On the cover of an issue of The AARP Bulletin I was surprised to notice “Gender Gyp” in large letters, referring to an article on inequitable treatment of women in retirement plans. Of course, women are always complaining about something, right, but isn’t that taking a swipe at Gypsies in an enlightened era when taking swipes is execrable? I consulted one of my best friends, the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary, 1978 edition. It had several things to say about “gyp;” particularly, that “gip” is an abbreviation for “gipsy;” that “gyp” may also be spelled “gip;” and that in U.S. slang, “gyp” means a thief. By golly, that was a swipe at Gypsies! I wrote an editor about it and received an antiseptic reply, expressing profound sorrow but regretting that no sort of retraction or apology would be possible. Therefore, regardless of your ages, Gypsies, you are still fair game at AARP, so better steer clear of elderly people.
It has not been long since I received a humorous card made by American Greetings. It’s front was captioned “Amish Road Rage,” and the picture was of five, bearded, black-clad, black-hatted men piloting horse-drawn wagons down a dirt road and shouting at each other such epithets as “Thy mother wears army bonnets!” and “Place it up thy butter churn!” It elicited a few yucks from me, but, by George, wasn’t this an affront to Amish people in an enlightened era when affronts are execrable? I wrote the company to inquire, and, as a reply, received some wastebasket fodder in the figure of an inane form letter. As a consequence, Amish people, if you’re looking for a funny greeting card, I would switch to a different brand.
Thanks to these experiences I concluded that the demarcation line between what is thought funny and what is considered offensive may depend at times upon the size, influence, or volubility of the group referenced. Neither Gypsies nor the Amish are particularly numerous, influential, or vocal. Furthermore, if we can believe Harrison Ford movies – and who would doubt Raiders of the Lost Ark, I’d like to know – Amish people are trained not to fight back. For some reason I have trouble imagining AARP’s documenting “Jewing women out of their benefits” or of the card company’s printing a black or Hispanic road rage version.
Once again I resorted to a best friend, and, whereas the O.E.D. mentions “Jew” as a colloquial verb for “to cheat or overreach” and gives “Jewing” as a valid gerund, my Microsoft Word spell-checkers, 1997 and 2003 editions, pretend ignorance of both! As I type, one of them is, in fact, underlining with inappropriate red squiggles occurrences of these VALID words. On the other hand the spell-checkers both smile upon “gypping,” “Gypping,” and both “gyp” and “Gyp” as nouns or verbs. Of course, when it comes to authorities on English usage, Bill Gates & Co. are hardly in the league of Henry Fowler, for example, but all this strikes me roughly as fair as China versus Tibet.
A substantial fraction of what is considered humor consists of making fun of something or someone, yet some groups seek to elevate themselves above all that. For a first example, consider the Washington bureaucrat that costumed herself as a black convict for the office Halloween party. Her humble, obsequious apologies were not long in being extorted by superior bureaucrats. More recently a television announcer, attempting to award him a compliment, used jocosely the word “lynch” in relation to golfer Woods. If you check up the word in the Oxford English Dictionary and Encyclopedia Britannica, you’ll see there are no grounds for any group’s feeling wounded over it, but profuse expressions of regret and contrition were all that saved her from suffering the very fate she’d mentioned. The golf magazine editor that thought a noose on his cover would be a laughable postscript to the affair discovered that it was not, after all, and did suffer, employment-wise, that fate. Years back, I heard a philosopher discussing “the tyranny of a minority,” and, sisters and brothers, it’s arrived! We are only a few scientific breakthroughs from seeing the Thought Police become reality.
