Every rodeo has a clown
and bucking horses
We love a good laugh here at the ranch. Most cowboys do. If you’ve ever been to a rodeo, you’ll have noticed that it’s a place where we horses shine. Some of us buck. Our bucking is as much appreciated as cowboys’ riding skills. Some horses score as many points as the rider do. Other horses run as fast as they can, while making a few very sharp turns, before leaving the competition area in around fifteen seconds. Most rodeos will end in a heart-warming act in which a herd of us just runs around, so the audience can leave in high spirits.
In spite of all the horse magic, no rodeo is complete without a good clown. Cowboy Jake from Hanging Puddle Ranch has been acting as the clown in the rodeo near here for years. He doesn’t want to have a high profile. Being the rodeo clown is his time to shine each year. To remember the event, he will post a recording of his performance online. This year though, he found his act to be deleted as it “violated community standards on hateful conduct.” He was upset beyond words.
When I heard that, I didn’t know what I was hearing. I thought that only the Soviet Union had rules defining “communist humour,” but apparently we did too. After some investigation, it seemed that both MetaPost and LookingGlass had defined “community standards on hateful conduct,” which included humour. Moreover, these “community standards” were too similar to be a coincidence … they could have been copy-pasted into a large language model with the task to formulate the same content in slightly different wording. Both sets of “standards” had overly broad and vague definitions of “hateful conduct,” using the word “hate” as window dressing for obvious censorship to accomplish nudging motives. Also, both sets of standards shared some similarities with those from the Soviet days, in the sense that one could read between the lines that there are “oppressors” and “oppressed groups.” It could be understood that “punching up” against perceived oppressors was acceptable, but “punching down” (by making a joke) against the oppressed would lead to account deletion. In my own view, the open adoption of a double standard should be enough for us not to use these platforms, but Jake was still on them and became the victim of that.
Jake had made a few jokes about how nimble and lean the saddle bronc and barrel racing riders need to be, by saying things like “Can you imagine a three hundred and fifty pound couch potato on horseback?” Personally, I don’t want to imagine how hard it is to have such a weight on my back, but that’s just my horse opinion. Nonetheless, MetaPost deleted his account for “hateful conduct,” because apparently “the fat” are a “protected category” of oppressed people and making jokes abut them is “punching down”. The fat seem to be somehow oppressed by the meagre, who oppress them by not eating as much.
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So-called “content moderation” guidelines can go very far. Discord is a social media platform mainly popular in gaming and developer communities. I already commented on their “medical misinformation” policy. Their “hateful conduct” policy turns out to be as entertaining a read. Here is how they define hate speech that leads to sanctions on the platform:
Discord claims to be a place of “acceptance and inclusivity [sic],” yet then thinks it can accomplish that by banning statements on “protected characteristics,” which seems a little off. If we truly want to reach a state of acceptance and inclusion, we should promote to accept others the way they are: not only their characteristics, but also their opinions. Yet in Discord’s world, “acceptance” seems to be a one-way street, wherein certain groups’ opinions need to be “accepted,” whereas others’ opinions can be rejected.
In other words, any statement that anyone with certain pre-defined characteristics can claim to be offended by, can lead to being banned from Discord, including jokes.
Humour is best when it is related to tangible societal subjects and builds up to a punchline. Invariably, at some point along the path, the joke will have referred to a characteristic that at least somebody can pretend to be offended by. In a working democracy, none of that should be an issue. There are jokes that I like and others that I don’t like and will run away from. No problem: I didn’t like what I heard, but just refused to hear more of it and ran away. I did not suffer any harm whatsoever. Nonetheless, there are groups these days who advocate for “comedy safety standards,” also in comedy clubs, to “protect” the audience from “unsafe” comedy. The latter derives from the nonsensical notion that words are thought to cause “irreparable psychological harm,” which is of course impossible. The universe designed us to be stronger than that. In fact, we can only learn to overcome negative emotions by experiencing them.
Good comedians have known since the dawn of ages that they will never be able to please the entire crowd. Comedian Jerry Seinfeld recently stated that a comedy show can only have two outcomes: it is either funny or not. We don’t need rules to tell us what is funny. We will laugh if it is. We are not able to produce non-binary laughter. Moreover, from the comedian’s perspective, it doesn’t matter too much what some individuals in the audience think of it. As per Jerry Seinfeld, by the time they’d worry about that, comedians are already in a different club talking to a different set of people. Pretty correct, except for the fact that the internet keeps a permanent record of what comedians have said and sites like MetaPost provide the digital “community” where the offended can multiply their outrage, ad infinitum.
(I’m not here to multiply outrage ad infinitum, but to provide solutions. If you like that, please subscribe)
Unfortunately, comedians have started to account for what happens in the digital echo chambers of the offended. Very good examples of this trend are Ricky Gervais and Dave Chappelle. Both have been known as left-leaning comedians for a while, a notion that has gradually dissipated until they eventually ended up at the receiving end of hatred from the offended. Note that content moderation policies will “not tolerate hatred,” except if it comes from certain groups of “oppressed” people. Those are generally individuals with clearly identifiable psychological problems and platforms allow them to be offended and spew hatred as much as they please.
In 2022, Ricky Gervais and Dave Chappelle managed to get on the hate list when they launched a pair of exquisite Netflix specials. Each of these shows criticized the radical transgenderism and gender identity movement in a very funny way. In these shows, they had set the bar for comedy very high. High standards are difficult to maintain, so one could have expected their next shows to disappoint. However, their 2024 shows differed from the previous ones in exactly the same, peculiar way.
