Imus
What’s red and silver and runs into walls?
A baby with forks in its eyes.
How do you kill a blue monster?
Shoot him with a blue-monster gun.
How do you kill a red monster?
Hold his nose until he turns blue. Then, shoot him with a blue-monster gun.
These two sequences have something in common. They are both jokes. Should I be banned from the Internet for publishing them here? Given the outrage over Don Imus’ one-shot joke about what inner-city kids look like, some people probably think so.
The Oxford American Dictionary defines humor as “the condition of being amusing or comic (less intellectual and more sympathetic than wit).” That means humor is lowbrow, comparatively speaking. Lowbrow humor turns on the bawdry and the offensive. Have you ever heard Larry the Cable Guy? He’s funny and pretty lowbrow. Andrew “Dice” Clay made a living off lowbrow humor in the late ’80s and early ’90s before trying to go more mainstream. Imus had intellectual content while generously dipping into the lowbrow whenever he felt like it.
Lindsay Leupelt doesn’t think that’s an excuse for what he said, but she can see where someone might use such a “tasteless, rude, ignorant, and uncalled-for comment.” She understands why he was fired. There’s been a lot of bad press after all. She understands and can appreciate tasteless jokes, though: “A joke is supposed to be funny, not a hidden way of taking a stab at someone. Also, don’t intentionally say rude, vulgar [things].”
In Newsweek, NBC’s David Gregory said, “Imus was living in two worlds. There was the risqué, sexually offensive, sometimes racially offensive, satire, and then there was this political salon about politics and books. Some of us tuned in to one part and tuned out the other … Whether I was numb to the humor that offended people or in denial, I don’t know.”
I think most of the time, people just got the joke. In 1729, England went crazy when Jonathan Swift published “A Modest Proposal,” in which he suggested the cure for Irish hunger was cannibalism. Educated people might have gotten the satire, but the general public was clueless.
That isn’t to say what Imus said was satire or on the same level as Swift — or even South Park, our modern day equivalent. Jokes are jokes, though. People tend to get upset when it should just roll off their backs. Political correctness has infected our world so strongly that we are becoming incapable of filtering anything out. The end result of that quite possibly could be frightening. Even Rosie O’Donnell is afraid of the thought police.
One thing is for certain, says Leupelt: “This week was a waste of time,” and the time could have been better spent “getting [the troops] home.”