Even people that attempt to be serious get into hot water these days, and we remember the chap that lost his situation because the mayor was so stupid he thought “niggardly” was an insult! Wow, what a nation! It worries me that we have so many illiterates in a country where every quarter mile there’s an institution ballyhooing itself as one of “higher education.” It absolutely frightens me, though, that so many of them wend their ways into positions where important decisions are made. Another concern of mine is that the unwitting victims of these First Amendment assaults never have the spine to reply, “Say, I didn’t mean anything derogatory by that, and if it bothers you, take your job and stuff it up, down, or both directions in your alimentary canal!” Given the same degree of fortitude a couple hundred years ago, today we’d be driving lorries onto kerbs and being arrested by the bloody bobbies. “Sorry, King George, that the word ‘independence’ bruised your royal feelings. We promise never to say it again; please keep us subjugated and bereft of rights.”
If the trend continues there may be no subset of the population conducive to ridicule. At the moment blond women are easy – meaning for jokes – and everyone lacerates rednecks. (I’m never certain how to define one of the latter. Southern whites appear to be in the mainstream, but even in non-meridional places, I’ve found quantities of people that fit the comic descriptions.) Beware, though, folks; the day is approaching when a little license in those directions may earn one a shot in the face with a bottle of bleach or a jug of moonshine.
Picking on religions is a venerable sport. Practitioners know that Christians, a nominal majority in this land, are a wise choice, because they are taught that taking crap is one of the rules. If abused for their faith, they are automatically on the fast track to heaven. Thus, when derided or insulted they are not expected to retaliate with murder or shrill cries for punitive measures, lawsuits, and scalps – oops, no offense.
Christians, especially Catholics, are not so much lampooned as they are maligned, however. Take, for instance, Robert Mapplethorpe’s photograph of a crucifix in a bottle of urine. That was a piece of art, whereas, had he chosen a Mogen David to dunk in pee, it would have been anti-Semitism. How many times have you seen a Catholics priest or Catholicism made to look badly in a film or television production? How about rabbis or Judaism? Quickly, now; there may be a quiz at the end of this. Similarly, think about the two media above, include erotic photographs, and think about any religious symbols worn by the naughty folks in the “R” or “X” scenes. What were they?
Let’s next address the important, practical question of what nationalities afford us safety in slurring, or, as we might term it, homeland security? One would suppose that it would be easy to snipe at Romanians. Theirs is a distant country, sealed for years by Ceausescu and his henchmen tighter than a Castro jail or Madonna’s – scratch that, she doesn’t wear any; only crucifixes. In a Chicago taxi recently the handsome young driver revealed himself a native Romanian and a lucky winner in a U.S. visa lottery. (Patterns of country of birth and former occupations are interesting in that profession; around D.C., most cabbies are from Ethiopia, and all over the world I’ve noticed quite a few are ex-professors, which must imply something about faculty pay in some places.) This man, like many others, had come, made perfunctory overtures to college, and then got down to the serious, original plan of finding remunerative work. He noted that his brother, as well as another friend from home, are also piloting taxies in that part of our country and that 300,000 Romanians now live in Illinois! No wonder there was a lottery; what a load of passengers must have been stranded there! Whereas out here in Montana one might make nonchalant, disparaging remarks about Romanians, he should watch his step around Lake Michigan.
Tune in Tomorrow, a funny film based on Mario Llosa’s novel, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, has Peter Falk as the author of wildly popular radio soap operas. Now, in the good old days of Communist dictatorships, Albania was an isolated outpost that officially hated the Soviet revisionists, applauded terrorists everywhere in the free world, and embraced only China’s brand of totalitarianism. Concerning emigration restrictions, Albania made Romania look like Mexico. Apparently in 1990 there were too few Albanians here to make them dangerously vindictive, for Falk’s character makes them the continual bulls-eye for insults in his scripts. “You dirty son of an Albanian,” is an approximation that conveys the flavor of the attacks. Until 2007 I had never met one of the population thus distinguished, but there was a very affable example waiting tables – a traditional hot spot for recipients of American education visas – at an Italian restaurant in midtown Manhattan. This has me greatly distraught over the possibility of an Albanian influx. If so, good heavens! The future of comedy in this republic looks mighty bleak.
Personally, however, I’m getting a head start; “There was this blond, Amish redneck that married a Catholic Gypsy, and they …”
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