Congrats: You're an Asshole

In our new post-racial and post-feminist world, where we all live in harmony as perfect equals, I frequently read the argument—generally mounted by straight white dudez who generously inform me they're way hipper than I am—that not making fun of women, or people of color, or LGBTQIs, or the disabled, or dwarves, or fat people, etc. etc. etc. is its own form of prejudice, because it tacitly treats those people as too vulnerable to withstand a bit of teasing.

Okay, actually what they say is: "Dude, I make fun of everyone!" but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt their argument is more sophisticated than equality-by-ridicule.

And the thing is, I actually agree with the position that no one is off limits—except that's never what's actually being said in these conversations. What's actually being said is not "I won't treat women et. al. with kid gloves," but instead "I want to make fun of girls for being girls."

This weekend, Saturday Night Live provided the perfect example of the difference between making fun of someone despite X, and making fun of someone because of X.


In the first clip, cast member Fred Armisen (who also plays Barack Obama despite not being black) plays New York Governor David Paterson, who is legally blind. The raison d'être for having Paterson in the sketch is the Blagojevich scandal and the vacant New York senate seat, on which Paterson could comment with no reference at all to his being blind. But instead, the sketch is rife with ridiculously juvenile blind jokes: Ho ho—he faces the wrong way; ho ho—he holds his chart upside down. Sigh.

And in the second clip, the "joke" continues as Paterson wanders in front of the camera while Amy Poehler is saying her goodbyes to the show. Hilarious.

Paterson and the National Federation of the Blind are not amused. (You gotta love a publication that reports on taking cheap shots at a blind guy by using a tacky pun right in the headline.)

This kind of stuff is just utterly pathetic and totally indefensible. I mean, "don't make fun of blind people" is the sort of lesson one learns in fucking kindergarten.

I just don't understand why the distinction is so hard for so many people to make: It isn't about David Paterson, the blind person, being off-limits; it's about David Paterson's disability being off-limits. If all you've got is "Haw-haw—you're blind!" that's not actually a joke.

And it's not. fucking. edgy.

Making fun of people for being different couldn't be less edgy. In fact, it's so not edgy, and the insistence on turning people's not-maleness, not-whiteness, not-straightness, not-wev into punchlines so unrelentingly ubiquitous, that the only edgy thing left to do is act like a fucking grown-up and reject this tiresome excuse for humor.

I don't find making fun of blindness amusing.

Ooh, get me. I'm a rebel.