What do you call a flying Jew? Smoke. What was funny about the title of this paper? What was funny about the joke? Nothing, but if you were talking to a friend and they made a Jew joke that was pretty good, you’d laugh. If it wasn’t funny in one context, what makes it funny or acceptable in the other context? Is it due to the relationship you share with your friend? Are you guys Nazis who want to oppress Jews, or do you guys just find inappropriate things funny? Nine times out of ten it is going to be the latter. Is the domain of humor only the space in which everyone finds it funny and it’s political correct? No. Comedians make dark or crude jokes all the time. Your everyday person throughout their day will make them. What separates them from being funny and inappropriate?

Not suitable or proper in the circumstances. The definition of inappropriate pretty much sums up the argument for the jokes themselves. The joke, if it is inappropriate is considered such if it is not proper for that context or in that certain circumstance. A rape joke probably isn’t acceptable in the work place. An ill-timed joke can be just as bad as crude joke in terms of being inappropriate. For example, if someone had recently died, it wouldn’t go over well if you told a joke about that person dying. If a joke is taking out of the context it was originally in, it obviously is going to seem wrong or not funny. Over analyzing jokes can also kill the meaning or the jest in the joke and highlight how wrong it was or how its going to be offensive. To people who seek out anything that isn’t politically correct, they’re going to point out the flaws in the joke, bring out why this isn’t correct and ignore the whole purpose of the joke. A dark or crude joke can be used to highlight a political-social issue and bring it in to conversation in ways that a formal debate or in a political scene just can’t accomplish. Comedy is used to bridge the gap in a torn apart social environment that we have today.

In our social environment we have today, everyone focusing on being political correct and everyone being so easily offendable, most jokes that are made can be easily made into an inappropriate “spear head” for their arguments. This manipulation of the “joke” nulls the idea of the joke and turns it into just a statement that was analyzed past its true meaning, turning it into something that it wasn’t. Referring to the definition of appropriate and inappropriate, a joke that was taking out of context makes it irrelevant to the side that is taking it out of context. When analyzing a joke, there’s a difference between taking it out of context and analyzing it for what it is. You can easily take a racist joke out of context and say that the joke and the comedian is racist. You can just as easily understand from the context of the comedian that their purpose of telling the joke is to bring attention to that topic and the stigma that revolves around it. As the comedian Dave Chappelle uses in one of his skits about how a blind white supremacist who is actually black who never knew he was black, and how he talked down about black people (Cohen and Richards). Obviously, this is funny in the context of the comedy skit, but it highlights a bigger issue in the American social status. It shows how the ignorance of a person can lead to oppression of someone else. 

Another aspect of a joke’s context is the location at which the comedian makes the joke. The audience does have an influence on how a joke plays out but most of the time if a comedian was to make a rough or slightly crude joke, the crowd will normally act how it’s expected to and laugh. Because that’s what they’re supposed to do. People don’t go to a comedy to show to not laugh and tear apart the comedian. They come to laugh. You also must look at the purpose of the comedian. Their purpose isn’t to start an uproar about race, it’s about making fun of the people that are racist. It’s addressing the obscenity of the whole subject and making fun of it out of spite of it, not to endorse it. It also depends on how the joke is delivered and the content of the joke because it is easy to have a logical fallacy when delivering the joke. If the joke isn’t deep, and isn’t funny or it’s old and been told out or it’s a joke that’s playing of the racism. For example, if the joke was, what would you call an elevator full of black people. A box of chocolate. That isn’t that funny. It’s just a racist statement that’s playing off racism, not poking fun at it. It’s just pointing out the differences between someone’s color and doesn’t call for or invoke change. The audience of the joke also plays a big role into the outcome of a crude or darker humor joke. If you’re a doing a comedy show and you know that you have kids in the audience you probably shouldn’t make very inappropriate jokes because that won’t sit well with the parents in the audience, or just make jokes that have hidden meanings that kids won’t catch but the parents will. Depending on how well you know an audience will reflect how your jokes will come off and what kind of jokes you can make. You make different jokes depending on who you’re around. What Deborah Tannen says in The Argument Culture, she claims that with inappropriateness, comes closeness and a relationship. Joking in a way you would joke with a close friend and an acquaintance is completely different from one another (185-186). That can also lead to a logical fallacy. Misinterpreting your friendship and cracking a joke that would be offensive can lead to seeming insensitive or ignorant, or in extreme cases a racist. 

What separates a joke from being inappropriate or not? Is it based on the audience’s reaction, who’s telling the joke, or even the joke itself. Sarah Silverman was critiqued over a joke she made about bill cosby and his recent doping and rape scandals, and how she tweeted “Bill Cosby gave me one of those ‘don’t be dirty’ lectures but I was unconscious, and he was talking about my [asshole]” and how she was in the wrong for targeting Cosby and for it being a rape joke (Jenkins 134-135). She then inclined herself to post a more censored version on her twitter saying, “Bill Cosby gave me one of those ‘don’t be dirty’ lectures but I was rendered unconscious” This is one way of showing how targeting a certain person other than your self can be considered inappropriate by then audience. Another way was the rape joke made by Daniel Tosh at the Laugh factory, ‘During his Laugh Factory set, a young woman in the audience yelled, “, actually rape jokes are never funny.” Tosh is said to have maturely responded, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by like, five guys right now? Like right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her …” (Gay). This touches base on the line between acceptable inappropriate jokes and things that shouldn’t be joked about and what really doesn’t count as a joke if you say it. Its not okay, socially, to publicly target someone other than your self and put them down. Likewise, it’s not okay to joke about an issue like rape that is so present in our culture today and how It affects everyone. 

If rape jokes are off limits, and you can’t target people directly in comedy, well what can you do to make people laugh? Obviously, people still find ways around the social taboos of making those kinds of jokes but in some instances, they just go all in and don’t care about if they are politically correct or not. Bernie Mac’s Milk and Cookies skit represents an example of how inappropriate jokes were successful. One part in his skit, Bernie goes on about how he has custody of his sisters three kids after bagging her about being on drugs. There were several instances where the things he said could be taking as inappropriate. He had several instances where the things he said in the skit was crude, “These kids murderers now adays, these kids a kill ya, you ain’t gone kill me, I’ma kill them” (Mac) “Didn’t I tell ya boy you couldn’t have no godd**m milk and cookies, now it’s to god**m late, go the back the f**k upstairs before you get f**ked up down here.” They easily could take this out of context and say he was talking about killing children, which is a very big no. Then he goes on about fighting the two-year-old about some milk and cookies, which when you take that out of context it’s also bad, he’s talking about fighting a two-year-old. During his performance the only time the audience seemed displeased was when he called the six-year-old a faggot. Where he then referenced a Michael Jackson song and how he was a sissy as well. He answered with another crude joke clearly targeting someone else. Completely the same thing that Sarah Silverman did but she got ridiculed for it and he didn’t? What was the difference? Where is the line between what he did, and she did that deemed one inappropriate and one not? Who’s responsible for deeming a joke to crude for standup if not every comedian is held to the same standard? 
