“WE’RE DIFFERENT—LOL!”
ON MOCKING MARGINALIZED MINORITIES

       Sometimes humor is funny because it’s edgy. The most popular funny things are often funny because they are offensive, from vaguely distasteful to downright shocking. Think about your favorite comedians—Dave Chappelle (edgy and hilarious, bitch!) Helen Keller (edgy for her era, but the shtick got old), or Margaret Cho (just kidding! Margaret Cho isn’t funny.) Think about your favorite comedy shows like Family Guy or Roots. Now think about your favorite jokes. Do they poke fun at women? Homosexuals? Slanty-eyed chinks? That kid with fetal alcohol syndrome that you have to try to play checkers with on Thursdays to fulfill your community service requirements so as not to violate your parole?

       Wait—stop. See? Now that wasn’t funny at all. Some of my best friends are slanty-eyed chinks. I wouldn’t want anyone having a laugh at the expense of my homeboy, Yoshinobu. And anyhow, it’s better for Asians to focus on the things they can do, like Dance Dance Revolution and multivariable calculus, rather than be bitter about all that basketball and getting laid they’re missing out on. What I’m saying is there’s a reason the blind kid gets badass at guitar, and the hooker with three boobs in Total Recall got all the action: they focused on their potential, rather than their limitations.

But I digress—offensive humor is a very serious issue for anyone who enjoys laughter, which is pretty much everyone; how offensive is too offensive? Are there litmus tests to determine when something crosses the line? And how do we fix offensive jokes so that they are still funny, but less likely to get your ass kicked?

Fortunately, yes, there are easy ways to tell if a joke is too offensive. Making people cry is usually okay—women are just too sensitive sometimes, and guys can sometimes be total pussy faggotrons. But if a judge tells you that your joke is not protected under the First Amendment and so you’re not entitled to compensation for your shattered eye socket after all…and that you might even be prosecuted under new hate speech legislation, you have perhaps have gone a bit far.

So, here’s a primer on writing your very own offensive joke at the expense of minorities: black people, Jews, and gays are all out. Sorry. I know they’re the easiest because there are well-established stereotypes about them that the joke can refer to. But then, it’s hardly a challenge. And more importantly, I think that slavery, the Holocaust, and the fear and loathing of Bible-believing America, respectively, are sufficient crap for a minority group to take. So get creative with the targets of your offensive humor; why not poke fun at Laplanders? Those reindeer-eating bastards have been getting off easy.

Understanding this concept of going after the obscure minority groups offers an easy way of fixing jokes that used to be too offensive. Take a long hard look at your material on Catholics—would a lot of them still work if you just changed the victims to Eskimos or the Baha’i? I bet they would!

Now that we know who will be the target of our cutting jibes, it’s time for reflection and research. Good jokes are based on truth, like that Wicca is just a subset of the ugliest “goth” chicks, that Hmong immigrants are a drain on the American welfare system, or that all Mexicans play in mariachi bands. Pick a source of authentic embarrassment and go for it!

Again, understanding the difference between making a joke about how Asians are nerdy is different from a joke about how Asians do laundry offers opportunities to “fix” jokes that used to be too offensive. No one wants to hear about how Native American Indians drink too much—that weakness has been overexploited. Would that joke still work if it were about how an Indian would never beat a Welshman at snooker? I bet it would!

But back to your joke: now that you have a target minority and an incisive observation about how they suck, all that’s left is execution. I can’t help you with that part—it has to come from that rich mélange of xenophobia, personal insecurities, and paranoid irrationality that you like to call your soul, cracker.

Well—I hope I’ve been helpful. If you think of any especially clever jokes, please email them to me by clicking my name at the top of this article. I’ll take the best ones and claim that I made them up, or if they’re about Asians, maybe try to get you expelled, as Penn doesn’t look kindly towards bigotry, especially not from you heretical Mormons.