So Who Can You Still Joke About?

White People copyI’ve been trying to come up with a list of nationalities or ethnic groups—even subgroups—about whom it is still safe to make a joke publicly, since political correctness is shrinking the domain down to the vanishing point.  Before long you won’t be able to make jokes about “little green men” from Mars, for fear of offending illegal aliens “undocumented” immigrants.  I’m not even sure you can joke about white people any more, like Martin Mull and Allen Rucker did 20 years ago in A History of White People in America.  Not even Sony would risk publishing this right now.

So here’s my list of groups or subgroups you can still safely make public jokes about:

1. Jewish mothers.

2. That’s it. (And Scott will have to tell me if Item #1 is in fact correct. But to this point I haven’t heard the ADL react the way FAIR reacts to anything satirical about Islam.)

Well yes, maybe you can make jokes and the French and Germans and the British, but fashionable opinion holds it against you.

The great John Cleese appeared on Bill Maher’s show last weekend, and offered an intelligent discussion of why you can’t joke about Mexicans or Muslims, and why it’s condescending. Plus this: “If you make jokes about people who are going to kill you, there is a sort of tendency to hold back a little.”  (About four minutes long.)

Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.

Responses