Talk show hosts and newscasters are obviously just people. It gets a tad grating, however, when almost every night a different TV personality commiserates on air about how much they can’t wait for their kids to go back to school because being at home with their children 24/7 is cruel and unusual punishment. Then they wait for a laugh – ha, ha. I don’t laugh, not even a little. I can relate to being cooped up, stir crazy, longing for human contact, but jokes at the expense of children, spouses or parents are not so funny.
It reminds me of other throw-away lines meant to be funny but instead fill me with discomfort. On TV, when Jackie Gleason in his bus driver uniform would ball up his fist, look at his wife and say, “To the moon Alice! I’m going to send you to the moon!” Laugh, fade, cut to commercial. Nothing funnier than domestic violence, it was thought. It got a laugh, a big one, for almost a decade.
Maybe I’m too sensitive but I’m reminded of the etiology of hate. It starts with jokes, seemingly innocuous jokes about how the Jew is stingy, the Mexican lazy, the African American violent or the woman just wants to be told what to do. When I say something, the other person often retorts, “Hey, if there wasn’t a kernel of truth to it, why would it be so funny?” Or I get attacked for being immersed in cancel culture or being politically correct to the point of having no backbone.
I don’t think it takes backbone to mock and ridicule groups of people. When individuals, not millennials, but people say boomers love their Prius, romanticize the 1960s and always have a classic rock story to tell, my radar goes up. Then, when it becomes a diatribe that ends with all boomers are self-indulgent, spoiled hippies who never had to have an original thought, at that point I’ll speak up. Not to defend my generation – no generation needs defending – but to hopefully try and speak out against ageism whether it’s the elderly, young or adolescent. Most people use the term “ageism” as a reference meant to call out those who vilify the elderly, but I see as much if not more ageism against youth.
I know the generation coming up is as smart, creative and altruistic as any other. I’m not going to pile on with a sentence that starts with, “Kids today…”. Kids today are what? Craving intimacy, longing for accomplishment, reveling in energy? Yeah, hopefully.
All teenagers don’t speed down PCH and all seniors don’t drive in Hemet on State Street at 20 miles an hour. Am I looking for something to be angry about because I have no life and largely haven’t been out of my home in four months? I don’t think so, but then again, I’m a boomer so maybe I forgot my point.
Mitchell Rosen is a licensed therapist with practices in Corona and Temecula. Email rosen@mrosenmft.com
The Link LonkAugust 21, 2020 at 02:27AM
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Mitchell Rosen: Some jokes, once delivered for a laugh, are no longer funny - Press-Enterprise
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