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Wednesday, April 6, 2022

Humour Under Assault and Battery

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Not only for making jokes, but laughing at them, too!

Yes, this is a take related to the Academy Awards (otherwise known as the Oscars), which is a ceremony that I and most people don't actually care about. However, as you likely know, an event happened at the most recent 94th Academy Awards of 2022 where actor Will Smith slapped comedian Chris Rock in the face because Chris Rock made a G.I. Jane joke about Will Smith's wife, Jada Pinkett Smith.

The details are unusually above the family-friendly atmosphere that KoopaTV coincidentally has, including liberal usage of a four-letter swear word. ...I'll use it in this article. But conservatively, you see. ...Alright, maybe a bit more.


Will Smith then won an award after the slap and was never arrested (though Chris Rock didn't want him to be), though he did resign from the Academy after. There is an upcoming meeting among members on what to do with Will Smith and his award and his future career, but that's not that important now. What's important is the mindset that makes you think it's okay to walk up to someone and assault them for telling a joke. Some call it toxic masculinity. Others say it's a man defending his wife's honour. But I think it's the same intolerance for humour that is sweeping the whole planet Earth.

But before that, I will say that humour is far from dead, even if it's been beaten up. There are many memes people made of the event. A lot of them videogame related! Here are some of my favourites:










That was a fun moment of levity! And it's good people are still pushing humour. Because Will Smith? Not into it. That worries comedians like Kathy Griffin (you may remember her for inspiring this decapitated Mario art) if people consider words to be VIOLENCE that must be DEFENDED against with VIOLENCE... of a physical nature.



(Is she capitalising “comedian” like a lot of media outlets are capitalising “black”? ...See embed below. This person believes that anything bad that happens to a black person is white supremacy, by the way.)



But, yes, the “words are violence” crowd is trying to take over the public discourse and set the standards for everyone. They have friends among religious zealots. (More on that later.) It all goes back to the “I'm a victim” mindset and competition. If words are violence, that makes it way easier to be a victim! And if you already are one, you can further augment your victimhood résumé!

I already told my personal story of how a Google+ gaming group moderator wanted to see all satire-based websites eliminated off the Internet and banned me for posting my funny Ledge Trump article because I “made fun of a serious issue.” That same mindset declares you can't reference Jada Pinkett Smith's involuntary baldness because it's a medical condition. (And yet people make fun of male baldness all the time?) I think you can joke about anything. Prohibiting levity is an exertion of power. Some would say... THAT'S a form of violence. Since it's stripping (what should still be) a right.

Anyway, I have a BRAND NEW story of me being banned somewhere because of levity. As of YESTERDAY! Oh, but this time I wasn't even the one making the joke. All I did was express that it's amusing and funny and that I laughed. This happened on the Pokémon battle simulator Pokémon Showdown, which is ran by the idiots at Smogon University. Their software is still inferior to Pokémon Online, by the way.

Anyway, what happened is that this guy named gamerfox04 was being badly outplayed by a troll named SharkHatter. Like, gamerfox04 was losing to a Focus Sash+Endeavor+Quick Attack Rattata despite having TWO Ghost types (which totally shuts down the strategy), as well as losing to an Imprison → Transform Mew and not even switching out of having Struggle as his only option despite not being trapped. In other words, he was being PWNED. Unable to battle his way out of a figurative paper bag, he decided to report SharkHatter to Pokémon Showdown staff for RACISM, because SharkHatter had a Regieleki named “Allah's chosen” and it used Explosion.


Pokémon Showdown Regieleki Explosion Allah's chosen SharkHatter gamerfox04 Islamic Muslim suicide bomber terrorism joke
This references radical Islamic terrorists’ belief that suicide bomb attacks are religiously justified and meritorious.
(There is plenty of disagreement and debate about this among other Muslim people.
You'll notice only the people complaining about the joke believe that all Muslim people are supposed to be represented here.)


