A Dark And Quiet Room

(I posted this in a slightly different form in another forum. But, I liked it so much that I posted it here, too.)

When we were growing up, my parents worked very hard to help us overcome racial barriers. Part of this was the forbidding of racial humor…unless it was about your own race. Because, honestly, most racial jokes are really just about someone doing something dumb and aren’t really connected to the specifics of that race at all. So, all the Polish jokes that we heard were retrofitted to be Puerto Rican Jew jokes. Honestly, I’m fairly confident that I know all the people who are both ethnically Puerto Rican and ethnically Jewish, and, if there were any doubt for the audience, you could always tack on “Swedish”. Then you knew that you were safe. So, you know, you’d get stuff like this:

How many Puerto Rican Jewish Swedes does it take to change a lightbulb?
What’s a lightbulb?

Or there’s the one about the Puerto Rican Jewish Swede inventing copper wire….

But the point that my parents were insisting upon was that you should only laugh at yourself.

Now that I’m older, I look at this and I think. There are two categories of laughter. You can laugh at someone, or you can laugh with someone. (There’s laughing near someone, but that’s really just a variation of laughing with someone. I think.)

Laughing at someone is an act of war. There’s a time and a place for that, just that there is a time and a place to fight. But, laughing at someone is a way of fighting. It pushes people apart.

Laughing with someone is an act of peace. Indeed, it is an act of fellowship. It can be a way of acknowledging an unfortunate truth, or sharing a common experience, or even sharing pain. But all of this is in the context of togetherness. It draws people together.

Now, sometimes, you can laugh with someone about something that is actually painful. Christian’s immigrant joke[*] is one good example of this. Another is the practice of telling each other stories where you were horribly mangled as the result of the actions that you took in the story. We laugh together about the strangest things.

So, how does this relate to stereotype humor? I submit that stereotypes exist for a reason, which is that there is often a seed of truth in them. Just to pick an example, jokes about geeks are funny, because geeks often act in the way depicted in the geek jokes. I consider myself to be a geek, and I laugh the hardest at those jokes. “I cast…Magic Missile.” Right? Now, I’m not a nasally, whiny, basement-dweller. But I am part of that group, and so I know that there’s truth in that depiction. Heck, I know it because I have been a basement dweller.

Now, if a fellow geek shares that joke, it’s fine. If a friend who is a non-geek shares that joke, then it’s fine. If someone is using that joke as a weapon against me, then it’s not.

I wonder if racial/gender/stereotype humor works like that. It’s not that we should shy away from it per se. Personally, I tend to think that Jewish jokes are pretty funny, and rabbi jokes remind me of my grandfather. If you can laugh with me, then we’re fine.

Just don’t laugh at me.

[*]Here’s the joke that was being cited:

A family of poor immigrants are applying for citizenship. The border patrol officers, a mean bunch, tell them that if they swim across a deep, ice cold lake, they’ll immediately make them citizens. So they all set out to do it. The father makes it. The mother makes it. The teenage daughter makes it. But the little boy flails and drowns. The mother starts crying.

“What are you crying about,” says the father, “He was just a bloody immigrant.”

Funny? Yes. But, it’s an uncomfortable sort of humor, isn’t it?