Thursday, July 14, 2011

It's Not Funny, Part 2

A quick update on Tuesdays post. I predicted Jay Leno would do the wrong thing. I just watched the monologue online. For a moment, I thought I would be proven wrong. Sadly, I was not. Somebody was assaulted, mutilated, and almost killed... but there was a penis joke to be made, so naturally Jay had to make it.

I'll say it again: It's not funny.

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

It's Not Funny

Today a story broke about a criminal who drugged their victim and tied them up. While the victim was waking up, the attacker took a knife and cut off part of the victim's body and proceeded to mutilate it.

Does that horrify you? Can you imagine how terrified the victim must have felt? Can you see the blood? Can you comprehend the physical pain?

The victim was a man. The criminal was his wife. The body part was his penis.

Is it funny now? If you have a husband, would you laugh and say "I'm going to take a knife and mutilate your body and maybe watch you bleed to death"?

Perhaps you've already heard this story on Facebook or maybe a friend e-mailed you a link. If so, make no mistake--it wasn't because somebody wanted to call your attention to the horrors of the world or to raise awareness for domestic violence. You heard about it because somebody thought it was funny.

Of course, the story doesn't open with a graphic description of the attack. The lead is "Woman Cuts Off Husband's Penis." It's stripped of the graphic truth and boiled down to two ideas:
  1. Penis. Ha ha ha.
  2. Men aren't always the ideal husbands. Ha ha ha.
There is nothing about this that's funny. But that won't stop the media from treating it like there is. Even when you see this on the evening news and they deliver the story with a straight face, you know they like the story because they simply like talking about titillating things.

And if you stick around after the news, I guarantee you that Jay Leno will be making actual attempts to get laughs from this. I hope he doesn't. I hope he has the common decency to realize that domestic violence, torture, vivisection, and attempted murder aren't funny. Does anybody think he'll do the right thing? Yeah, me neither.

But you can. When you see the e-mail about the assault land in your inbox, don't forward it to your friends like it's a good joke. When you see a link on Facebook, just type the following as your comment: It's not funny.

Monday, July 11, 2011

As mentioned earlier, here's Ben Folds' audience participation recording of Working Day!



Yeah, I really like this song.