Hate Mail - The Insouciant Laughter of The Insouciant

Any Subject Can Be Funny?  Ha!   I don't think Duncan has found people making fun of him and his blog is especially funny.  Nor those who have noted that he is hardly a member of the underclass.  He doesn't even find it funny when someone makes fun of his sense in comedy.  I've seen him get testy when someone did that.  He banned me when I mocked his affection for the stupid, vulgar piece of crap, The Aristocrats.   I've never known a man who had jokes made about those things in his life and about his body that he's touchy about think that was funny, even as other people around them were weeping with laughter.  I've never known a man who was going through mid-life crisis find that to be an especially funny topic.

I think what he means is that people on top making fun of people beneath them can have no bottom beneath which the ones on top will think it's not funny anymore.  Straight, white, affluent men have the most to laugh about, I guess.   I would guess there are lots of topics women wouldn't find funny, the murder of Kitty Genovese comes to mind.   I wonder what the author Duncan's favorite movie, Penn Jillette,  would do with that topic.   I wonder if it's ever figured in a rendition of "The Aristocrats".

It depends on who you are and where you find yourself, if you're lacking in sympathetic imagination to that extent.  I don't think the inmates of the death camps would have found Mel Brooks' Springtime for Hitler particularly funny.  I guess any who didn't would be accused of lacking a sense of humor.   Really, why is that any more funny than the most offensive movie since Birth of a Nation,  Life Is Beautiful?   Loved Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder in that movie, hated the Springtime for Hitler part of it.

Update:  Message to my stalker:   I Don't Practice Nazi Thinking, You Do

I really don't know a word for it but there should be a name for the frequently used tactic of argument by assholes that begins in distorting what someone said and replacing it with something that they never said.   I never said what Jews should find offensive, I said that I doubted that inmates of DEATH CAMPS would have found Mel Brooks' Springtime for Hitler sequences to be funny.  Of course, to start with, I wasn't telling anyone what they should find funny and, second, many millions of people murdered or slated to be murdered by the Nazis were not Jews.  I don't think any victims of the Nazis were more significant than any others, they are all equal.  We've been through that before, to rank the victims of the Nazis in terms of their worthiness of consideration is to put into practice the same thinking that led the Nazis to kill people for their ethnic identity, their status of disability or for their religious beliefs.  I don't practice Nazi thinking, you do. 

You're just lying about the rest of it too.  I haven't looked but I imagine you repeated that on Duncan's Dunces as you've been doing for the past four years.   I imagine Duncan thinks that's hilarious, for which you can tell him to bite me. 

Update 2:   Since I will not publish any more comments by you I have to tell people that your comment is another in the long line of examples of what I said needed a name in my last update.  I didn't make any claims about, as you put it, "the relatives of those death camp inmates".   Nor do I particularly care about their reactions if they were as you claim.  I think if they found Springtime For Hitler to be hilarious they couldn't have thought very hard about the suffering of their relatives and the Nazis creed that there is an ethnic hierarchy, which  you share which was the reason that they suffered and in so many millions of cases died.  If you are referring to yourself, born well after the war, I wouldn't accuse you of an act of sympathetic imagination, as a self-centered idiot, you aren't capable of either sympathy or imagination.   

I don't think it's anything to laugh about or to make light of, if making fun of it were effective in preventing it it would never have happened as the Nazis were mocked and ridiculed from the start of their organizing and it did nothing to prevent any of it.  We've been through that, as well.  Mel Brooks has been a good comic actor, writer and movie maker,  though one who so often went for the easy laugh, that one thing he did was offensive.   If he had been making movies before the war, they would have done nothing, whatsoever, to prevent the Nazis doing anything they did.   

That power attributed to comedy and even satire is a lie, neither of them have nearly that much power.   Their proven power would tend more to strengthen the malign aspects of life, as we have seen in the period since Andrew Dice Clay and others revived the worst in misogynistic, racist, etc. "humor," with the full approval of the community of comedians.  Comedians, with rare exceptions, are all about going for the easy laugh.  The Nazis, the Klan, fascists, etc. are fond of that kind of "humor".  And so are you as a fan of Penn Jillette's movie which Duncan loved so much which so often features those things.   And as Dorothy Parker pointed out, the kind of stuff that Mel Brooks does isn't satire, it's a form of light topical humor that doesn't go deep enough to be satire.   You couldn't handle satire, it requires thought to experience.  

Update 3:  If you're auditioning for a job as my copy editor, forget it, my first requirement would be that anyone getting that job would not be an habitual liar and pathological stalker.