WARNING: YOU might find the following story offensive

So a while back I watched a Ricky Gervais comedy special on Netflix – SuperNature – and he made an important point:

Ricky said he rejects it when someone says another comedian isn’t funny; it’s more accurate to say you don’t find them funny, other people might think that comedian is hilarious. Ricky said the same thing about people declaring something offensive; you find it offensive; other people might be OK with it.

And as Ricky pointed out, in many cases it’s a movie or comedian or joke that nobody forced you to watch or listen to; you volunteered for the experience, but then got upset by what you heard and/or saw and decided nobody else should get to have the same experience and make up their own mind and that offensive thing or person should be banned or taken off the airwaves or, if at all possible, burned at the stake.

Little-known fact:

Joan of Arc got in trouble when she was opening for REO Speedwagon and did a stand-up bit on English cuisine that did not go over well with the English crowd, who set her on fire and then had a tailgate party that included heaping helpings of Blood Pudding, Spotted Dick and Bangers and Mash…whatever the hell those are…and the only cuisine worse than English cuisine might be Scottish cuisine which includes “haggis” which uses sheep lungs, hearts and liver as ingredients cooked inside a sheep’s stomach into what the Scottish mistakenly call a “savory pudding” because for my money, savory pudding is chocolate and should be sold by guys who later turn out to be sexual predators.

Look at this picture and tell me if your first thought is: “Oh, boy, Savory Pudding!”

OK, totally made all that up for my own amusement and possibly yours, but the point is we need to think twice before we ban something because standards change and what was once acceptable no longer is and what was once offensive is now considered acceptable and if you don’t believe me, watch another Netflix special called The Hall and you’ll get to see George Carlin do his Seven Dirty Words You Can’t Say on TV right there on your TV.

And to prove standards can change dramatically: according to the internet, George got arrested seven times for performing a routine you can now watch in the comfort of your own home and share with your grandkids and then send them home, cursing like inebriated sailors on shore leave, and let your kids deal with some of the same bullshit they put you through.

Anyway…

We are living in the Age of Political Correctness where people are eager to point out any act or statement that isn’t sufficiently “woked” (or maybe that’s “waked” and I don’t really care, so woke me when it’s over) which is scary for people who deal in humor because humor is often intentionally offensive to make a point or set up a punch line.

Watch Ricky fire a rocket up the collective asses of a bunch of Hollywood actors who take themselves too seriously:

OK, so that’s the set up and now we’re going to take a walk through a Politically Correct Minefield and see what we step on. (And if you’re easily offended, you ought to stop reading right now and I’m not fucking kidding…See? That was a joke using profanity — not much of a joke, but still a joke.)

And now, a possibly offensive cartoon

After that guy shot up a grocery store because he bought into the Great Replacement Theory (White people are being replaced by immigrants) I said White people just might believe that theory because it’s exactly what we did to the American Indians and I was going to draw a cartoon about that and here it is:

Cartoonists use a lot of visual shorthand to make a point in a short amount of time (I once read about a study – because I didn’t want to read the whole damn study – that said most people spend about three seconds looking at a cartoon) so we use elephants to represent Republicans and donkeys to represent Democrats and Uncle Sam to represent the United States and so far so good, but then you have to draw a figure to represent American Indians and you end up drawing a stereotypical Indian based on vague memories of Tonto because you need a figure that immediately says “American Indian” which some people might find offensive and I can’t say I blame them all that much if they do.

I mean we steal their land, give them diseased blankets, do the Tomahawk Chop at Arrowhead Stadium and then they have to look at my juvenile representation of American Indians?

On the other hand…

I once read one of those “How To Be A Cartoonist” books written by a guy who I’d never heard of (so he wasn’t a really successful cartoonist) and he advised that a cartoonist should never try to draw racial characteristics because that might offend somebody and get the cartoonist in hot water, but if you think about it (and I did) that advice is kinda racist because it implies that there’s something wrong with those racial characteristics and the only racial characteristics that are OK to draw are the ones possessed by White people.

On the other hand…and we’re about out of hands…

Cartoonists use exaggeration and if you exaggerate somebody’s facial characteristics, people are going to lose their damn minds and call you a racist for that.

This shit gets complicated.

What makes good stand-up comedians great

The best stand-up comedians have the balls (or in many cases, ovaries) to go out on stage with nothing but a microphone and say the stuff the rest of us are afraid to say or acknowledge and then ridicule those fears.

And when they’re brave enough to do that, it makes it easier for the rest of us to follow along.

I got to hear George Carlin do his “Seven Dirty Words” routine in person twice and by the end of the evening he loosened up the crowd (and God knows a lot more people can use some loosening up) by pointing out how ridiculous it is that we’re offended by certain sounds even though two different sounds might mean the exact same thing.

“Penis” is OK, “dick” is not, even though to my ears, penis sounds way worse and I can understand why some women don’t want one anywhere in their vicinity.

We’re also sometimes offended by the order in which those sounds are made. As George pointed out:

“You can prick your finger, but can’t finger your prick.”

George’s logic (which was pretty much: “Grow the fuck up and start thinking for yourself and quit accepting what other people tell you is offensive”) had a profound effect on me and my use of language and since I no longer have an editor telling me what I can and can’t say, if a profanity feels like the right word I’ll go ahead and use one and if somebody finds that overly offensive they should just stop reading me.

And some people do.

Substack sends me an email when somebody signs up to get this stuff or somebody decides they’ve had enough and quits and I often wonder what I did that made somebody say, “That’s it, I can’t take any more!”

But even if I knew what it was, it wouldn’t change a thing because one of the joys of doing this is doing it exactly the way I want to and not trying to please everybody, which reminds me of the Ricky Nelson song, “Garden Party.”

Just in case you don’t know:

Ricky Nelson got invited to play at a Rock ‘N’ Roll Revival show at Madison Square Garden and showed up with long hair and started his set playing his old hits like “Hello, Mary Lou” and then tried to play some newer stuff like a cover of “Honky Tonk Woman” and the audience didn’t like that and booed him off the stage.

So Ricky wrote a song about the experience called “Garden Party” and I think the lesson here is don’t piss off a songwriter or they might write a song about what a dick you are (look on the bright side, at least you didn’t get called a penis) and I think every guy who ever dated Taylor Swift would agree with me.

Also, don’t piss off Carly Simon because she might write “You’re So Vain” or Queen’s Freddie Mercury because he might write “Death On Two Legs,” but for my money, there’s never been a greater Fuck You Revenge Ballad than Bob Dylan’s “Positively 4th Street” and if you don’t believe me, give it a listen:

We’ll end this with a quote from John Cleese of Monty Python and here’s what he had to say about political correctness:

“If people can’t control their own emotions, then they have to start trying to control other people’s behavior. And when you’re around super-sensitive people you cannot relax and be spontaneous because you have no idea what’s going to upset them next.

All humor is critical.

If you start saying, “We musn’t offend them!” then humor’s gone. Then as far as I’m concerned you’re living in 1984.”

During my life it has come to my attention that you can’t make everyone happy and it’s a mistake to try because if you’re controversial someone will object to that and if you avoid controversy like a heaping helping of haggis someone else will call you boring so in the end you might as well do exactly what you want to do because you’re the only person on the Face of the Earth that you can control, which is why it’s kind of ironic (if by “ironic” you actually mean “mo-ronic”) that people spend so much time trying to control others and so little time trying to control themselves.  

OK, that’s it for today and I’ve got to get going to my mom’s place where we’ll spend quality time trying to control each other. Hasn’t worked yet, but there’s a first time for everything.

Have a good day.

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