Anyway, gamerfox04 went and posted that replay to the lobby chat, inviting hundreds of people to go look at it. So I went in there and said it was funny (and that gamerfox04 played really badly). A guy named Butterscotch77 said that jokes can be offensive, and therefore SharkHatter must be punished for making a joke. I said that being amusing is a defence against this, and I questioned why avoiding offensiveness is to be society's main priority. Then Butterscotch77 weirdly was saying that non-Americans also use Pokémon Showdown, so I asked why only Americans are allowed to have a sense of humour. I never got an answer to that, but Butterscotch77 then reported ME for finding the whole affair amusing. And then I got locked from talking for “racist remarks and apologetic towards islamophobia”. It was never explained what my racist remark was, but I will say that the only ones who are afraid of the Islamists in that conversation were gamerfox04, Butterscotch77, and the moderator BreadLoeuf.

If you reduce something to a punchline, you are, in a way, taking away fear of that something. I mean, you can laugh about it. You don't have to be deathly afraid of it. So I was laughing about the suicidal radical Islamic terrorist Regieleki. But it's the Pokémon Showdown moderator and the anti-humour brigade that is terrified of what they might do. And, to be fair, these religious zealots certainly proved their capability to kill and destroy things over cartoonish humour. And there should be some fear over that, sure. It's not unreasonable.

But whether it's Chris Rock or SharkHatter, they want to silence anyone making edgy jokes (which are the best kind). And they also want to silence anyone who finds that humour funny, because we don't fit in the new world they want to make. A world of bland, boring interaction where you cry over perceived oppression. (Though I don't know if they'll still cry about oppression in the hypothetical new world where they've wiped out the oppressors. ...I guess they'll turn on one another, like that Twitter person I embedded earlier can be seen doing by saying any bad thing black men do to black women is because of white supremacy.)

Bringing this back, I promised I'd write the f-word in this article. Besides finding Regieleki blowing itself up as a radical Islamist terrorist funny (by the way, that had a good ending, since it didn't even KO its target), as well as finding Will Smith vs. Chris Rock memes funny, I also find random, out-of-context or tangential bashing of BALAN WONDERWORLD (now one year old!) to be really funny. Like dunkey name-dropping BALAN WONDERWORLD in this description about Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin, or how this Dinger City (competitive Mario Superstar Baseball group) April Fools video randomly begins with discussion about BALAN WONDERWORLD and how it's a bad game.




Is Yuji Naka going to walk up to me or someone else and slap us in the face while saying “KEEP MY GAME'S NAME OUT YOUR FUCKING MOUTH!”? Or how about the #Wonderworldpositivity hashtag cult on Twitter, which invented that hashtag because the normal #BalanWonderworld hashtag is full of accurate (negative) messages about that disaster of a game? Are they going to go violent? BALAN WONDERWORLD cultists are already mentally unhinged people. But I don't think we should live in fear of them. I'm not Balanphobic.


This article is all over the place, but Ludwig likes its message. Did you? Or do you think there are lines that jokes shouldn't cross, such as if someone can be offended? (Is there anything that CAN'T offend SOMEONE out there nowadays? Think about the implications if your rights end at where someone is offended before commenting.) Feel free to joke about whatever or offend KoopaTV's staff in the comments section. You won't be silenced. Though you might be humiliated in the monthly newsletter as having the worst comment of the month.


You may wonder if Yuji Naka would actually want to be associated with BALAN WONDERWORLD... He would. His publisher just barred him from doing so for a year.
This article ties together KoopaTV's belief in levity with its free speech advocacy.
We all know humour isn't the only thing at stake. So is the truth, and truth-tellers are targets for murder.

4 comments :

  1. I still laugh at this: https://twitter.com/ImagesMetroid/status/1508287240845377544

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I wish I had that frame-perfect timing that Will Smith has.

      Delete
    2. Doesn't the creator of the KH video know they are Dreamworks characters? Disney does not own the Madagascar characters Marty and Gloria and Shark Tale's Oscar as of yet.

      Delete
    3. Could be that Future Sight we were talkin' 'bout before!

      Delete

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