's been an elephant in your refrigerator? Footprints in the Jell-O.
If you're my age (I kinda remember the '60s), you may have smiled, nostalgically, at that. You probably remember it from the late '60s and early '70s when "elephant" jokes were all the rage. It takes it's humor from a whimsical image -- an elephant crammed into a refrigerator, sampling your leftovers -- not from making fun of any ethnic group.
The fact is, however, that an awful lot of what we call humor makes fun of someone. Whether that's offensive depends a great deal on how the teller intended the joke, and whose ox has been gored.
The comedy roasts that proliferate on TV are a ritual of humiliation for the "roastee," who, we are told, considers being ridiculed an honor. Therefore, statements that in any other context would be considered highly offensive are not, because the target has given his permission.
But that's not really what I'm talking about here. Humor is often the art of treading the line between funny and offensive. If you have a good understanding of your audience, you can walk closer to the line than if you are sending your humor out to a wide, diverse audience.
I lurked around the edges of a controversy similar to the "take your meds" kerfuffle a couple of years ago. It wasn't here, it was on a forum mostly made up of a mixture of British users and American users. We almost speak the same language, but not quite.
The word that touched off the trouble was "spaz." A British member became quite incensed that Americans kept using that word, which she perceived to be a slam against disabled people. This surprised a lot of American members, because they believed the word simply meant "clumsy." The people who were using it, mostly to describe themselves (I dropped my keys down the sewer grate because I'm a spaz..."), were surprised anyone would take offense. The person complaining took the word to refer to people with epilepsy or other seizure disorders.
The argument came down to: "Don't use that word around me, or I'll stop talking to you." Or, "You need to take what I say in the spirit I said it!"
We pick up the words we use from hearing them around us. Back in the days of "West Wing," the week after Allison Janney (C.J.) described being deposed as being "bitch slapped" by the lawyer, the phrase was popping up everywhere in my workplace.
Our perception of what the words mean comes from the context we're hearing them in. When someone in my office said something like "I just got bitch slapped by that project I'm working on," they weren't trying to liken their job to domestic abuse. They were thinking of C.J. being verbally out maneuvered by the White House Counsel.
For a while, "bitch slap" seemed pretty funny, in part, because it was being injected into inappropriate slots in the discourse. After a while, it faded away.
What's funny and what's hurtful depends on the context you drop the alleged humor into.
Back in the '70s, when I was finishing my bachelor's degree at Wayne State University, for reasons that don't really make a lot of sense, I took Mandarin Chinese to fill my foreign language requirement. About that time, the first group of students from the People's Republic of China arrived at WSU. My Chinese teacher thought it would be a good exercise to pair up Americans learning Chinese with Chinese students who needed to improve their English. Though a series of events that matter not at all these days, I ended up leading a study group of me and five Chinese students.
We did a lot of practice exercises, correcting each other's grammar, accent and syntax. I came up with idea for one of those exercises. Each of us would tell a joke in their non-native language. I hoped that telling a funny story would be an interesting way to build longer constructions of language.
I thought long and hard about what sort of joke to tell. It couldn't be a pun -- because puns make no sense when translated into another language. It couldn't be a shaggy dog story, because I didn't have enough Chinese at my command to go on very long.
I settled on an elephant joke. This is what I told:
What do elephants do between 3 and 5 in the afternoon? They like to jump out of trees in the forest! Why are alligators built so low to the ground? Because they like to stroll through the forest between 3 and 5 in the afternoon!
My audience listened politely, but there was not so much as a chuckle. Finally, one of the students asked: "Do elephants climb trees?"
To be fair, I didn't understand their jokes either.
I kept after it for the rest of the semester, though, and before we got to the end, I did find a kind of joke that the Chinese students thought was hilarious -- Pollack jokes. (When I told them, I substituted "stupid person" for "Pollack," not so much for the sake of political correctness, but because I couldn't find a good analog for "Pollack" in Chinese. The joke I told that cracked them up was the oldest one in the book: "How many stupid people does it take to change a light bulb?"
They'd never heard that before and thought it was the funniest thing since ... whatever it is the Chinese think is funny.
Anyway, that story is meant to illustrate the principle that humor depends as much on context as what is actually said. The Chinese students, never exposed to elephant jokes before, were simply mystified. They had no idea what I was trying to say. But the Pollack joke was a variation on a type of joke they had heard all their lives, the "stupid farmer from [insert Chinese provence]" joke. Jokes that make fun of an ethnic group are universal. No matter what ethnicity you choose, though, someone is going to be offended.
If you are of Polish descent, I'm sure you had at least little twinge of negative reaction every time I used the word "Pollack." I hope that from the context, you know I wasn't throwing it out as a word bomb to hurt you. I was simply trying to illustrate the emotional reaction words can trigger.
But, if you were offended, I apologize, with no equivocation.
Word bombs are a problem. People whose intentions are not as pure as my own (joke) use words to injure. Some of those words (not a complete list by any means) are:
Pollack
Kike
Feminazi
Teahadist
nigger
Wop
Wingnut
Dick
Cunt
and so on...
Note, there are at least two words on that list that are considered perfectly fine here on DailyKos. They are "Teahadist" and "Wingnut." They are OK, because if you're an ultra-conservative Republican, the only reason you'd be here is as a troll. And nobody minds throwing hurtful words at trolls. It's always important to know whose ox is being gored.
The land mine here is the fact that I don't have a complete list of words that will offend you at my fingertips. Maybe "bitch slap" triggered a memory of domestic abuse in you. Maybe like the old Vaudeville routine, you react to "Susquehanna Hat Co." (Slowly I turned ... step by step ... inch by inch ...)
Sometimes, I worry too much. I worry that I'm going to write something that sets off the reader on a tangent so they completely miss what I was trying to say. I try to remember not to use the phrase "Going postal" because it refers to an incident where several innocent people were shot to death. I don't generally refer to the "black hole of Calcutta" because it refers to a horrific imprisonment. And so on.
But the fact of the matter is that if you eliminate all the words and phrases that have emotional connections, your writing will be as dead as Dickens' proverbial door nail.
The art of lively writing or speaking is using words and phrases that have more impact than their literal meaning. And I don't think there is a successful comedian alive who has never offended anyone.
So, what is the answer? How can you avoid the "spaz" factor -- the word or phrase you perceive differently from your audience?
You can't. It's as simple as that. Being a lively speaker or writer means sooner or later giving offense.
You don't have to be Rush Limbaugh (who, clearly, is aiming at offense with nearly every word he speaks), to be lively. But even Jon Stewart, who many here enjoy, and whose politics are more to our side than the other, offends us now and again.
I can offer two bits of advice now. First, I'll quote Will Wheaton: "Don't be a dick."
The other bit, as I promise at the beginning, is a sure-fire way to know that something you've said or written is offensive. Unfortunately, it only works after the fact. There's no way of knowing before you speak or write:
If someone says "I'm offended by what you just said," then what you said is offensive. It's really that simple.
If you care what the listener or reader thinks of you, there's no way out but to apologize. "I'm sorry. I didn't know what that meant to you. It means something different to me. I'll try to avoid that in the future."
If you don't care...
Fuck 'em.