Q: How do you know a woke is losing an argument?
A: They start talking about privilege.
No, this is not a post that seeks to make jokes about wokes. Instead, here, I seek to explore what kind of jokes wokes like, assuming there are jokes they like, that is.
A long time back, I had written here that the problem with the woke movement is that it denies people their jokes. Because jokes are inherently at the expense of someone (a person or group of people or thing), and because extreme political correctness means that making fun of a person or group of people is not polite, political correctness means a lot of jokes go out of the window.
Think of all the jokes that you enjoyed when you are in high school – it is likely that you won’t be able to put most of those jokes on social media nowadays – since it’s not kosher to make fun of the people / groups of people they make fun of.
And so, one day recently, I started thinking if wokes laugh at all – if making fun of people or groups of people is not done, how do they get their laughs? And then I realised that if you look at standup comedians, there are a bunch of them who can be broadly described as “woke” (as per today’s standards – I have NO CLUE how well this will hold up). So what gives? How can wokes have their jokes when most of our old jokes are not valid any more?
The interesting thing about the woke movement is that they largely depend on group identities. One <insert oppressed community (on whatever axis)> person gets beaten, it is seen as an act of violence against the community. Everything is spoken in group terms. The individual’s individuality doesn’t matter. Everything is analysed in group terms.
Except for the jokes.
Wokes get their jokes because they target particular people. And identification of such people is rather easy. Start with choosing a politician (or politicians) who are definitely anti-woke (Modi, Trump, Johnson, Jair, Orban – at the time of writing). And then build a social network around them, on people who hang out with them, agree with them, retweet them, get retweeted by them, and so on. All of them are worth making fun of.
If you make a joke about Modi, you are NOT making a joke about Gujaratis. If you make a joke about Trump, you are NOT making a joke about builders, or blondes. And these jokes are kosher because the target of the jokes are reviled, or are strongly associated with the reviled.
And a person’s status on whether they can be made fun of or not depends on their associations. You cross the proverbial political floor, you can suddenly gain indemnity or get exposed to being made fun of, spending upon the direction in which you’ve crossed the floor.
I’ve never really been a fan of standup comedy (I think it has a rather low “bit rate”). But this possibly explains why I find it even less tolerable nowadays – most of the jokes are political, and it gets boring after a while.
Then again, as the wokes say, everything is political.