To the Editor:
Michelle Kraemer would do well to remember the first rule of humor: every joke needs its butt. In "Weekend Update: Just A Joke?" [Jan. 23, 1997, The Dartmouth], Kraemer expresses disdain that a joke contained in a blitzed list of parties "effectively reduces the woman to the sum of her body parts."
As for myself, I thought it merely made that particular woman look like a creature that is a double-entendre for a lone body part: an ass. That is what humor does. Somebody is portrayed as a fool.
Women (as in this example, although I'm not convinced that the particular prostitute is representative of an entire gender), Asians (as in a recent Bear Bones cartoon strip), Pollocks (Who hasn't heard those?), Southerners (my Northern friends tell me those with glee), and every other imaginable group has been and will be the subject of jokes.
Contrary to Kraemer's opinion, this is not a bad thing. Each of us is a fool at times, and jokes remind us that P.T. Barnum's maxim predicted our births too.
Like the prostitute, I did not see the koala's wily ploy coming. That is why his verbal trickery is so amusing. This is not sexist fare; it's wordplay! It is not an attempt to subjugate women; it's an exercise in cleverly employed homonyms!
Whether the joke is offensive or not, however, it certainly does not warrant censorship. Although Michelle Kraemer notes that she "by no means advocate[s] censorship or the preservation of so-called 'p.c.' sensibilities without thought or discussion," all that does is to distance herself from a group whose existence I previously was unaware of -- those who arbitrarily impose censorship.
Make no mistake about it, censorship always is a carefully thought-out, extensively-discussed measure. It's still a bad one.
