I don't think that anything is a taboo subject for humor as long as it's not used to humiliate, denigrate, or generally be used for negative purposes. Humor, even on the most serious subject, can be used to teach, to make an important point, or bring about much-needed emotional and psychological relief.
It all depends on how it's used. What people find funny in general, is entirely subjective.
I think a person's emotional baggage can make something seem too serious to joke about. For me, I think rape is too serious to joke about. But I also understand that there's a reason for that, and if I didn't have that reason, it wouldn't be any more "serious" to me than anything else on the darker side of humanity. If we can depersonalize a "serious" thing, we are free to joke about it. If we cannot, we aren't.
It's hard for me to imagine a funny rape joke, but that may be because I've forgotten any I might ever have heard. I can imagine that there could be one, and I might laugh - but I would never tell it around you. I see your point.
Although I'm not sure that "depersonalize" is the right word, for me. "Detraumatize" might be. Humor serves as a way to detraumatize, for me. I've heard any number of funny and not-so-funny jokes about missing fingers and self-inflicted gunshot wounds in the past year and a half, for example. I have known some people who, in my circumstances, simply would never be able to laugh at that if they had suffered it themselves, but it doesn't bother me.
Rape is much more serious than my finger, of course, but there are people who wouldn't think so. Humor is a very strange and subjective thing.
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It all depends on how it's used. What people find funny in general, is entirely subjective.
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If we can depersonalize a "serious" thing, we are free to joke about it. If we cannot, we aren't.
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Although I'm not sure that "depersonalize" is the right word, for me. "Detraumatize" might be. Humor serves as a way to detraumatize, for me. I've heard any number of funny and not-so-funny jokes about missing fingers and self-inflicted gunshot wounds in the past year and a half, for example. I have known some people who, in my circumstances, simply would never be able to laugh at that if they had suffered it themselves, but it doesn't bother me.
Rape is much more serious than my finger, of course, but there are people who wouldn't think so. Humor is a very strange and subjective thing.
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NERD! :-)
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