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"Hush child! Free speech is the reason you grew up without a grandma or your mommy or daddy! They all went to the Utah camps for demonstrating against the Democrat Party!"
https://twitter.com/Julio_Rosas11/status/1520790249957429248?
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/apr/28/dhs-created-disinformation-governance-team-police-/
https://ijr.com/dhs-dismisses-concerns-disinformation-board-leader/
Geeez, people, too bad we didn't have a disinformation board in the McCarthy days, huh? All those commies and socialists could have been put into concentration camps. Those radical black activists could have joined them. All the gay activists, a bunch of feminists, the free sex cultist hippies, and all the druggies. Don't forget the illegal aliens!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 02 2022, @09:12PM (5 children)
Somebody needs to add the BabylonBee to Wikipedia’s list of deprecated sources. Conservatives suck at humor, they are just not funny.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 02 2022, @10:23PM (4 children)
I've seen a few actually funny pieces from there, but mostly it is very on the nose libbies evil hurrdurr. Satire is not their strong suit, as usual cons copy the free. What else can you say about a group of privileged white bigots that thinks Rage Against The Machine is on their side?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 02 2022, @10:52PM (3 children)
The Babylon Bee got banned from Twitter and had posting disabled for an article naming Rachel Levine "Man of the Year". They were banned because it was deemed offensive due to Levine being a transgender person. Here's an article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/petersuciu/2022/03/21/the-babylon-bees-twitter-account-was-suspended-but-that-made-its-story-go-viral/ [forbes.com].
I'm not weighing in on whether the attempt at humor was funny or not, or whether it went too far. That's up to you to decide.
The CEO, Seth Dillon went on Tucker Carlson's show to discuss the ban: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnq92_mR3yo [youtube.com]. The problem here is that Dillon goes beyond saying that satire and comedy should be protected. Instead, he suggests that the point of the satire was to take a position on whether a transgender person can actually transition to the opposite sex.
A lot of comedy becomes unfunny when it focuses on taking political and social positions instead of humor. That's exactly what the Babylon Bee is doing here. SNL wasn't funny at all when it became too political, and I just wasn't interested in watching. And I'm someone who has watched all of the Celebrity Jeopardy sketches so many times on Youtube that I have pretty much know every line in all of the sketches. Yes, I enjoy them too much, but SNL actually was quite funny at times. The Babylon Bee is getting political here, and it's just not funny to me. It makes me less interested in any of their other content because I know they're trying to make political points instead of just being funny and writing satire.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 03 2022, @06:14PM (2 children)
A joke is funny because people laugh. Not everybody will laugh. Not everybody can. Some are too stupid, some aren't stupid enough, some internalize everything. Some simply lean back, turn it all off, and read Mark Twain or watch Blazing Saddles (1974) [imdb.com], every few years. Others...
Analysis paralysis ensures that some people will end the day, drained from a hundred conflicting emotions, and very few of them good.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 03 2022, @09:46PM (1 child)
The measure of good humor is if it makes people laugh. The Babylon Bee has posted some quite funny content in the past. Politics isn't off-limits. SNL has a long history of satirizing politicians. I always enjoyed Darrell Hammond's caricature of Bill Clinton; it was hilarious. I remember a sketch, and I'm pretty sure it was a cold open, where it involves him calling Saddam Hussein and asking him to kick out the weapons inspectors to distract from the impeachment. It's political, but it's absurd and very funny. The difference between is that political humor wasn't trying to persuade me to some political view, which is a lot of what late night comedy turned into for awhile. When it became clear that the Babylon Bee was trying to make a point about transgender people, it made it unfunny. People tend not to laugh when you're beating them over the head with a political view.
It's not about good or bad taste in the jokes. I know the sketch with Dakota Johnson where a father was dropping his daughter off at the airport to join ISIS [youtube.com] was controversial, but I thought it was funny as hell and well executed. I know that people complained about Gilbert Gottfried cracking a joke about 9/11 a few weeks after it happened, but dammit, it was funny.
Good humor unites people, getting them to laugh about something where they might otherwise disagree. I don't have a problem if it's in good or bad taste if it's funny. Just don't beat me over the head with political views, because that defeats the purpose of humor and is unfunny.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 03 2022, @10:18PM
Gilbert Godfried died last week. I suppose Don Rickles would work as a meat packer, today. Everybody has a point to make or an axe to chew on... other people suck.