At 06:48 PM 25/01/2002 -0800, Mary wrote:
>>But women , well, it s always ok to bash women.
Of course it isn't. It's not okay to bash anybody -- ever.
But, personally, I think the absence or banning of humour is as bad as--if
not worse than--perverse, at-the-expense-of-someone-else type humour. But
not all humour is like that. Some stuff -- lots of stuff --- is just funny,
inexplicably so. Thank goodness, I say. Laughter is really healthy.
Humour is an interesting phenomenon to me -- Apart from the fact that I
love to laugh, I find humour as difficult to think and talk about and
understand as music. I like funny people. But I detest the (apparently)
prevailing forms of humour that rely on having a "loser" (group or
individual) as the butt of the gag. By the way, there are just as many
"men" jokes as there are "women" jokes. I don't especially care for either
kind.
What counts as funny in the media is getting really weird too. Take, eg,
this website http://www.legallyblonde.com.au/ , apparently designed by a
young woman to sell products to young women. Really sicko stuff -- at least
I think it is. The "national blonde day" advertised on the website (there's
also a blonde jokes page) was one of the most successful public events of
last year. It was one of my students who bought this to my attention by
writing about it for an end-of-semester paper.
I must admit that I was at a loss to help her analyse it because I didn't
(couldn't) understand *why* anybody would do something like this, least of
all as a promotion for *anything*. Even less could I understand why it
actually worked.
I'd appreciate any suggestions as to how we could go about understanding
why something like this was successful amongst young women, what its
success means, and how we can grasp something like this in cultural,
social, and historical terms.
Best regards,
Phil
......................................................................................................
Opinions expressed in this email are my own unless otherwise stated.
If you have received this in error, please ignore and delete it.
Phil Graham
Senior Lecturer
UQ Business School
www.uq.edu.au/~uqpgraha
......................................................................................................
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Feb 11 2002 - 09:22:33 PST