Is it only offensive if it’s not funny?

(otherwise known as How Big a Hypocrite Am I?: a continuation of my diarrhea of the fingers about the use of the words retard and retarded)

So while I was sick this week, one of the things I watched in my basement sick camp was Louis CK’s new DVD, Chewed Up. Louis works in the Carlin school, where he likes words for words’ sake… and some of his favorite words include those that would be thought dirty or distasteful or rude. All of which I give a big thumbs up to most of the time.

In fact, the opening of this hour is all about words that he likes as words that are not acceptable out in the world and he goes into a great bit about some of them, including “nigger,” “faggot,” and “cunt.” I kept waiting (of course) for him to bring up “retard,” but since that’s my obsession — and probably because for most people it doesn’t even cross their minds that it might be objectionable — it didn’t come up. But anyway, he went on and on about these words and using them in and out of context, etc, etc, and I found myself in agreement with most of what he said.

And then he talked specifically about “the n-word.” Not “nigger,” but people actually saying “the n-word” as a substitute, and how he finds that offensive, because the euphemism means is that when someone says “the n-word” on TV or whatever, what your brain does is it says, “oh, ‘the n-word’ means ‘nigger,’” so in effect whoever says “the n-word” is really making you think the word “nigger,” and that’s even worse — you never would have said or thought it on your own, but there it is, living in your head now.

But anyway, so the larger point would be that I basically agree — intellectually — in the larger point, that words are words, etc, just like in this Carlin bit. But that doesn’t stop my blood from running cold the second I hear or see the word “retard” or “retarded,” as happened later in CK’s set when he said something his 4-year-old daughter did was “borderline retarded.” I could tell by the tone that he didn’t mean anything by it, didn’t think about it at all before it came out, that’s just what he said.

(and in my more honest moments, I have to admit that that’s the word that pops into my head still, to this day, when I think something’s stupid, which I hate)

But it made me not laugh at his joke and then wonder if I was “allowed” to find anything else he said funny or if I should just be offended and dump whatever other enjoyment I got out of his comedy into the trash.

The short story is I still think Louis is funny. But there’s always gonna be that cringe, maybe, waiting for him to pop out with the Word That Dare Not Be Spoken (see, it’s in your head now, though, isn’t it? dammit!)

*I’ll also say that it made me wonder if part of the deal with Louis CK and Carlin and anyone else who so easily brushes off the “it’s just words!” thing is ’cause they’re straight white men. As CK talks about in his special, being a white man is pretty great… what’s somebody going to call you, a “cracker,” which will take you back to the time when you were the only one who could own land and people? I mean, empirically, sure, they “get” why it’s bad, but until something hits you on an emotional level, it’s pretty easy to dismiss.

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And I also started to watch Step Brothers, even though Tim warned me it was bad — and oh, was it ever bad — and noticed that in the first 45 minutes or so that I got through, “retard” was bandied about a few times… not because it was funny, even, just more in a “why the fuck not” kind of way. Which, combined with the “retard” tossed into Semi-Pro for seemingly no funny reason, really puts me off Will Ferrell. Really, Will Ferrell’s repetitious and not-so-funny comedy should put me off Will Ferrell, but there you go. And what I really want to know is if you’re gonna boycott Tropic Thunder for using the word, why did Semi-Pro, released that same summer, get to escape without notice? I’d argue that at least Stiller using “full retard” in that scene had a point that Ferrell’s use of the word didn’t at all, which makes Semi-Pro much more offensive in my book. Not that I agreed with the boycott tactic in the first place…

…but I digress. I wonder, though, if I found Step Brothers to be more funny, would I be finding excuses for the use of retard in the movie? Don’t know, really, ’cause it wasn’t and I don’t have any.

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Back to the boycott thing, again, I mostly think it was a boneheaded tactic. Does some more attention need to be paid to the way we use language and how that affects people? Sure. Is a boycott/banning the way to approach that? I really don’t think so. I’d point to some of the letters I wrote a few months back as a way to start a dialogue about that issue, which occurred again just yesterday. One of the dad blogs that I read pretty regularly, MetroDad, had a post up on Monday talking about a three-year-old’s sense of humor. And number four on his list was “retarded knock-knock jokes.” Now, MetroDad has proven himself to be both a good writer and a fairly sensitive sort — though not above the potty humor I often enjoy — so I was pretty surprised to see him throw that out there.  And to his credit, when I posted a blog comment about it — nothing inflammatory, just a hey now: