and people have the choice to get offended by anything. the only difference is that making a joke about a genocide is a douche move, while getting offended over a genocide joke is not. unfortunately, several people in this thread think it should be the opposite, that people who react towards insensitive and forgeted up jokes are the devil incarnate, and all profanity and disrespect should be the law of the land
i get what you mean about the 'construct' and 'context' part of your post, but in this case, taking advantage of people who probably dont speak proper english in a developing country to say an extremely insensitive phrase isn't a well constructed joke.
you're right, anyone has the right to be offended, but your offensivness should never reach a level where youre trying to discredit and slander someones reputation and business just because you don't agree with their humor. if they're genuinely hateful people than id understand, but that is not the case here
do you understand what I mean by construct? cause you can tell a genocide joke and not be a richard. i mean, am i classified as a richard just because I enjoy and partake in offensive humor? does that quality of me immediately invalidate all the good things I do on a daily basis? while the subject matter of the joke is key to
how you construct it, it's not part of the construction
the construct of the joke is your assessment of the current social situation and how you deliver that joke in said social situation. purely the mechanics of the joke, not the content. if i just walked up to a group of people at a party and said "death to all jews haha" that's not really that funny and a lot of people would find it offensive or uncomfortable. a poorly constructed joke. now if i were to deliver that same joke with a witty story and a witty punchline that's based within the bounds of the social situation at hand, then you can make a funny jokes about genocide. Can the people I told that joke to get offended? Of course. but once they start fighting me and bullying me for it, their getting their stuff kicked in. not because I'm a richard, but because humor is not meant to be taken seriously. it's a joke. if you don't like it, simply make it known in a respectable manner
taking things out of context to prove a point about something as serious as anti-semitism isn't respectable by any means, and that way of promoting information only breeds ignorance, especially when it's done by an entity like the Wall Street Journal. they're doing more damage to the overall picture than the humor is
