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David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

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Why do so many find it funny to embarrass the people they love?

By David McElroy · May 6, 2018

I grew up in a family where insults were the dominant form of humor. We made fun of each other all the time. If you had listened to our insults, you would have assumed we were all ugly and stupid and useless.

It’s all fun. Laugh it up. Don’t be hurt. Just throw an insult back at the other person. Be as cruel as you want. Make fun of her face. Tell him how stupid he is. Whatever. Just laugh and don’t complain.

I was really good at insults. I’d practiced all my life and honed my skills. If I found out you worried that your nose was too big — a real example with a friend in high school — I would mercilessly attack you and make fun of your “big nose.” Isn’t it funny? Don’t you love it?

It wasn’t until I was in college that I realized I had been hurting other people. What’s more, I realized how much I’d been hurt by all the mindless insults. I completely changed the way I used humor. I was not going to hurt people anymore.

I saw a post on Reddit Sunday evening that reminded me of the sort of insults and embarrassments we tried to do to one another. It made me cringe. The man who posted it thought it was hilarious. His two children helped. He claimed the victim — his wife — thought it was funny.

But I still wonder why anyone would find it funny to embarrass or insult someone he loves.

As the man who posted it tells the story, “My wife spent 2 weeks in Peru teaching women entrepreneur workshops and surfing. Me and the kids made signs for her return.”

I’ve cut out the faces of the children holding the signs at an airport, but the two signs said, “Welcome home from rehab, Mom,” and, “30 days clean.”

Is that funny?

Yes, it’s a funny thing to think about in theory. It’s like a joke from a bad movie. But, no, it’s not something that loving and emotionally healthy people would do to one another.

Why would loving people risk hurting or embarrassing those they love?

When I eventually told my father that I had stopped insulting people — because I had realized it was hurtful — he took that as something like a personal insult. He said I was wrong.

“Oh, everybody knows it’s just a joke,” he said. “It doesn’t hurt anybody.”

I found from talking to people in the years that followed that other people had been hurt by my jokes. I eventually apologized to the high school friend whose nose I had mercilessly mocked, for instance. Although she had laughed and played along at the time, she told me — after I apologized — how much it had hurt her and how hard it had been to pretend it was funny.

I don’t want to be insulted. You probably don’t want to be insulted or embarrassed, either. If you grew up in a family where such callous treatment was common, this might not quite register with you. You might think it makes people tougher if you get them accustomed to being insulted and belittled.

Yes, your children are going to be insulted out in the real world. Other people are going to hurt them. Others will embarrass them. You can’t stop that.

But what you can do is to teach them that there’s an emotionally safe place in their home. You can let them know that they’re not going to be attacked or insulted or embarrassed or belittled there. Knowing there’s an emotionally safe place for them can make all the difference in the world.

Maybe the woman who was greeted at the airport this weekend with those signs above laughed. Maybe she said it was funny — just as I did when I was growing up desensitized to the hurt. But I have to wonder if something inside was just a little bit embarrassed and hurt.

If we love people — especially those in our own families — we need to treat them with respect and kindness and love. There’s no place in such a loving family for intentional insults and potentially embarrassing jokes.

Treating each other well creates long-term trust and love that outweighs any possible short-term laughs that might come from jokes that hurt.

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On a live awards show Sunday night, one man made a joke about a female celebrity. The husband of the celebrity was offended and hit the man who made the joke. Or maybe it was staged for entertainment. Who knows? Who cares? Social media is full of discussion — and even arguments — about this idiocy today. This baffles me. Let’s assume for a moment that the event happened as reported. People have been having such idiotic fights ever since there have been humans. Half the bars in the world see such brief dustups regularly. It simply doesn’t matter. The fact that so many people believe they need to talk about this — or even need to have opinions about it — is more evidence of the bizarre media brainwashing that convinces many to care passionately about brain-dead trivia. Your life will be happier and saner if you focus on yourself, your family and your friends, not on whatever scripted (or spontaneous) bilge that the media wants to pipe into your home.

I’m in the middle of migrating this website to new servers this week. This means you might encounter some unexpected behavior until I get all the bugs worked out. Clicking on my links (including this one) might cause your browser to give you the message that it’s a site without a current security certificate. It’s not actually unsafe, but there’s something which isn’t yet set up for the security certificate. I apologize for any such errors you might encounter while the process is going on. If you notice any problems with content which didn’t migrate properly, I would appreciate you letting me know the details at davidmcelroy@mac.com. Thanks for your patience.

I often wonder what animals think when they look at us and consider the society we’ve created. Yes, I know this is fanciful and unrealistic, but what if they could? Would they be astounded at how we treat each other? Would they be disgusted by the ugliness and pettiness which fill so many of our daily interactions? The truth is that I’m feeling pretty disgusted with humanity tonight. I made the mistake of reading some online interactions that I should have avoided — and it sickened me. The people involved appeared to be vile and stupid and arrogant. I wish I could pretend they’re a tiny minority, but I know better. It’s times such as this when I most need to escape much of “civilization” and disconnect from their world. If humans are going to be worthy of “ruling this planet,” we have a lot of growth to do. And I fear that growth is nowhere in sight. So my buddy Thomas, above, and all of his friends would be right to judge us harshly — and to think, “Why do you folks get to be in charge?”

I should have expected this, but I honestly didn’t. The article I wrote last week about disagreements over treatment for autistic children brought me angry emails. You could almost call it “hate mail.” Of the five emails about it so far, two have been to tell me that I’m wrong to even listen to critics of the most popular therapy for autistic children — and the other three tell me I’m wrong for not condemning the treatment as the “obvious” abuse it is. If you read the article, you know I didn’t take a position on the issue, because I simply don’t know enough to have an opinion. But by talking about the issue, I stepped into a heated controversy. The emails from the two sides convinced me of nothing. But they did give me even more empathy for the unfortunate parents who have to figure out for themselves where the truth lies for their children.

Have you ever had what you thought was a new idea — and then discovered that “old you” had the same idea years ago? I had that experience tonight. And it’s been wonderful. I came up with an idea tonight for a very short satirical film that would be a promotion for a fictitious college. The point is to make the college promote — as good things — everything which is actually terrible about most modern colleges. Then I remembered a fake college that I invented back when I was in college. I had created student recruitment brochures and various newsletters back then, so I decided to call my “new” college by the same name I’d invented years ago: Ochita College. As I searched my computer for any old material I might still have about Ochita from the past, I discovered an email I sent to someone in 2009 — outlining essentially the same idea which I came up with tonight. Since I didn’t remember writing that, it felt like magic. So my next film project just might be this one instead. If all goes well, you might soon see “Ochita College: Your Future Starts Here.” This should be fun.

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