My dad once tried to give some fatherly advice.
“Son,” he said, “you should never talk about anything that you don’t know anything about.”
“Dad,” I replied with some concern, “that will cut out 90 percent of all my conversation.”
He paused. Then he leaned over so I could hear him clearly.
“Son,” he said, “that’s the idea.”
When I tell people about that exchange, they usually laugh. And so do I. But then, I knew my father well. I knew where he was coming from. And he knew me.
I’m not sure I’d find such an attempt at humor as funny if someone else told that joke about me. Especially not someone I didn’t know that well. And who didn’t know me.
When it comes to humor, what makes me merry may make you mad.
Just ask the editors of the student newspapers at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Nebraska at Omaha.
The student editors at Carnegie Mellon recently shut down their newspaper, The Tartan, for the rest of the semester following protests aimed at a cartoon with a racial slur against African Americans. The cartoon appeared in its April Fools’ edition, which also offered poetry about a rape of a teacher and mutilation of a woman, along with a female genitalia illustration.
The university created a commission to look into what happened and the editors faced questioning by their fellow students.
At the University of Nebraska at Omaha, the student editors of The Gateway made fun of African Americans, identifying a separate edition of their paper as “The Ghettoway.”
In both cases, the editors said their April Fools’ editions were meant to be humorous, not humiliating, to those targeted by their prank publication. But a number of people who read their editions didn’t get the joke.
The antics of these papers, and the reactions they prompted, caught the attention of professional newspapers and news services. The journalists who called me wanted to know what I thought about ethics involved in publishing April Fools’ editions.
One journalist wanted to pin me down about whether the April Fools’ humor that made fun of people was an appropriate newspaper endeavor. I gave that journalist a definitive response: It depends.
It depends on whether that newspaper sees itself as a serious vehicle for disseminating news or whether it sees itself as a vehicle for satire and humor. I think that publications known for publishing satire on a regular basis stand a better chance of having people giving them some leeway.
Conventional newspapers face a different challenge.
It’s not that they can’t publish humorous stories. But doing so requires something of both those publishing such humor and those reading it. The newspaper needs to know itself and its readers well. And the readers need to know the newspaper, and where it stands, well. The readers also need to know the purpose for the humor.
But even then, the risk exists that the reader won’t “get it.” That there will be a disconnect between the humor and the humored. Some might see the disconnect the way Malcolm Muggeridge described it: “Good taste and humor are a contradiction in terms, like a chaste whore.”
Have we become so politically correct, socially sensitive, and journalistically wimpy that we can’t make, or take, a joke?
I’d like to suggest that when we make ourselves the butt of the joke, it goes down easier. People can laugh with us. Think Dave Barry. In an earlier era, Art Buchwald.
But when we make fun of others, we do so at our peril. The targets of such jokes may wonder whether such fun is meant lightheartedly or whether it masks certain biases, stereotypes, and prejudices. “Humor is also a way of saying something serious,” T.S. Eliot wrote.
Some might say that in the past it seemed easier to publish April Fools’ editions or poke fun at others. My sense of that view is that the only people who thought it funny were the people publishing the humor. Those who didn’t appreciate being in the minority either had no voice or were ignored when they complained.
Today, everyone seems to have a voice, and no reluctance to use it. For some, that may make it more difficult to have fun and publish humor. For others, it may simply be that they want to be respected and find disparaging humor no longer acceptable.
So, what are we to do? Maybe we can listen to what the great American humorist James Thurber once wrote: “The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself, but in so doing, he identifies himself with people — that is, people everywhere, not for the purpose of taking them apart, but simply revealing their true nature.”
Now, did I tell you about the time that I…