Both comedians decided to show the broad public that they were still “manly enough” to “punch down” by composing a set of cheap one-liners that denigrated disabled persons. In so doing, they failed to adopt the truly courageous route: continue punching up against the trans medico-pharmaceutical industrial complex, which is one of the most oppressive forces in present day society. Individuals who have been trans for a decade did not start out as oppressors. However, their movement has been hijacked by financial interests. These corporations, composed of major pharmaceutical companies and medical service providers, have discovered that they can create billion dollar markets out of thin air by convincing enough people that they are “born in the wrong body.” To make more people think that their body is unfit for their gender identity only works if so-called “gender dysphoria” is omnipresent, such that it is perceived to be normative, whence the pressure on fellow corporations to adopt measures like mandatory pronoun policies, even in cases when gender is obvious. These policies brainwash a fraction of the population into thinking that “things are not the way they used to be,” by making them feel that they have to adapt their well-tested ways to accommodate for increasing perceived prevalence of gender dysphoria.
In reality, what really has changed is the immense gravy train generated by trans “affirmative” care. For instance, the market for gender reassignment surgery in the United States alone is estimated at $722 million and projected to grow at a staggering 11% annual growth rate. It is thereby forecast to reach a size of $5 billion by 2030, all due to the “increasing prevalence of gender dysphoria.” Similar statements can be made about hormone therapies and puberty blockers. The latter come with very significant side-effects and are administered to children who do not have the capacity to give informed consent. As recently as a decade ago, there was virtually no market for these products. Pharmaceutical companies who push these “therapies” do have motives other than to “help teenagers with gender dysphoria.” The unrealized market potential for pharmaceutical players is high enough for them to pressure lawmakers to enact legislation that ensures market growth for their products, at the expense of children and parents alike.
A decade ago, the trans movement was in many ways similar to the gay-and-lesbian movement (back then referred to as “GL”): it was all about tolerance. Live and let live. Let people be who they are. However, since the trans movement has been co-opted by corporate financial interests, it has become all but tolerant. In fact, it wants to impose its cockamamie theories on the majority through coercion, or even worse, by influencing lawmakers to codify what didn’t exist as recently as five years ago. I don’t know any other movement that tells us that interviews with Sylvester Stallone should be annotated with “he/him,” because otherwise we might assume that he identifies as a fifteen-year-old girl. Nor do I know another movement that tries to get individuals convicted for harassment if they fail to use pronouns that were created along with the last batch of overnight oatmeal. Which other movement attempts to stop scientists from spreading correct information about the side-effects of gender reassignment therapies? And yes, the present, financially co-opted trans complex also exerts pressure to cancel comedians who make a joke about it.
Ricky Gervais and Dave Chappelle should have taken the path of courage. They should have continued to punch up against the trans medico-pharmaceutical industrial complex and its abhorrent, inverted morals. In fact, they could have made a thirty-one episode month-long show and would not have run out of good material. As to the offended, well… they can always watch a different show.
The trans medico-pharmaceutical industrial complex is not the only nefarious actor that tries to undermine comedy, though. Recently, video streaming platform Rumble was put under pressure by Inspire Brands (the parent company of brands like Dunkin’ Donuts and Sonic) and Diageo (a beverage giant that owns brands such as Johnnie Walker and Smirnoff), with the condition to stop “entertaining right-wing culture” and in one of both cases, with the explicit demand to de-platform comedian Steven Crowder as a condition for these companies to advertise on the platform.
Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski respectfully declined their demands. However, a better question is why these brands would be exerting such pressure. Society consists of a wide variety of opinions, which some overzealously try to classify as either “left” or “right.” Due to the binary nature of this classification, we inevitably end up having about half of the population in the “right wing” camp. This then roughly translates into half of Inspire Brands and Diageo’s customer base being right wing, which raises the question: why on earth would these corporations want to alienate fifty percent of their own customer base? One can only speculate, but a plausible explanation can be found in: ESG.
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As we just saw, the definitions of “punching up” and “punching down” are further examples of vocabulary distortion, just like “left” and “right.” But in the case of comedy, that should not even matter. Comedians are the ultimate line of defense against oppressive power. Even in the Middle Ages, an era not particularly characterized by free speech, the court jester was often the only person who could speak truth to power with impunity. The jester could say that the emperor had no clothes. We need to stand with comedians and do everything we can to protect their artistic freedom. That may encompass both positive action, such as engaging with lawmakers to obtain legal protections for comedy, as well as boycotts, by not patronizing clubs and/or platforms that pretend to adhere to “comedy safety standards.” Comedy is the last bulwark against tyrannical oppression and it requires total artistic freedom of expression.
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Cowboy Jake took some time to reflect on what had happened. Laying back on bench on the porch, he tilted his hat backwards and said: “maybe next year we should introduce a new category in the rodeo: bareback hippo riding. I bet that’d be ‘inclusive’ to three-hundred-pound riders, since no other ones would stay on for eight seconds.”
He had also arrived at the inevitable conclusion. He said “I’ll just do the live show next year and enjoy the sunset on horseback. Enough time wasted on MetaPost.” On the next morning, he closed his account.
(To the interested reader: I have recently been posting short comments and preview snippets on X. A warm welcome to every reader who joins the herd there!)