Between the Will Smith Oscar's slap and Dave Chapelle getting attacked on stage and the recent social media outrage over Ricky Gervais's new Netflix special, the question, "What are comedians allowed to joke about?" has been an interesting one to think about lately.
And I'm always right on the edge of arguing, "Comedians should be allowed to crack fun at whatever they want," until I consider the scenario of a white comedian making relentless insensitive jokes about Black people, and it's just too hard to defend that scenario. At the end of the day, someone in a position of privilege or with a specific platform should not be punching down at other people or groups without that privilege or platform. I can't say I enjoyed seeing Chris Rock make fun of Jada Pinkett Smith's medical condition.
But I was listening to a Ricky Gervais interview the other day, and I think he actually put it quite eloquently. He said, "I think people get offended when they mistake the subject of a joke with the actual target." And that's been genuinely true in my experience: a lot of us interpret any joke about us as an attempt to shoot us down when in reality the comedian may be shooting at something else entirely. Or perhaps they're not shooting at any target at all and they're just pointing out an irony. In any event, I think always conflating the subject of a joke with the target of a joke is the wrong lens through which to view comedy, and the sooner we can all acknowledge this, the safer all comedians will probably be and the less guilty we'll all feel in laughing with them.
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