We’re Just Joking: Comedy And The Language of Disgust
It’s not that we can’t take a joke, it’s just that hate isn’t funny
My partner and I were hanging out the other night, watching a few episodes of a show that we’ve been following before going to bed.
The last episode we watched put a lump in our throats and left us sitting in silence for a long moment, just trying to process the gravity of the message it presented.
It was about genocide, and the role played by rhetoric. Specifically, the role played by comedy and how it helped to dehumanize the future victims of the genocide, and paved the way for the killing to start.
It was chilling. Some of the scenes were absolutely brutal, and there were moments where we were genuinely uncomfortable with what we were seeing on the screen.
The man who was identified as a popular radio host being held at gunpoint by a survivor of the genocide, insisting that he was only telling jokes, he was only trying to make people laugh.
And the survivor shakily, tearfully recounting how she heard men repeating his jokes and laughing while they murdered her family. She held up a machete before his eyes, telling him that she watched her loved ones taken apart with weapons just like it.
Now, the show is a television drama. It’s fiction. But the genocide being discussed in this episode was not; it was very, very real.
In the episode, we hear some examples of the kinds of jokes that the radio host was making.
He described squashing cockroaches, and how he thinks it’s better to squash the father cockroach first, then the mother, and then the kids ‘so they don’t grow up and breed.’
The cockroaches he was talking about were the Tutsi victims of the Rwandan genocide.
Other jokes included things like, ‘how many dead Tutsis does it take to change a lightbulb? Obviously more than thirty, because my basement is still dark!’
In real life, propaganda spread on the radio was a huge driver of the Tutsi genocide. Cockroach was a real slur that was used to dehumanize the victims, even before the violence broke out.
Going further than spreading hateful humor, the radio also provided a source of direct incitement to murder. It provided names, addresses, and motives to the people who would go on to rampage through city streets with weapons in hand, targeting those who were suggested to them.
Compared to the incitements to violence and murder, jokes and banter like the examples above probably don’t sound too bad. But I would argue that they were actually one of the most important factors in the lead-up to the crimes that followed.
The reason I think they were so important is because genocide is not something that just happens spontaneously. We think of genocide as mass murder and nothing else, but that’s actually not quite true.
Not only are there multiple crimes that fall under the United Nations definition of genocide, but it doesn’t happen all at once.
Genocide is something that occurs in stages; there is a step-by-step process.
One of the first steps is dehumanisation of the future victims. And that’s where humour comes in.
Jokes about marginalized communities can fall under two categories.
One; jokes made by a member of the community that highlight their own daily life.
And two; jokes made about the community from somebody on the outside looking in.
When people within the community make jokes about themselves, it can be cathartic. It can be a way to highlight a shared experience and make light of certain hardships.
A good example of this is Hannah Gadsby’s jokes about growing up autistic. As an autistic woman myself, I laughed so hard I almost passed out when I first listened to this bit! I could relate to her struggles in class, because I went through the same thing.
On the other hand, people on the outside looking in don’t have the same context. The jokes they make don’t land the same. Especially when they’re mean-spirited and made at our expense.
That’s the difference between laughing with you, and laughing at you. When it hurts somebody, it isn’t funny anymore.
An example of the latter kind of comedy is the movie Lady Ballers, written and directed by employees of the Daily Wire. The movie is ostensibly a sports comedy, but it portrays a common form of slander against the transgender community.
It’s basically just, “Men pretend to be women to succeed at sports” the movie. To people who believe that narrative, it’s probably hilarious. To those of us who don’t, it’s just depressing and distasteful.
To the transgender community, it’s understandably incredibly hurtful.
But beyond hurting someone’s feelings, movies like this actually do matter. They help mainstream those narratives and encourage people to believe them.
They contribute to a phenomenon called, ‘the death of a euphemism.’
Before I stopped using X (formerly Twitter), I had a run-in with this kind of rhetoric.
I had the audacity to make a Tweet about Pride, showing my support for fellow members of the LGBTQ+ community. Most people were happy to share their own messages of support and wish others a good month, but not everyone shared our feeling of good will.
I got an alert that somebody had added me to their list. A list of ‘Pedophiles and Groomers.’
This is a common experience these days for those of us in the LGBTQ+ community. The narrative used to be that parents didn’t want to ‘confuse’ their children by exposing them to LGBTQ+ people ‘too soon’.
Now, we’re actually a threat to those children. They claim that we genuinely intend to hurt them.
This idea has taken root to the point that some states have passed laws that could charge transgender people as sex offenders just for using public restrooms.
This is a clear example of euphemistic language being ditched. They no longer need to pretend; they can say what they truly think.
The narrative has gone mainstream.
This is why movies like Lady Ballers can pose a problem—comedy that punches down at a marginalized community serves as a method of othering.
It gives people permission to hate, and allows them to justify it by saying it’s just a joke. That way, the people who are the butt of the joke are actually the ones at fault. They need to develop a thicker skin, you see.
It’s a very common tactic for abusers.
When a community becomes dehumanised and othered, it separates them from the rest of society. The ‘normal’ people view them as distinct, even threatening. This is a necessary step along the road to genocide; people have a hard time perpetrating violence if they see their victims as innocents.
One way to enforce this is via public humiliation, a form of mockery that degrades and instills shame in the victims.
Here in North America, our history is rife with comedy aimed at mocking people of colour. The ones that were enslaved, and considered less than human.
‘I was just joking,’ is not a good enough defense.
Watching that episode made my partner and I sit and think for quite a while. We were discussing it for several days afterwards, sharing examples and talking about our own experiences of being picked on and mistreated.
We’ve both had ‘jokes’ made at our expense. I think almost everybody has at some point or another.
It doesn’t take a genius to see how those jokes, when applied to an already marginalized or othered group, can contribute to the climate of fear and oppression that they already have to deal with.
I think back to the radio man in the episode. His insistence that he was just a funny man, that he only wanted to make people laugh. He didn’t kill anybody.
And I think about the pain in the woman’s eyes, the tears streaming down her face as she told him how it felt to be called a cockroach, and to watch her family die.
I think about how she recited his jokes, her voice shaking in grief and rage. How she talked about the murderers laughing, as if what they were doing was funny.
I think about that, and I think about modern comedy in this time of legal persecution.
It isn’t okay to mock people for existing. It’s not funny, it’s not ‘just a joke’. It matters, and it carries a genuine potential for very real harm.
There is a quote out there that is sometimes attributed to the late great Terry Pratchett, although I haven’t been able to confirm that it came from him.
Whoever said it, the words are powerful.
“Satire is meant to ridicule power. If you are laughing at people who are hurting, it’s not satire, it’s bullying.”
Solidarity wins.
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Not to certain how the examples presented are jokes or humorous. Working in healthcare all my career gave me (and most colleagues) a dark sense of humour but those things…wow
Are we seeing jokes about the Palestinians yet? In Israel for sure but in the west? But you're right. This is how these people rationalize their bigotry. "I was just joking." Then the next thing you hear from them is, 'I'm not prejudice. I'm not a racist." Unfortunately, this will always be with us.