Shit! My Fault! (Not Really!) I Did Not Know She Was Trying to be Funny!

Ok.  I had hoped to get to the new year with out feeling so compelled to mention silly person Ann Althouse  again.  But this post is not only about her.  It is a re iteration of one of my favorite themes.

Try being funny at your own risk, bitches! And if you fuck it up, it's your fault, not the audience.

Now for the set up.  Althouse generally does this totally fucked up shit all the time, where at one level she plays devil's advocate, and sorta seems to advocate fucked up ness, by virtue of not then and harshly condemning such fucked up ness.  She will post quotes and links about issue  X, Y, or A, and not comment.  Or she will comment, and it's supposed to, I am guessing maybe, be tongue in cheek.  And apparently sometimes  she thinks she is being funny, and says shit that she thinks is funny and people lo and behold, don't get the fucking joke.  And according to her, sorta, it's yours  it's our fault for not getting the joke.

Case in point.  She (again with the fucked up ness in not being clear about what she actually thinks about the issue) posted some quote and link (go here  if you must) about  whether or not that racist piece of shit Ron Paul is a racist.  And her  own commentary, in the comment thread after  was . . . . let me just post that as a quote:

"Let's be fair. I think he made a lot of money on those newsletters. That's a completely separate motivation for publishing that stuff. Do you think everyone who publishes porn loves exaggerated, promiscuous sex?"

 Now to me, that in of itself is much fucked up.  Doesn't matter if he was cynically publishing racist homophobic shit to make money.  According to my rule, which is the same rule they told us runs the world, when we were in grade school, that all that shit goes on your permanent record?  Well using that kind of rule, if you run around pretending to be a racist and homophobe just to make money, you are showing yourself to the public as a racist and a homophobe.  That's the part that goes in your permanent record.  And ya can't blame people for judging you and harshly, if you run around acting all racist and homophobic.  I mean really?  As if it is everyone else's job to do the impossible and be able to figure out your fucked up motivations and fucked up inner self?  People can only judge based on what they see.  And if they see you acting like a racist homophobe, that as they say is that!

I went long there, but that's really my take on the whole  Did He Mean It, question.  I say it doesn't fucking matter.  Moving on  though, someone later takes her to task for seeming to defend Paul by talking about the alternative motivation for his racist seeming  behaviour.  Her reply to that?

"Sorry if my humor is too dry for you."

Now we get away from the racism shit and back to comedy theory.  I have said it before.  I will say it here again.  Try to be funny at your own fucking risk.  It is NEVER the fault of the audience for not getting your fucking lame assed  attempts at humor.  It is 100% the responsibility of the humorist/comedian/joke teller.  Professionals know this.  Fucking amateurs oftentimes  don't.  And I know.  Trying to be funny is something a lot of people do.  And I am not saying there should be some sort of law that says, only trained professionals should be allowed to attempt this.  But if someone is so reckless that they attempt to be funny in public, and don't pull it off?  It's their failure, not the audience.

And while I am at it.  There's a difference between a novel and a play.  And there is a difference between telling a joke (trying to be funny) in person or for tape/vid/film  and doing that in text only.  Text only is actually harder.  Why?  Because all the human communication parts are missing.  There's no physicality, no tone of voice, no facial messaging, and usually timing is off as well.

Now I have to admit that back when people still emailed jokes to me, I would often hack them  to make them read better as a joke, because  usually they were badly formatted.  And that all goes to my next point, and that is that it is one kind of recklessness to try to be funny in public, but trying to do it in text only communications?  That's really fucking hard to do.  Particularly when someone really does not get the core idea of comedy.  It's less about what the joke teller thinks is funny.  It's more about whether or not the joke teller successfully figures out what will be funny to the audience, and successfully  entertains the audience.

But again.  Unlike Althouse, who has her undergraduate degree in a narrow visual arts field,  I have mine in Theatre.  I did not exactly take a class in comedy theory.  But I did a little acting, and I know, it's the performers job to sell that shit.  It is not the audience's job to buy it. 

Edit to add:

I could have let it slide.  But ya know?  My argument is inferred in there when I talk about comedy theory, and permanent records.  But now that I have thought about it, I do not want to let it go.  Her fucked up remark about pornographers?  How fucked up is her thinking there?  I mean, really!  It doesn't fucking matter if a pornographer loves their work.  All that matters,  and all that is going on their permanent record is that they actually produced and marketed smut.  So that whole analogy was very much fucked up.

And in that vein, I will add the following image.  Sorta sums up my feelings, here.