I am leaning harder and harder on ‘political comedy isn’t comedy’ as a rule. ‘It’s just a joke,’ is a far too common smokescreen for people pushing terrible ideas and mocking people spreading bad ideas doesn’t do anything to stop them. It can even help. Politics isn’t supposed to be entertaining. It’s the decisions that affect how we live our lives. We need comedy in politics like we need strippers in surgery.
what I’ve leant into hard is the idea that those “clever comebacks” or “murdered by words” posts and communities do much more harm than good. 80% of the post is the most bigoted and hateful thing you’ve ever read, and 20% is “your mom lol”. sharing hate speech with a lame joke tacked on the bottom is still sharing hate speech, turns out
I was an OG mod for that sub and hearing you say that makes me so sad.
Here’s some history for you; MBW started out with high quality long-form content. Then one day an Admin hand selected it to feature on the Front Page which caused it to explode in popularity, going from about 5,000 subs to over 30,000 in just 48 hours. The new users started upvoting the old content which caused a 2nd and then a 3rd post to organically hit the FP. The growth accelerated.
Later that week the sole mod had a panic attack over the stress and while melting down they deleted the whole sub. At that point I offered to help and they added me as Mod #2. My first official act was working with the Admins to restore the sub from backup. From there we built a moderation team and all of the crap that goes with it like sub rules, wiki, automod, Discord channels.
As the sub got more popular people started posting ever more short form content which was causing the quality to go down even while the subscriber and traffic numbers continued to climb.
A few of us fought hard for a long time to hold the line on quality content, wanting to keep with the higher quality long form content that made it popular even if it meant lower subscriber and traffic numbers. We tried a lot of things to accomplish that but relevant to your comment one of the things was to create “Clever Comebacks” as a place to push the tsunami of Twitter/Tumblr/Facebook dreck. Sadly it didn’t work, people either posted stuff in both places and / or the mod team wouldn’t remove short form content from MBW because it got too popular before it was noticed and they didn’t want to delete something with tens or even hundreds of thousands of upvotes.
As the mod team continued to expand to deal with the ever higher traffic first one then another Powermod was added. I strongly objected to it but was over ruled by Mod #1. Then the Powermods began to stuff the mod team with their friends and sock puppet accounts. That’s when things really started going downhill. They’d delete things that were almost popular then repost it themselves. They’d refuse to remove Posts or Comments from their friends or sock puppets. They implemented bots without sharing the source code. They kept “accidentally” breaking the mod log. They forced endless re-writes of the sub rules, each one giving them more leeway on what fit the sub and what didn’t.
I eventually went hands-off because I couldn’t stop them and couldn’t deal with what MBW had turned into. I finally left the mod team during the API fiasco because they wouldn’t hold the line on the blackout.
So there you have it, a short history of MBW and CC from someone who knows.
On a side note Powermods ruin everything they touch and they’re now showing up on Lemmy.
Counterpoint, comedy is often a coping mechanism for people dealing with difficult things, be it politics or something else. I’ll agree that it’s not how everyone wants to deal with it, though, and I also agree that not everyone does it in a way that’s constructive (but I think that’s in execution, not everyone is funny and a bad joke without proper comedy is certainly just elevating a bad message)
But I think if I didn’t have political comedy, I’m not sure how I could deal with how absolute shit things have been for decades. For me that’s not memes though, it’s stuff like Last Week Tonight or something that actually is done with professional writers and researchers.
I get that humor is useful for making hard topics seem easier but some things should be hard. Would you consider dirty jokes an appropriate substitute for a sex ed class? Would drinking away your nervousness be a good way to prepare for a driving test? Serious matters need to be discussed frankly and honestly.
I used to kind of like Oliver sometimes, but then I saw the pattern and it ruined it for me. Every episode is 'Hello joke>subject>mock subject if funny looking, else mock thing next to subject>let’s get serious, bad thing is happening>it’s really bad>but don’t get outraged enough to go do something about it, here’s someone else taking care of it for you>callback to joke earlier>HBO-brand anti-capitalist recuperation catharsis complete. Go back to work.
Kind of a false equivalence, since you’re not educating yourself on memes exclusively (and if you are, god help you lol). Even in your own reference, you can absolutely make dirty jokes after sex ed, especially if it helps you remember the topics. Good jokes will both reinforce the right narrative, make it more approachable, and help people remember what matters on a topic. Still has to be a good joke though, and humor is subjective so hard to gauge.
