Why wouldn't the Catholic go into a Colonel Sanders' restaurant? Because he was a friar. 

Why was 6 afraid of 7? Because 7 ate 9. 

I thought I'd make a point today about what it is in the "social justice warriors" - the most delusional of the postmodernist crew in my opinion - that feels so irritating to the rest of us. 

They don't know how to laugh anymore. They get mad at my first joke if they're Catholic. Or get mad on behalf of their Catholic friends. And they get mad at my second joke because they think it might offend Math profs. Some even, in an imagined retaliation, make up jokes about those groups that they don't belong to. In other words, they do the very thing that they claim is so offensive in whatever group they hate. A glaring hypocrisy? Not really. Just a waste of time.  

Humor depends on a quick sequence of thoughts. First, we see something incongruous in a remark or a situation, and, as our brains have been trained to do by millennia of evolution, we turn our attention toward the incongruity. Then, if the incongruity is non-threatening, we expel a bit of air and a shout, the intensity of which varies directly with the degree of our relief at ascertaining the incongruity is harmless and how scary it was in the first place. Laughter is a brief release from the normal anxious state that is just life in this uncertain world. The odder the unexpected detail is in our present context, the better the laugh when we see it is harmless. 

This incongruous element is most of what makes a remark or event funny. The unfamiliar, we know from long experience, can cause pain. We are programmed to stay alert for incongruity always. Once she is trained, the ship's engineer can even sleep through constant noise and wake to the sound of one bearing humming a bit above its normal pitch. Even in your sleep, you know when your child's breathing in the bedroom down the hall sounds labored. Sometimes the incongruity is a danger brewing. Detecting it early has survival value. And when we realize that a detail that seemed threatening is harmless, we experience relief. We laugh.  

The familiar does not get this response because it is exactly that: familiar. Or in other words, we are in large degree creatures of our programming, genetic and cultural. Cultural programming and genetic programming overlap and reinforce each other much of the time in our flow of consciousness, which is only what we must expect if we accept that there is a reality out there, and it poses many of the same hazards for all of us. Falling. Getting burned. Hit. Cut. Going hungry. And so on. 

But my point today is that most humor could not exist without what some comedians have called a "wrongness". Incongruity. 

I am bitterly opposed to any humor that is clearly ridiculing any group of people who have had a past experience of exploitation and suffering. 

But we can't ban humor itself. A tyrant might try, but human beings won't do it. It's as simple as that. Some of the "triggers" being whined over in the West now, especially on college campuses, are getting ridiculous. 

I will not cut the word "violate" or the word "brutal" or any of dozens of others from my vocabulary. Policing language was one of the warning signs that Orwell told us of in "1984". 

There has to be balance in there that we can arrive at by negotiation and compromise. And maybe, I will agree not to use the word "brutal" in your presence if you are a rape victim. 

But I need that word simply to express my thoughts in some public contexts. It says succinctly what I need to say.  

The world is what it is. I didn't make it that way. I want very profoundly to fix the unnecessary suffering, but we will never do that by stressing ourselves, or worse yet, raising our kids, to be hothouse flowers. It's a jungle out here. Always has been. Entropy and (quantum) uncertainty, at the profoundest level, guarantee that life will be stuffed with adversity and hazard. Much of the time we simply have to "get over it" in order to get work done. 

Our being able to laugh together is one of the few consolations in a hard life. If I say something that you think is insensitive, take me aside and we'll talk. Most likely, I will try to accommodate your feelings if I believe they are anything like reasonable. 

But be also prepared for me to say, "No, that's not reasonable. Get over it." 

The following clip from an article Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt in The Atlantic of September 2015 caught this point:

Some recent campus actions border on the surreal. In April, at Brandeis, the Asian American student association sought to raise awareness of microaggressions against Asians through an installation on the steps of an academic hall. The installation gave examples of microaggressions such as “Aren’t you supposed to be good at math?” and “I’m colorblind! I don’t see race.” But a backlash arose among other Asian American students, who felt that the display itself was a microaggression. The association removed the installation, and its president wrote an e-mail to the entire student body apologizing to anyone who was “triggered or hurt by the content of the microaggressions.” 

We will get paralyzed in an orgy of internal self-loathing if we give in to this silliness. Everyone will be mad at everyone else all of the time and no teamwork among any meaningful mix of people from varied racial, ethnic, cultural, and sexual orientations will be possible anymore. 

The way out is through discussion and compromise. I affirm this principle absolutely. But I repeat that the touchiest of social justice warriors need to be prepared to have old guys like me say: "On this one, I can't cooperate. You're asking something that is simply unreasonable." 

Have an outrageously fun day, even though ...your shoelace is untied.