little people are not inherently funny
Sep. 17th, 2011 12:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7I just have to pause here to have a minor tirade.
This morning on my FB feed there was someone telling some bizarre story about watching midget porn. Then my boyfriend read me this story. Gordon Ramsay Porn Dwarf Double Eaten By Badgers. Now, I wrote a whole paper in college about how sudden, shocking tone shifts make things inherently funny; my paper dealt with the shocking violence in the Irish epic Tain bo Cuiliagne, and how it was played up for humor with abrupt language. This is not new; I am not writing here about how terrible it is that people would laugh about someone’s horrible death. It’s nearly impossible not to play up someone dying in such an unexpected way as funny; eaten by badgers is not exactly a common way to go.
And as it happens, it was utter fiction– there is no such porn star, and he was not eaten by badgers, or dragged into a badger den to be eaten after his suicide or accidental death, or anything like that.
But I just wanted to have a little tirade: midgets are not funny. Dwarves are not funny. Little people are not funny. There is nothing inherently funny about an adult who is of tiny stature. I got so angry watching Peter Jackson’s Fellowship of the Ring because of the ceaseless jokes at Gimli’s expense. There is not a single joke in the entirety of JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings cycle based on Gimli’s stature– OK, there is ONE SINGLE joke, made by Eomer near the beginning of The Two Towers, and it is the more shocking (and, I’ll admit, funny) because it is the only one. (They used it in the movie but it wasn’t nearly as well-presented, mostly because their version of Eomer, hot as he was, was a hulking mouthbreather of a brooding manchild, not for want of acting by our dear Karl Urban– ach, his eyebrows alone– but I digress.)
So, I just wanted to put that out there. It’s one of the few things that many of my otherwise sensitive friends still seem to think it’s OK to be “politically incorrect” about. It’s not funny and it makes my teeth hurt whenever people do it. I’m a person of normal stature, perhaps even above average in height; everyone in my family for generations has been tall. And that makes it even less OK for us to joke about it. So we don’t!
Stoppit with the midget jokes already, people. Especially midget porn jokes. Really. Ugh.
This morning on my FB feed there was someone telling some bizarre story about watching midget porn. Then my boyfriend read me this story. Gordon Ramsay Porn Dwarf Double Eaten By Badgers. Now, I wrote a whole paper in college about how sudden, shocking tone shifts make things inherently funny; my paper dealt with the shocking violence in the Irish epic Tain bo Cuiliagne, and how it was played up for humor with abrupt language. This is not new; I am not writing here about how terrible it is that people would laugh about someone’s horrible death. It’s nearly impossible not to play up someone dying in such an unexpected way as funny; eaten by badgers is not exactly a common way to go.
And as it happens, it was utter fiction– there is no such porn star, and he was not eaten by badgers, or dragged into a badger den to be eaten after his suicide or accidental death, or anything like that.
But I just wanted to have a little tirade: midgets are not funny. Dwarves are not funny. Little people are not funny. There is nothing inherently funny about an adult who is of tiny stature. I got so angry watching Peter Jackson’s Fellowship of the Ring because of the ceaseless jokes at Gimli’s expense. There is not a single joke in the entirety of JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings cycle based on Gimli’s stature– OK, there is ONE SINGLE joke, made by Eomer near the beginning of The Two Towers, and it is the more shocking (and, I’ll admit, funny) because it is the only one. (They used it in the movie but it wasn’t nearly as well-presented, mostly because their version of Eomer, hot as he was, was a hulking mouthbreather of a brooding manchild, not for want of acting by our dear Karl Urban– ach, his eyebrows alone– but I digress.)
So, I just wanted to put that out there. It’s one of the few things that many of my otherwise sensitive friends still seem to think it’s OK to be “politically incorrect” about. It’s not funny and it makes my teeth hurt whenever people do it. I’m a person of normal stature, perhaps even above average in height; everyone in my family for generations has been tall. And that makes it even less OK for us to joke about it. So we don’t!
Stoppit with the midget jokes already, people. Especially midget porn jokes. Really. Ugh.