I mostly draw the line when it targets a vulnerable person or persons (like, let’s not joke about rape), or makes someone in the room uncomfortable out of respect for that person (like a dirty joke in front of grandma). I suppose one could say any joke about the assholes in charge fall under that first category, but they harm vulnerable people, but they themselves are perfect targets.
Almost no one does one thing to the exclusion of all else, so few, if any, people are getting their knowledge purely from memes, but it doesn’t have to be exclusive to have an effect. Someone who drinks a gallon of soda a day isn’t necessarily getting all of their nutritional intake from soda, and, to borrow the phrase, god help them if so, but it is going to have effects on their life. Treating politics as entertainment also has secondary effects. Just like drinking soda can train your tongue to expect that level of sweetness, which can lead to troubling dietary choices, political humor trains you expect a punchline in a discussion about policy, which can lead to bad political choices.
And notice there how you changed what I said to argue against a point I didn’t make. I talked about jokes as a substitute for sex ed. You talked about jokes after sex ed. There is no mandated political ed class after which to make jokes. The shallow coverage on things like Oliver, tiktok, or other comedy shows is often the deepest, or the only, examination of a political subject people actually ingest, maybe supplemented by a few headlines, a shallow newscast, and an article they didn’t finish. They aren’t making memes about the thing they learned during an in-depth intended-to-inform class. They are making memes based on the memes they laughed at because of the vague half-knowledge they got from the media atmosphere.
Jokes have their place. No one would argue for a life completely lacking in humor, but, just like your example of rape, a subject that is extremely serious because of the long lasting and possibly life-destroying effect it can have on people, politics is too serious to be joked about in the public sphere. Joking about it fails to take serious something that can leave someone alive, but utterly unable to live.
The “funny” parts of the internet like Twitter and Reddit are also owned by millionaires and billionaires, their express purpose being to entertain you and show you ads, not to actually inform you. An especially egregious example is YouTube when a video essayist tries to explain how the Native Americans were killed by colonists, or how most of Latin America was brutalized by capitalist oppression resulting in millions dead, and people have to bleep out their words like they’re on cable TV.
I am leaning harder and harder on ‘political comedy isn’t comedy’ as a rule. ‘It’s just a joke,’ is a far too common smokescreen for people pushing terrible ideas and mocking people spreading bad ideas doesn’t do anything to stop them. It can even help. Politics isn’t supposed to be entertaining. It’s the decisions that affect how we live our lives. We need comedy in politics like we need strippers in surgery.
what I’ve leant into hard is the idea that those “clever comebacks” or “murdered by words” posts and communities do much more harm than good. 80% of the post is the most bigoted and hateful thing you’ve ever read, and 20% is “your mom lol”. sharing hate speech with a lame joke tacked on the bottom is still sharing hate speech, turns out
I was an OG mod for that sub and hearing you say that makes me so sad.
Here’s some history for you; MBW started out with high quality long-form content. Then one day an Admin hand selected it to feature on the Front Page which caused it to explode in popularity, going from about 5,000 subs to over 30,000 in just 48 hours. The new users started upvoting the old content which caused a 2nd and then a 3rd post to organically hit the FP. The growth accelerated.
Later that week the sole mod had a panic attack over the stress and while melting down they deleted the whole sub. At that point I offered to help and they added me as Mod #2. My first official act was working with the Admins to restore the sub from backup. From there we built a moderation team and all of the crap that goes with it like sub rules, wiki, automod, Discord channels.
As the sub got more popular people started posting ever more short form content which was causing the quality to go down even while the subscriber and traffic numbers continued to climb.
A few of us fought hard for a long time to hold the line on quality content, wanting to keep with the higher quality long form content that made it popular even if it meant lower subscriber and traffic numbers. We tried a lot of things to accomplish that but relevant to your comment one of the things was to create “Clever Comebacks” as a place to push the tsunami of Twitter/Tumblr/Facebook dreck. Sadly it didn’t work, people either posted stuff in both places and / or the mod team wouldn’t remove short form content from MBW because it got too popular before it was noticed and they didn’t want to delete something with tens or even hundreds of thousands of upvotes.
