who needs a laugh

Okay, clearly the bar has been lowered... I'll join in.

This joke is a true story so the punchline lacks... punch, but try to imagine it as I heard it, from a skinny, unshaven and acutely schizophrenic old man in a street cafe.

Mr Woods: Yes, society is indeed much more immoral these days... Why, I've even heard young girls crying out to be touched in a sexual way.

Barrister: Where did you hear that, Mr Woods?

Mr Woods: At my home, in my house.

Barrister: ...

Mr Woods: Of course, that might have been an hallucination.

Barrister: Yes, I think it probably was.

****

Another priceless gem from the incomparable Brian Woods. We were sharing a table and I noticed he was staring at my hands. Then, from out of the blue...

Brian: I say, I say, I say, what do call a man with very small hands who uses them to explode in bed?

Me: I don't know, what do you call a man with very small hands who uses them to explode in bed?

Brian: You call him Brian.

The deinstitutionalisation of mental patients in Australia has really paid off in terms of street theatre.

 

Hey I think the bar was always pretty low, I've gone through this thread before and some of the jokes are pretty sick. Anyway:

I did something ridiculous the other day, I was so embarrassed! I was sat on my bus to work, and I accidentally shat myself. When I looked down to assess the situation, I noticed I was wearing odd socks - what a fool!

 

There's a nuclear family of moles living in a small burrow. They leave it together, in a particular order. Father mole first, Mother mole second, and Baby mole last. What does the baby mole smell as he leaves the burrow?

Molasses.

 

So, on reflection, I still object to the rape and pedophilia jokes, and here's why.

There's as yet no evidence that violent movies and video games increase the likelihood of violence, BUT there is scientific evidence that this kind of rape-culture increases the likelihood of future rapes. Adolescents, mysogynists and repressed religious nuts read this kind of thing as an implied consent.

Maybe it is just a correllation and not a cause but I don't wish to debate the issue, I just have to go on record as saying "Uncool."

If you think it's normal, also uncool. If you think it's harmless, wrong.

And now, a joke.

A man walks into a bar and he says, "ouch!"

 

I'll be sure to rape an additional person in your place, ytzk.

 

Re:

Group mentality. If it's part of society, it eventually becomes normal. Normal is accepted, and people begin doing crazy shit either to fit in or because how are they bad if "everyone else does it?"


A masked man walks into a sperm bank and points a gun at one of the nurses.

"You! Take me to the samples!"

"Oh...okay." She nervously but quietly leads the masked man to the collected sperm samples.

He gestures at one, indicating he wants her to pick it up.

"Drink it."

She does it, but only because he's pointing a loaded weapon at her.

He points to another sample. She drinks that one too. And another. And another.

Finally, the man takes off his mask and reveals himself to be her husband.

"See, honey? That's not so hard, is it?"

 

Re:

I tend to think that any joke can be excused if it's funny - the problem I have with most of these is that they are not. Second-tier comedians often try to improve poor material by shocking the audience instead, but that's a cheap way out in my opinion - shock value is no substitute for humour.

Here is the only joke of that ilk that I've ever found amusing enough to retell:

A man gets home from work one day to find his girlfriend throwing his things out of the house.
"What's going on honey?" he asks.
"Get out! You're disgusting! I've just found out that you're a paedophile!" she replies.
"A paedophile?" he says, "My my, that's an awfully big word for a ten year old."

 

Re: Re:

I don't think these points are valid. People are going to either have an upbringing that makes rape okay within the scope of their morality or they're not; no normal person is going read a joke about rape and then go and buy a balaclava and start prowling streets at night. I think it's essentially the same argument about people who read violent books, play violent games or watch violent cinema and then go on to spree kill - the media reflects their world view, not the other way round. So yes, correlation not causality is the case - I know plenty of friends and family who tell these kind of jokes and yet are moral well adjusted people.

