Letter #154: Who Gets to Laugh?

At a certain point we're all going to have to learn to take a joke.

Pops,

So much depends, it turns out, on your sense of humor. It’s no surprise to me that the witless wonders at The New York Times are hounding you brigands at The Daily Wire. These are the same people who gleefully reported last year that Douglass Mackey, whom they called “a digital-age dirty-trickster,” had been sentenced to seven months in prison for playing a prank online during the 2016 election.

Mackey’s crime was posting a meme in a format that partisans of both Trump and Hillary used, inviting voters for the other side to “avoid the line” by registering their vote in a text message.

I’ll admit I detect behind Mackey’s posts a malicious little snigger that’s not really to my taste. But sniggering maliciously is not in itself illegal, or you’d have to lock up half the staff at The New York Times, and most of its readership.

What’s becoming illegal, or at least quite dangerous, is joking for the wrong team. Take my friend Ryan Girdusky, who got in a verbal Gir-dustup on CNN with pro-Palestinian shill Mehdi Hasan. Or Tony Hinchcliffe, the comedian whose racial caricatures fell a little flat at the Trump rally in Madison Square Garden.

Even some conservatives accused Hinchcliffe of poor timing and bad manners. But sifting through each individual gag to critique its relative merits seems a little beside the point to me. Our major problem here is not that some off-color jokes are less than perfectly pitched in less than appropriate company.

There are always going to be errors in social judgment from time to time, on big stages and small. But the rules of the game overall are rigged: some people get to feign outrage at every minor slight while others have to cringe and apologize on command. The power brokers at the Times want their favored groups to enjoy infinite latitude while their enemies cower in fear of dishonor and jail.

If we don’t just want to suffer under this arrangement as it grows increasingly rigid, then all of us—yes, even the blacks and the gays—are eventually going to have to learn to lighten up and take a joke at our own expense once in a while. The ideal state of affairs was already described pretty admirably in Avenue Q: “Ethnic jokes might be uncouth / But you laugh because they’re” (whispered) “based on truth. Don’t take them as personal attaaaa—a—aaacks. / Everyone enjoys them. So relax!”

The test, of course, is whether you can laugh at the group you belong to along with the rest. There were once two men, a Pharisee and a Tax collector. And the Pharisee thanked God he wasn’t like that that contemptible, ridiculous tax collector. But the tax collector beat his breast in a plea for mercy. Only one of them went home justified—and I bet only one of them could take a joke.

Love,
Spencer