As the mod team continued to expand to deal with the ever higher traffic first one then another Powermod was added. I strongly objected to it but was over ruled by Mod #1. Then the Powermods began to stuff the mod team with their friends and sock puppet accounts. That’s when things really started going downhill. They’d delete things that were almost popular then repost it themselves. They’d refuse to remove Posts or Comments from their friends or sock puppets. They implemented bots without sharing the source code. They kept “accidentally” breaking the mod log. They forced endless re-writes of the sub rules, each one giving them more leeway on what fit the sub and what didn’t.
I eventually went hands-off because I couldn’t stop them and couldn’t deal with what MBW had turned into. I finally left the mod team during the API fiasco because they wouldn’t hold the line on the blackout.
So there you have it, a short history of MBW and CC from someone who knows.
On a side note Powermods ruin everything they touch and they’re now showing up on Lemmy.
Counterpoint, comedy is often a coping mechanism for people dealing with difficult things, be it politics or something else. I’ll agree that it’s not how everyone wants to deal with it, though, and I also agree that not everyone does it in a way that’s constructive (but I think that’s in execution, not everyone is funny and a bad joke without proper comedy is certainly just elevating a bad message)
But I think if I didn’t have political comedy, I’m not sure how I could deal with how absolute shit things have been for decades. For me that’s not memes though, it’s stuff like Last Week Tonight or something that actually is done with professional writers and researchers.
I get that humor is useful for making hard topics seem easier but some things should be hard. Would you consider dirty jokes an appropriate substitute for a sex ed class? Would drinking away your nervousness be a good way to prepare for a driving test? Serious matters need to be discussed frankly and honestly.
I used to kind of like Oliver sometimes, but then I saw the pattern and it ruined it for me. Every episode is 'Hello joke>subject>mock subject if funny looking, else mock thing next to subject>let’s get serious, bad thing is happening>it’s really bad>but don’t get outraged enough to go do something about it, here’s someone else taking care of it for you>callback to joke earlier>HBO-brand anti-capitalist recuperation catharsis complete. Go back to work.
Kind of a false equivalence, since you’re not educating yourself on memes exclusively (and if you are, god help you lol). Even in your own reference, you can absolutely make dirty jokes after sex ed, especially if it helps you remember the topics. Good jokes will both reinforce the right narrative, make it more approachable, and help people remember what matters on a topic. Still has to be a good joke though, and humor is subjective so hard to gauge.
I mostly draw the line when it targets a vulnerable person or persons (like, let’s not joke about rape), or makes someone in the room uncomfortable out of respect for that person (like a dirty joke in front of grandma). I suppose one could say any joke about the assholes in charge fall under that first category, but they harm vulnerable people, but they themselves are perfect targets.
Almost no one does one thing to the exclusion of all else, so few, if any, people are getting their knowledge purely from memes, but it doesn’t have to be exclusive to have an effect. Someone who drinks a gallon of soda a day isn’t necessarily getting all of their nutritional intake from soda, and, to borrow the phrase, god help them if so, but it is going to have effects on their life. Treating politics as entertainment also has secondary effects. Just like drinking soda can train your tongue to expect that level of sweetness, which can lead to troubling dietary choices, political humor trains you expect a punchline in a discussion about policy, which can lead to bad political choices.
And notice there how you changed what I said to argue against a point I didn’t make. I talked about jokes as a substitute for sex ed. You talked about jokes after sex ed. There is no mandated political ed class after which to make jokes. The shallow coverage on things like Oliver, tiktok, or other comedy shows is often the deepest, or the only, examination of a political subject people actually ingest, maybe supplemented by a few headlines, a shallow newscast, and an article they didn’t finish. They aren’t making memes about the thing they learned during an in-depth intended-to-inform class. They are making memes based on the memes they laughed at because of the vague half-knowledge they got from the media atmosphere.
Jokes have their place. No one would argue for a life completely lacking in humor, but, just like your example of rape, a subject that is extremely serious because of the long lasting and possibly life-destroying effect it can have on people, politics is too serious to be joked about in the public sphere. Joking about it fails to take serious something that can leave someone alive, but utterly unable to live.
The “funny” parts of the internet like Twitter and Reddit are also owned by millionaires and billionaires, their express purpose being to entertain you and show you ads, not to actually inform you. An especially egregious example is YouTube when a video essayist tries to explain how the Native Americans were killed by colonists, or how most of Latin America was brutalized by capitalist oppression resulting in millions dead, and people have to bleep out their words like they’re on cable TV.