Are some subjects unsuitable for humour? | Notes and Queries

Are some subjects unsuitable for humour?

Douggie, Edinburgh UK

• All subjects are suitable for humour - while some individuals may not appreciate jokes about death, rape, or jewish mothers (I believe that the one which ends "Just call me Sitting Shiva" should go in the Top 100 Jokes of All Time), we have the right to object to or not laugh at that which we don't find funny. We do not, however, have the right to tell others what they may not laugh at.

  Tony James, London, UK

• Suicide.

  Mary McGrath, Dublin

• Fiona is patently wrong. I quote Woody Allen: "I'm not frightened by the prospect of dying. I just don't want to be there when it happens."

  Rob Lines, Worcester UK

• Surely not death. Remember all those princess Di, Paula Yates etc. jokes. They may have been in bad taste but some of them were very funny!

  Michelle, Darlington UK

• Yes. Humour itself is unsuitable for humour.

  Martin, Newcastle

• Surely David Beckham's Foot?

  James , London UK

• There is virtually no subject that should be considered unsuitable for humour, but the issue of "taste" surely lies mostly in the question of context. Jokes about social groupings can be offensive when told by someone from outside that group, because in the context it's based entirely on a notion of "otherness" that is borne of some kind of prejudice. Told from within such a group, a joke can illuminate the shared-experience within the group, and can subvert the prejudices purely by playing on them. By way of llustration, 14 years ago on Channel 4's FRIDAY NIGHT LIVE, a disabled comedian named Jag Plah did a routine based on the experiences of disability - he started off by dropping one of his crutches to the floor, looking down at it, and saying "look, bloody hopeless without me!". The rest of his routine deals with playing on common notions of disability (such as the speech patterns of "spastics"), and is very funny precisely because of the context of his own experiences, and his desire to make comedy from them (and, importantly, not to make light of them). If the context is right, there is no real barrier to any subject being used for humour. Of course, it'd be a brave individual who'd want to try and justify a context for humour in the paedophilia and Holocaust subjects cited earlier (note there was some controversy regarding Roberto Begnini's LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL, though it seemed that there was a misinterpretation of Begnini's project - he was making a comedy "within" the Holocaust, not out of it). Further, it does seem entirely unlikely that anybody would dare to make humour from September 11...

  J. Penn, London GB

• Rob, your Woody Allen quotation was actually said by Spike Milligan. And if child abuse is an unfit topic for comedy, why was the BrassEye special so damn funny?

  Tom, London

• Sorry, Tom, but I understand that Spike was quoting Woody Allen from Allen's short play "Death" written in 1975. Allen also famously wrote "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying"

  Rob Lines, Worcester UK

• As someone who works for one of the companies affected by 9/11, I can tell you I've been sent 'humorous' material about it from people who used to work in the WTC. Perhaps in that there's a point; we find humour in things to make them less threatening.

  A Reader, London UK

• Yes, things that are not funny are not suitable for humour. Unfortunately however, this seems to have completely escaped the writers of the American comedy show "Mad TV", five minutes of which leaves you reaching for the nearest heavy object to hurl at your television.

  Guy Dowman, Tokyo Japan

• Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park, have so far made it their business to lampoon every sacred cow they encounter - from child abuse to disability - and have yet to offend me or fail to make me laugh. I don't believe there is a genuinely funny joke in existence which isn't offensive to *somebody*. Surely true equality is when you can feel free to poke fun at anyone, if you're simply being light-hearted rather than mean-spirited?

  L Male, Swansea UK

• The assumption that the Queen mother is out of bounds is in itself a rather funny stereotype. Whilst travelling on a train between Rye and Hastings last weekend, a friend of mine pointed out the picture of the Queen mum's head on yoda's body. A middle aged woman passenger took offence to our resultant laughter, she subsequently was very nice and gave us directions around the town. Also whilst at a music festival an American comedian who was presenting had dressed up and was pretending to be handicapped, his reception wasn't the greatest. Humour has borders between cultures, I would make jokes about Sept 11 and the Queen mum but I wouldn't about the handicapped, so nothing is untouchable but timing and awareness of your surrounding are key.

  Darren, Dublin Ireland

• Well. A fair number of comments, such as that by the Iranian woman, say that anything can be laughed at, as long as the joker is of the group that he is making jokes about. Hmm. So a Jew may make jokes about Jews, but a Gentile may not. My father is Jewish, my mother isn't. May I tellJewish jokes? My partner is of Indian extraction, and therefore so are my children - am I allowed to tell jokes about Indians? Or am I only allowed to tell jokes about white men from London? Surely it is a mark of a grown-up society that we can tell jokes about each other and judge them purely by how funny they are?

  Tom, London UK

• Eddie is right about 'location', or to put it another way, "know your audience". I doubt that there is anyone who finds nothing offensive. But I disagree about the "tragedy + time" formula. All the bad taste jokes I have ever heard depend on familiarity with a situation for their effect, which fades with time. Emails of such jokes were doing the rounds on City dealing floors within hours of Diana, Concorde, 9/11. Private Eye's Armageddon edition came out within a week of WTC. I think these provide a seditious form of release: people who do not relate personally (and therefore feel no sense of bereavement) to tragic events may be subconsciously rebelling against the intensity of media coverage and may feel a state of mourning is being imposed on them. Media coverage of carnage in far-flung corners of the world, while serious, is far less intense than for the above events, presumably because it is deemed unlikely to affect personally many people in the audience. Yes, everything is a suitable subject for humour, for humour is a function not of the subject itself, but of mechanisms that can be applied to all situations: incongruity, absurdity, satire, distortions of the familiar ("Work is the curse of the drinking classes"), etc.

  Andrew, London UK

• Self-deprecating jokes (eg the Irish telling Irish jokes) are EVEN MORE unacceptable than outsiders doing it, because it is an example of the insidiousness of introjection. So, an Irish person (or Jew, Pakistani, gay person etc) will prove his good sense of humour by joking about his own group, and we'll all laugh and think "what a good fellow". What we really like is these people being safe and harmless and not creating a fuss which makes us uncomfortable. We all have internalised racism (and homophobia etc)but the voice of the dominant can make the subjugated turn it on them/ourselves.

  Ged, Liverpool, UK

• Talking about how the passing of time makes something horrible more acceptable as joke material, I remember a Gary Larson cartoon, where there's a guy in a hospital bed, with his head missing, and someone standing next to him saying "Cheer up! One day you'll look back on all this and laugh!"

  Sue, Modena Itlay

• George Burns once said "There is nothing funny about seeing a woman fall down stairs ... unless it's a really OLD woman".

  John Royle, Beverley UK

• No one should make a joke about George Bush. He is doing a perfectly good job himself.

  Neil, Barnet

• On the South Bank tv special about Joan Rivers a couple of months ago, she was filmed doing a routine which included a very funny gag about the World Trade Center. ("Out of all the wives who lost their husbands in the WTC, are you telling me that at least 4 aren't REALLY happy?") Is that offensive?

  Jonathan, Brighton UK

• Yes and No. It depends.

  g, l p

• I liked this cartoon that I saw a few months ago: Yasser Arafat is looking at a kid with dynamite strapped around his waist and asks, "So, what do you want to do when you blow up?" This didn't follow the rule that time must pass, or that certain groups may only make fun of themselves - but it was funny! And that's what counts. People should be offended by what happens in the world, not the jokes that are made to help people cope with terrible events.

  Sarah, Anchorage U.S.A.

• "It's better to laugh than cry", simple as. Kudos to all comedians who have no boundaries....or at least try to be controversial in a humorous way, expect Frankie Boyle, he just annoys me.

  Shane, Dublin Ireland