With pedophilia, it's more of a sexuality rather than a fetish - not really something that someone can become by reading a joke. No sense of humour can be considered "normal" when there's no standardised method of valuing humour, and I don't think a joke has ever incited rape or pedophilia in any distinguishable way - so yes it's totally harmless.

Really ytzk, why so serious?

As for a joke, here's one:

People always say you are what you eat. I guess that explains why my gay brother is such an arsehole then.

 

I think you're right about paedophilia, but not about rape. It's not the case that people are either rapists or not. A typical rape scenario is not a man in a balaclava prowling the streets, it's more like a man and a woman are making out and then the woman doesn't want to go any further but the man decides to force the issue.

Of course, if you or I were in that situation, noble upstanding men that we are, we would immediately respect the fuck out of her wishes and leave, but there's a moment where that decision is made and lots of factors come into play. For one thing, the guy almost certainly doesn't consider himself a rapist - he isn't deciding to rape the woman, he is deciding that she wants to have sex and is just playing hard to get or something, because hey, bitches be crazy, right? And just the other day he and his buddies were in a bar and comparing the outfits of sluts that walked by, giving them marks out of ten for how badly they were asking for it, so really, why did she go out dressed like that if she didn't want to get laid? And then before you know it, she's stopped resisting because she doesn't know how violent he'd get otherwise, and he takes that as evidence that he was right and she did want it after all.

That's how rape happens, and that's why it's different from high-school massacres. Those have to be planned. Rapes are hardly ever planned, they're a spur of the moment decision, a product of a hundred small attitude adjustments coming into play.

Good morning.

Wait... wrong thread. Um... I need a joke... erm... okay, here's one:

Surveys show that nine out of ten people enjoy gang rape.

 

I feel your points are fair, but at the same time I don't know how large a role telling an offensive joke has played in this hypothetical guy's behaviour. Clearly him and his friends talking about women as though they are objects is more of the issue and more indicative of a rape culture than telling a joke, I don't believe that a joke can really inform someone's behaviour.

From my perspective, I think it is important to trivialise these things - not to laugh at other people's misery but because if I ever got raped I wouldn't want my life to be over and I would cope by treating it like a joke; I would almost certainly make frequent jokes about it that would make people uncomfortable. I read an article on rape jokes informing rape culture and it seemed their argument was "people shouldn't joke about these things because some things are too serious and haunting"; but I think if anything can be laughed at it lessens the evil behind it.

Besides, graffiti depicting rape has been found it ancient Rome - clearly rape is more or less (and sadly) a timeless theme in humanity and no amount of censorship is really going to discourage a rapist from raping. Plus as a side point the majority of the articles written with a heavy feminist bias which grates on me, I'd imagine if women had cocks but still lacked male hormones then they would rape people too.

But enough about rape, here's a joke I shamelessly stole from a website but felt like sharing just because it was too darn good not to:

I went into my library the other day and asked for a book about jokes with rubbish punchlines.

She directed me to the appropriate section.

 

This doesn't make any sense. Is it important to trivialize murders? I can see that you're saying that personally you would deal with trauma by making jokes about it, but that's different from saying society as a whole should treat a subject lightly.

Personally, I don't think any subject should be off-limits for humour - as I said before my only criterion is "Is it funny?" But there's a certain type of leering attitude that some men have, along the lines of "rape is funny because those sluts deserve it", which I think is harmful and should be not be sanctioned. Coincidentally, I also don't think that it's funny, so it doesn't pass my own test in the first place. Note that I'm not accusing anyone here of having that attitude.

By the way, it turns out I may be wrong about how most rapes occur. I've read some more on the subject and it seems that there is a tiny sub-section of men who commit a huge number of deliberate rapes by manipulating women into a state of being too drunk to resist. However, I'm not sure what proportion of rapes would fall into this category, since it's difficult to get objective data when the subject is so emotive and most articles written about it have an agenda of some kind.

And now the required joke:

Two chimpanzees are having a bath, and one starts going "Oo oo oo oo oo!"
The other one says "Look, if you think it's too hot then just add some cold water."

