It's Just a Joke...really

ESPN has made a politically correct move and suspended one of its reporters for statements he made about a female colleague on the air. Supposedly, he made negative comments about the outfit she was wearing, and after that the heads at ESPN went nuts. The commentary has been all over the place since then, with people either saying it's much ado about nothing, ESPN overreacted, or Kornheiser should be fired, skewed and napalmed with extreme prejudice.
Why am I talking about this? Well, because it brings up a subject I've wanted to talk about for awhile, and that's the whole idea of comedy and humor.
Years ago, when I was in the service and out of the Academy, I was required to attend a basic training unit (I attended a lot of them as part of my assignments while working for CID and CI). I remembered I was in this battle of wits with this really stupid PFC. He was trying to insult me, and my response was to take every insult he waged, agree and then use an additive process to show how he was now contradicting himself. By the time I was done, he looked really foolish, wanted to fight, and let's just say that the situation did not end well for him.
BUT right after that, and because of that, it got me to thinking about humor. I was a very flippant young man at the time. I was quick to use a cynical response to unarm an opponent, and much of my humor was directly insulting in some way. At the time, I thought that was what constituted "funny".
Well, at that time, I made a decision because I felt really dirty after that conversation because even though EVERYONE was laughing with me, they were all laughing AT HIM, and something didn't seem right about that. I began to see humor as something that could be very negative. After that day, I made a vow to avoid ever using negative humor that hurt someone else. I no longer found it funny, and therefore, I would no longer try to gain favor for using that style of humor.
What I discovered is that there are very many people who ONLY know that type of humor as "funny". As I was reading through the responses to the Kornheiser story (the guy who made the stupid comments about his female colleague), I started to notice how many people would say something like: "you people don't understand humor, so leave him alone", and all I could think was that perhaps a lot of people don't understand humor. The ability to poke fun at someone else's expense should never be considered funny to an enlightened community, yet there is so much of that type of behavior in our society. From political pundits to late night talk show hosts, negative humor is used so much at the expense of other people. Oh, we justify it by using such comments as "he's a public person" or "he or she should have known better". But in the end, it's humor that comes at the expense of another individual.
One solution to this problem for me back then was to think through each attempt at making a joke. How I used to do this was think to myself, "would everyone find this funny, including the subject of the humor itself?" If the answer was no, then it wasn't funny to me. It took me many years to cement this into my psyche, but it was something that had to be done because I was no longer finding insults or negative commentary to be funny. I don't even find it funny when it is done by very good comedy folk; I tend to be the only one in the room who doesn't laugh, and I have come to a comfortable understanding that I'd rather be that person than the one who joins in with them.
Unfortunately, very few people agree with me. Or they agree, but in the end they practice a different processing when it comes to such humor, no matter how much they claim otherwise.
What I'd like to add to the interesting part of this observation is that I do succeed in creating a lot of humor on a daily basis, both in my writings and in person. But it's never negative towards an individual. Oh, it may still by cynical and biting at times, but there's never a person sitting in the next cubicle, thinking "I wish he wouldn't use me as the brunt of his jokes all of the time."
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