<<<Have you ever read the Darwin Awards and laughed?>>>
I told you I didn't object to tasteless humor if it was funny.
The Darwin Awards were in my email, sent by a friend, when I got back yesterday. I deleted without reading them. In the past, I have laughed at some of them, and I laughed at some of the jokes you posted yesterday. If it's funny, I don't complain about it. Funny is very important.
To me, there isn't much difference in the Darwin Awards and the jokes you posted yesterday. Both are (the ones that work) funny. And both make me feel sad about... something. And I have found that the laughs are outbalanced by the sadness about that "something," so it's best for me to skip them. BTW, "taste" has nothing whatever to do with this, so I differ from those complaining about "bad taste" in that way.
But my comments were, really, about the remarks of yours I pasted, not about the jokes, or your pasting of them, except in so far as pasting them was a precursor of your hard remarks.
You are judging very harshly; and if someone you love does a stupid, reckless thing, not from evil but from immaturity, and pays with their life, you won't be so complacent about their death, taking the position that they deserved it for that mistake in judgment. Or something.
Yesterday I wrote that I have no particular "respect" for JK Jr, either. I'd like to add something to that.
It seems that he was a very nice person. And an unusually humble, decent one, given the opportunity life gave him to be arrogant, if it was in him to want that. Here's an anecdote: He was invited to give a commencement address, and receive an honorary degree, at a college in Maryland. He called them up and said he'd give the address on condition he not receive the degree. When they asked him why he was declining the degree, his reply was, "Ah, come on; you know I don't deserve it."
Also, he spent an unusually large amount of time on (unpublicized) charitable work. He, for example, established a foundation dedicated to improving the training of mental health workers, and particularly those who work with the retarded.
He lived in a loft in Tribeca, didn't have homes all over the world, got around his neighborhood on a bike, talked like an ordinary guy to everybody. The universal opinion of his neighbors and everyone else is that he was a very nice, decent, person.
Little things, but they make me respect him at least a little-- especially his self-aware remark about the honorary degree; and since he just died horribly, and I sort of insulted him with my remark, I feel like mentioning it.
If you read my comments on your post, you'll see that it wasn't the jokes I was commenting on, though.
I don't mean to be hard on you about those remarks, really, Steven. I was just giving my personal reaction. I think a generalized irritability toward celebrity-worship, which in our culture is so bizarre and insane and pathetic, and which irritability I share with you, conduces to an opposite emotional stance; but taking the stance can sometimes be its own error, imo. |
