If you are not a member of the aforementioned category, any joke told at your expense is now denounced as an aspect of your oppression as the member of a Victimized Class. Such is the superficial paradigm that has come to dominate our “woke” civilization. Should a straight White guy spew nonsense unworthy of a 6 year old, you are perfectly entitled to submit him to excoriating mockery. But all others, however absurd their delusions, however dumb their beliefs, are above criticism, indeed exempt from Man’s natural propensity as an Intelligent Being to derive humor from what is manifestly ridiculous.
On a recent broadcast which he tagged with the phrase “Democracy Dies in Dumbness,” Bill Maher discussed the fate of Washington Post reporter David Weigel who has been suspended without pay for a month for re-tweeting a joke he found rather amusing. It read: “Every girl is bi; you just have to figure out if it’s polar or sexual.” Fellow Post employee Felicia Sonmez saw his tweet as an insult to all women and her outrage had much to do with Weigel’s fate though, ironically, she has since been fired for causing dissension amongst the Post’s employees. Another Post reporter, Jose Del Real, while admonishing Sonmez for her excessive outrage, nevertheless took it for granted that the joke in question was “terrible and unacceptable.”
While there is no room for them here, I could cite hundreds of statements by Feminists and members of the LGBTQ community that are brazen denials of Objective Reality rooted in a juvenile need for Validation totally impervious to Biological Fact. I revere Women’s Rights and the Right of the “non-binary” to identify however they will, but this does not give them license to impose brazen lies upon the rest of us. Should you seek to convince me that my heterosexuality [i.e., my fascination with Women] is a mere social construct, I am perfectly entitled to mock the demonstrable absurdity of that claim. It was such absurdity that Weigel’s re-tweeted joke was meant to deride!
British comedian Rowan Atkinson recently defended the Art of Comedy with the following: “Every joke has a victim. That’s the definition of a joke. Someone or something or an idea is made to look ridiculous.” Atkinson’s concept of Humor, Maher asserts, is now under attack because of a generation that has abandoned the classical Western view of Man as a “rational being” given to the pursuit of Truth, in favor of the flagrantly idiotic notion that our Feelings are all that count. Citing a N.Y. Times article which asked: Why are we still governed by baby boomers?, he insists it’s because Millennials and the members of Generation Z are, with few exceptions, little more than spoiled children consumed by a sense of entitlement. Indeed the work environment at the Washington Post and other purveyors of Leftist propaganda, he argues, is barely distinguishable from what one might expect to find at a “daycare center.” Absurdly, our Culture has come to be dominated not by Thought but by Feeling!
Megyn Kelly recently interviewed Jonathon Haidt who in 2012 wrote a book entitled “The Righteous Mind” which impugned Man’s capacity for Reason and asserted that “intuition” ought to be his guiding faculty. While I am reticent to attempt to define anything as abstract as “intuition,” it would certainly seem to entail much of a purely emotional nature. Haidt’s earlier work was followed in 2018 by “The Coddling of the American Mind” which ironically suggests that Generation Z’s addiction to “feeling” has had the disastrous effect of leaving it more or less incapable of dealing with Ideas! Apparently still revered as an expert in the Psychology of Morality, calling himself a Centrist now rather than a devout Leftist, he has not, to my knowledge at least, admitted that it was the sheer stupidity of his earlier world-view that in fact led to the cultural collapse we are presently experiencing, a state of dysfunction so absurd that Man’s sense of humor, unless directed at one specific demographic [you know who] is now under threat of “cancellation!”