this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2023
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Have you ever considered people make the joke because of Seinfeld and no inherent knowledge of the actual situation that took place in Australia?
I came to the comments expecting Seinfeld references and am only just now learning it was a real thing.
As do most people. Deceptichum is just unable to grasp a concept like time. Or that not everyone who lived in that era even knows it’s a real thing.
And a lot of us who were around in the 90s also used "gay" as a casual pejorative without really understanding it. It wasn't right then and it's not right now and most of us grew up and realized that.
The key is thinking, "dang, that's messed up actually" and changing. Not "it's just a joke, geez people are so sensitive."
You joked about how half of US states outside of the cities aren’t worth visiting. You joked about how everyone in Florida is crazy. Is that not messed up, generalizing whole groups of people like that? Or are the jokes about people you disagree with ok?
Using Gay as a negative is bad… because it impacts a whole group of people. We aren’t directly making fun of the kid specifically, but joking about the situation. Making a joke about the kid, wrong. Obviously. Joking about a dingo eating a baby? Funny. Because it’s not about a person or who they were, but about a shitty situation.
Get off your high horse. Take a joke.
I said "Florida is looking sketch lately", which anybody paying attention to DeSantis should recognize, and I stand by that most US states outside of cities and parks are largly undifferentiated swaths of farm and suburb with no unique reason to pick one over another. Neither is a joke, nor are they about whole groups of people.
You aren't joking about the situation, you're parroting a joke written after Lindy was pardoned. It's a tired Australian go-to reference like "throw a shrimp on the barbie" but instead of just being inaccurate and a stereotype it's also rooted in a specific and very personal tragedy.
This takes me back to my original question. How many dead people in a tragedy does it take before we can joke about it? How many dead actual human lives count up to the death of one baby?
Also, shouldn’t you then be happy the joke and saying of “a dingo ate ya baby” is being said. It’s a true statement.
Some people (and I’m definitely not one) consider Henry Kissinger's death a tragedy. Does that mean we shouldn’t joke about him resting in piss? Do the jokes about “get your mind blown by this one JFK fact.” Become automatically not funny because it was a personal tragedy? Of course not. They’re still funny. What happened is sad, or terrible, or maybe good in the case of Kissinger. That doesn’t mean we stop joking. If anything we’ve immortalized that baby and brought awareness to the idea that sometimes people don’t lie, and dingos, a wild animal, do wild animal things and eat kids. It makes us pause after and reflect on how we should have listened to the parents and how they suffered due to people not realizing it’s true. All of these things can co-exist.
Nobody knows the baby's name, that's not immortalized. (Azaria, by the way) And most people, as evidenced by this thread, don't know anything about the actual story. So it's wet blankets like me bringing awareness.
Decades later authorities determined a dingo really ate the baby
A murder investigation in the NT is like a blind guy looking for his sunglasses
Have you ever considered, even without contemporary context, you’re still making a joke about a real life baby being killed?
You can make jokes about anything you want, as long as it’s funny.
I never understand this argument. How does humor come before empathy to some people? How could having a giggle ever overrule a tragedy? There's coping with pain through humor, but if it's not your pain, it just seems juvenile and insensitive.
Because Humor can be coping mechanism also for stuff there are not involved with. Some people need to laugh at tragedy.
Edit: you are saying "not your pain" as if empathy does not exist. We sometimes need to distance ourselves from tragedy and some do this with humor.
I’m not downvoting you because that’s a valid question I don’t have an answer for. All I know is, I stand by my statement, because it’s been proven to me time and time again.
You realize humans have made jokes about terrible things, pretty much since language was invented? And that making light of horrible situations is a coping mechanism?
Woah, sorry Mr. Sensitive pants. How do people know it’s a real life baby?
Care to write out a list of all the things society can’t joke about?
Needing a list of things to treat with care and not joke about is a new level of lack of social awareness.
Oi, you fukn wot m8?
I work in tech sales. If I didn’t have “social awareness” I’d be terrible at my job. Joking about shit that’s dark is a human response to things we sometimes view as uncomfortable. It sucks that a kid died from being attacked by dingos. It probably wasn’t the first time it happened, and probably won’t be the last. 9/11 was a national tragedy, but we still joke about that too. Far more than dingo ate your baby jokes. Do the deaths of 3000 people not equal one baby? Or is there some strange math problem where 1 baby, but only when eaten by a dingo, is somehow more sad (and less jokey) than all those deaths?