by Gary Gilson
Newsworthy 1999

Based on complaints the News Council has received in recent months, some people can't, and won't take a joke. They say that jokes are usually made at someone's expense, and they don't want to pay the freight with their hurt feelings.

Based on your personal standard, would you publish or not publish the following cartoons?

Example: Pioneer Press editorial cartoonist Kirk Anderson's comment on the University of Minnesota basketball team's academic-cheating scandal. It showed black ballplayers on the court, with white men in the stands saying, "Of course, we don't let them learn to read or write!"

A lot of black people took offense, saying that plenty of blacks, including athletes, read and write very well, and that the cartoon perpetuated a stereotype. The City of St. Paul's human rights commissioner even asked for a review board to screen cartoons for racial sensitivity before publication.

Others said they saw Anderson's cartoon (as he intended it to be seen) as indicting whites who exploit black athletes by taking so much of their time for sports that they have little or no time to study.

Example: A Minnesota Daily "Humor Issue" article fabricated a story of an assault on a foreign teaching assistant by a frustrated student. An angry reader said it was "reprehensible to suggest that violent anger is the proper response to someone's difficulties in speaking English."

Others saw humor in the spoof story because they recognized a truth: the frustration of many students whose education depends upon T.A.'s who may be academically gifted, but cannot speak English very well and thus can't communicate.

Example: An outstate weekly news-paper regularly ran a freelance column that included Ole & Lena jokes, making Scandinavians the butt of stories about ethnically based stupidity. A subscriber, whose ancestors were Norwegian, complained.

Others we spoke with, mostly people of Scandinavian extraction, liked the jokes and wanted more.

An Expert Perspective

That seems to be crucial, according to a seasoned professional in the hurt-feelings business. Mort Ryweck, retired director of the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC), says acceptable use of ethnic humor depends upon the setting, the intent, the teller, the listener and the current climate. Is it hostile? Friendly?

Ryweck's successor, Jay Tcath, recently resigned from JCRC and starting a similar job in Chicago, asks: Are there rules, or guidelines - for example, "Don't make fun of people based on their ethnic, religious or physical description" - to which there may be exceptions? Has the group being targeted been historically and brutally victimized?

If the teller is a newspaper columnist, such as the late Chicagoan Mike Royko, who took tongue-in-cheek pokes at Poles, drunks, and Chicago politicians and newspapermen, Tcath says, "Give him a pass."

If we don't give some jokes a little leeway, says Tcath, "How can we have a culture that is engaging, humorous and self-critical, without homogenizing the society?"

That argument doesn't satisfy the complainant in the Ole & Lena case. He says those jokes put down Norwegians, and he sees no excuse for it. The columnist who wrote those jokes has now stopped, and the complainant is happy, but a lot of readers and the publisher are not. They liked to laugh, even at their own expense. Obviously, they didn't think the expense was too great.

I recently met an Indian woman who has one of the best dispositions of any human being I've ever known. I told her about a journalism class I once taught where a majority of the students were black. One day a few of them turned to the only Indian student in the class and said they'd never heard Indian humor. Would he give them an example? He did:

An Indian was dancing around a hole in the ice on Lake Superior, swigging whisky and chanting, "Ho-ho-ho-ho-ho, four," "Ho-ho-ho-ho-ho, four," and he spotted a Finlander watching him with great curiosity. The Indian waved to the Finlander to join him, and he kept passing the bottle back and forth as they both danced around the hole in the ice.

"Ho-ho-ho-ho-ho, four," the Indian chanted, over and over, until the Finlander drank so much that he fell into the hole and disappeared forever under the ice. The Indian went on dancing, now chanting, "Ho-ho-ho-ho-ho, five!"

My new Indian friend howled at the joke. She howled because for a change the Indian, a representative of a historically brutalized group, came out on top.

Ah, but what about the Finns?

Years ago, when so-called Polish jokes flooded the United States, an enterprising researcher decided to ask residents of Poland what they thought of Polish jokes. The Poles were baffled; they said they had not heard of Polish jokes. So someone told them a few. "Aha!" said the Poles, "You mean the Czech jokes."

To paraphrase Gilda Radner, "It's always somebody."

If a joke teller exerts power over the butt of the joke, and uses the joke to maintain his power, the joke teller is out of line and should be confronted. Nat Hentoff, the journalist and civil libertarian, says the best antidote to bad speech is not censorship, but more speech. I agree. How about you?