This seems to be a recurring theme in American social life, the attempt to simply destroy humor, to stop people from laughing, from enjoying life, from making fun of others, from anything remotely fun. Although this is one of the many things the different political “sides” blame on the other side, it’s actually true across the board. The Lefties think MAGA is trying to deprive them of their humor (trying to defund “Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me” and Trump’s bristling at the many, many jokes about him), and the Righties think The Left is doing the same thing (What do you think Woke is at this point, other than an attempt to cut humor off at the knees, while keeping us from making jokes about people whose legs were cut off at the knees?).
Both “sides” do it. Perhaps we’ve leaned too much into the stupid and nebulous idea of political purity to be able to recognize it when “our” side does it, though that makes it alarmingly easy to see when the “other side” does it. Guess what? Both are trying to get rid of humor.
It’s not going to work, of course, but even the attempt is fairly scary. EVERYONE DESERVES TO BE MADE FUN OF, everyone. Every single one of you, and for that matter, me, deserves it. We’re all idiots stumbling around, fumbling for truth and grasping for something we only kind of see on the horizon…and we all need to be taken down a peg or two.
There should be no groups of people protected from being made fun of. Who do you think finds cancer jokes the funniest? Cancer patients.
I tried to look up the etymology (origin) of the line “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.” I thought it would fit in this rant pretty well. The internet said, “It may be Voltaire or it may have been falsely attributed to Voltaire.” It even said it was a Neo-Nazi. Man the internet loves Nazis. It just wraps everything back to Nazis. Honestly, we should be making fun of Nazis AND French philosophers, and there’s plenty there to make fun of.
Laughter is a more powerful weapon than people think, and when we lose the ability to laugh at things (especially ourselves), then we’re primed for total control.