 

You may recall my "porn up, rape down" thread. I ran into the same problem several times while posting to it. There's not going to be any one straight answer to get, considering (from my observations) as much as the justice system favors a woman in the accusation of rape, it goes to great lengths to paint her as an accuser rather than a legitimate victim. This alone helps contribute to the shame involved, with shame possibly contributing the most to the unreported proportion of the crime. This lead to the controversy over Kobe Bryant being accused of raping a woman (who I don't necessarily doubt was assaulted), because the semen of three other men was found in her panties (eww). Basically, "This woman is obviously promiscuous. I suggest we drop the charges because of how gaped she is." This in itself can definitely be associated with the agenda present in many articles of "rape awareness."

Then again, you have cases of rape where it never actually happened and the "perpetrator" involved is actually being victimized. Most men can never recover from being accused and then found innocent of rape.

A big problem is the idea that men aren't raped nearly as much as women. Statistically, this looks rather truthful. However, men don't seem to enjoy saying there was any instance where they were victimized, so much so that in this article, it says women are 5 times as likely to report domestic abuse as men are, when the populations of those abused are in similar proportions. I'm taking a liberty and assuming the amount of men raped can at least be multiplied by 5, with most cases going unreported because the victims don't want to be assumed less manly in any way. If this is true, at least in the US, rape statistics would even out if men reported at the same rate as women.

Joke time!

Mom and Dad were trying to console Susie, whose dog, Skipper, had recently died.

"You know," Mom said, "it's not so bad. Skipper's probably up in Heaven right now, having a grand old time with God."

Susie stopped crying and asked, "What would God want with a dead dog?"

 

I wouldn't say that I'd ever triavilize a murder of someone close to me, but I'd probably make an awkward joke about how at least we wouldn't have to deal with some unusual quirk of their's anymore after enough time had passed - not in a cruel way but as a remembrance. I've had a fair few traumatic things happen to me in the past, not as bad as a rape or hospitalization by any means but it doesn't make them any less unpleasant, but you get tired of having to react to gravely serious events in a gravely serious manner anymore - part of you has to see a funnier side to things to keep your head straight. I don't think I have the same level of detachment that arises as a coping mechanism as I used to because my life is a lot better now, but I don't think it will ever stop pervading my sense of humour. You're right though - I shouldn't impose my own world views on others. Still if the only alternatives are to let trauma ruin your life or - even worse - to "Praise Jesus!" (kind of the same as the first alternative) then sometimes it makes you wonder.

Of course, but as you point out I don't think anyone here does fall into that camp anyway - I was of the line of thinking we're all mature adults (well, maybe) and could share whatever we liked here. There's certainly far darker jokes here if you flick through the thread than anything I've posted. Still, I'll try and tone it down, your sensible and shrewd arguments have it as always.

Here's one of my poorly executed jokes that doesn't revolve around hideous trauma (well, mostly):

I had an accident that made me incontinent recently, but I try not to let it get me down. Shit happens.

 

Because the line is already THAT low:

What did Michael Jackson buy at McDONALD'S?

Happy meal.

While Bush and Bin Laden plays chess, Bin Laden suddenly cried out: "Come on. You've already lost two towers!"

 

Why did Michael Jackson like Kmart?

He saw they had little boys' pants half off.

 

What was Saddam Hussein least favorite shampoo?

Swartzkopf.

 

Roses are red,
Violets are glorious.
Never sneak up,
On Oscar Pistorius.

 

Someone's been looking on Sickipedia, Mr Smuel. Or at least the person who told you the joke has been. Anyway:

I keep coming onto strangers in bars. They tend not to like it, especially when it gets in their hair.

 

What's the best thing about having sex with twenty one year olds?

Spoiler

There's twenty of them.

 

I have a golden showers fetish, so unsurprisingly earlier I watched a video of a guy's cock letting go all over this gorgeous naked woman. Unlike usual I got bored a few minutes in, it just wasn't streaming very well.