In which Our Hero pokes fun at poking fun.
A college friend and I were at dinner with his new girlfriend. We were playing a silly word-association game we’d been playing for years. At some point she said, “Stop making fun of me.”
We weren’t making fun of her. We stopped immediately.
But something interesting happened. By misidentifying play as ridicule, the game collapsed – and a contradiction surfaced on its own. No mockery was applied. None was needed.
Play is fragile. When it is misnamed as ridicule – or when the target of ridicule is misidentified – it stops being play at all. And in trying to prevent harm, one can sometimes create the very harm one fears.
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I find this behavior socially corrosive. Constraint masquerading as protection should be ridiculed and scorned.
Societally, we accept it. Because its harm is not as apparent. It is stifling, restricting, and just plain un-fun. It is stopping someone else’s kid from climbing up the slide because we don’t want our kid to climb up the slide.
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I laugh probably 3x more than the average person. I find humor probably 3x more often than the average person does.
Infrequently, it’s for a reason undesirable. (Someone has a name that sounds funny to me, so I’m implicitly outgrouping their culture.)
Generally, it’s because 1) they’re doing something that reveals a contradiction between their goals and their behavior, or 2) they’re doing something “silly” – i.e. something that reveals a comic underpinning to existence.
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When we let people police down to the lowest common denominator, life is duller and weaker.
And that’s how the terrorists win.
🤡
Julian Wise 