Leaving aside questions of whether anyone can really say "such and so is objectively not funny," leaving aside questions of whether clueless users "deserve" mockery, I think there's a fallacy in both the original rant and many of the comments. Humor is not always a weapon or a punishment to be doled out as retribution for real or imagined sins. A given target doesn't have to be "wrong" or "bad" to justify a few jokes about it.
Think of the tradition of the roast, where a bunch of your closest friends stand up and make jokes about you. By the logic of Kurtz's essay and many of the responses to it, you would have to be an unpleasant or evil person to "deserve" such a treatment. The way I see it, it's just a recognition of our universal fallible humanity.
Which is not to say that there isn't such a thing as cruel mockery. I think most of us understand that there's a point where you go from having a sense of humor to just being a jerk (even if that point varies from observer to observer). But if we start requiring a justification of deservedness for every joke, we may as well tear down the comic strips and replace them with nice, dry, unambiguous political essays.
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Leaving aside questions of whether anyone can really say "such and so is objectively not funny," leaving aside questions of whether clueless users "deserve" mockery, I think there's a fallacy in both the original rant and many of the comments. Humor is not always a weapon or a punishment to be doled out as retribution for real or imagined sins. A given target doesn't have to be "wrong" or "bad" to justify a few jokes about it.
Think of the tradition of the roast, where a bunch of your closest friends stand up and make jokes about you. By the logic of Kurtz's essay and many of the responses to it, you would have to be an unpleasant or evil person to "deserve" such a treatment. The way I see it, it's just a recognition of our universal fallible humanity.
Which is not to say that there isn't such a thing as cruel mockery. I think most of us understand that there's a point where you go from having a sense of humor to just being a jerk (even if that point varies from observer to observer). But if we start requiring a justification of deservedness for every joke, we may as well tear down the comic strips and replace them with nice, dry, unambiguous political essays.