Recycling racism
Because, really, fuck these people
I love to tell jokes, and I have a wide repertoire, but one day in 1982 I realized that telling racist jokes was aggressive and offensive and I stopped doing it forever.
Now, this didn’t mean I wouldn’t push the edge.
I told this one to my late friend Doug Walker, the electronic musician and communist, after he had been stopped for Driving While Black (with no horrible consequences, thank goodness):
Q: What’s black, twelve inches long, and hangs in front of an asshole?
A: A policeman’s tie
I watched Doug bristle when he heard the first half but I think it was worth it for his reaction afterwards.
But no more racist jokes forever. And I was and am happy to do this. Many of the jokes were structurally funny — but only really funny if you truly had contempt for their targets.
But yesterday I had a revelation: I can recycle all my racist jokes in the service of Truth, Beauty and the American Way!
We can lose our troubles in laughter for a moment, confound our enemies, and detourne a crude and cruel part of America’s popular culture for our own.
Things look bad for the good guys
It’s a dark time.
If you care about the environment and the climate emergency, governance, racial justice and justice in general, or you’re an American and for some reason don’t care to see several hundred thousand of your fellow citizens die horrible and mostly avoidable deaths, then you have to be a little… gloomy these days, even if you haven’t been personally affected.
It’s exhausting to get beaten on. We need a way to strike back, but it has to be fun and easy and entertaining and effective, because everything else seems to be constant miserable striving only to constantly lose ground.
Jokes are a great anodyne to sorrow, one accessible to all humans of all walks of life, of all varieties of perception, sophistication, intelligence and of wisdom, and they’re free.
Let me be clear that I am not talking about puns or absurdism — I love them, but they offer mere intellectual entertainment for the most part, groans or titter, where a belly laugh cleanses your very soul.
No, it’s jokes I’m talking about, and, as Robert Heinlein first clued me in to in his epochal Stranger in a Strange Land (still a brilliant read if you can put your head into the mores of the time), jokes are essentially cruel: someone gets hurt in a joke or it isn’t really funny.
If you were living in New York City in the 80's, the Greats of twentieth century music were very accessible. I chatted with John Cage for a few moments once or twice and saw him perform half a dozen times or more.
At one performance, he told a story about a nice young lady with diarrhea trapped in a tiny hidden WC in the Paris metro, with, eventually, a plumber and some inspector trapped with her. I believe the last words I ever heard John Cage say in the flesh were, “The diarrhea continued.”
John Cage understood jokes.
Who be the butts if jokes be cruel?
We must pick our targets with precision. We must be fair, we must be accurate, but also, we need the jokes to be actually tellable and funny.
We cannot target a single person. Racist jokes involve abstract groups of people. “Q: Why do [racial category X] have [property Y]? A: [Answer that reiterates some slur]”
The words need to be short and clear and impactful. There’s a reason why no one uses the word “Pakistani” in racist jokes.
And it has to be a group that has a clear visual representation in people’s minds.
Jokes are very visual, and I say this as a mostly non-visual thinker. For example, Jews are amongst the most ethnologically disparate people in the world and yet we all know the sort of picture that comes into a Gentile’s mind when they hear racist jokes about Jews (as distinct from “Jewish jokes,” self-deprecating humor mainly from New Yorkers like Asimov and Allen).
These criteria eliminate such target categories as Republican and conservative out of the gate.
Also, most Americans have members of their family who fall into those last two categories. Most people aren’t willing to tell offensive jokes about people who are sitting in the room with them.
Who are the butts?
What one group is hated and despised by all thinking, compassionate humans?
What one group is not just statistically evil, but universally so?
What one group exemplifies the mean-spirited, corrupt, and even sociopathic ethos that is ruining America?
You guessed it — it is Trumps — the extended Trump family(*).
Trumps encompass every single negative characteristic ever attributed to a racial category — stupid, dishonest, lazy, gullible, insensitive, delusional, gluttonous, crass, the day is not long enough to list all their faults and outright sins.
So let us take our best racist jokes, and recast them as Trumps jokes. You can tell them at the dinner table to your Fascist relatives, and when they get angry, smile and say, “Can’t you take a joke”?
Some jokes
Memorize a few Trumps jokes, and go to it the next time an offensive joke is appropriate. Here
Q: What do Trumps use for birth control?
A: Their personalitiesQ: Why do Trumps have those funny marks on their foreheads?
A: It comes from teaching them how to use a forkQ: Why do they put shit on the walls at a Trump wedding?
A: To keep the flies off the brideQ: Where does the Grand Canyon come from?
A: Fred Trump once lost a dime in ArizonaQ: What’s the aim of Trump football?
A: To get the quarter backQ: How do Trump brain cells die?
A: Alone
This one perhaps goes too far: I saw it somewhere on the Internet maybe?
Q: What do you say to a big fat hog before you slit its throat?
A: I don’t take responsibility at all
A: It is what it is
Write your own
Got any good, really nasty jokes? The ones you heard from your racist uncle twenty years ago, and laughed, and then secretly felt ashamed? Redeem yourself and entertain yourself at the same time — detourne it into a Trumps joke!
Spend a little time working on each joke individually. There are jokes I know I have tinkered with for years.
Maybe you can’t just cut-and-paste “Trumps” in, but you can always fiddle a bit until it works. Memorize it — make sure you have the timing right — and then trot it out to your friends and enemies, family and strangers.
Trade them! Mix and match! Gotta catch ’em all, so they can die in jail!
And please post the good ones in the comments on this article. Or even the bad ones. I am not proud.
And thanks for reading. Oh, one more.
Q: Why doesn’t Trump have sex with Ivanka?
A: He’s afraid the kids would be too lazy to steal
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(* — Dr. Mary Trump is excluded, but I’m sure she won’t mind taking a little flak in a good cause)
