Learn How to Take a Joke Already

Lately, it seems like people are really uptight. I realize that the world is depressing, we have a fucking moron for a president, and we just wound up with yet another rich, white male on the Supreme Court who is the embodiment of “the man”. However, the thing that separates us from dogs, aside from the inability to lick our own asses, is the fact that when everything seems desperately shitty, we can still find our wonderful sense of humor.

At the beginning of the week, some cartoons came out in a Danish newspaper depicting the Islamic prophet Mohammad wearing a bomb on his head, or something like that. When those loving people who claim to be a peaceful faith, and make a ritual practice out of cutting their daughters’ clitorises off of their bodies at puberty, got wind of some Western paper accusing their main guy of being hateful, all hell broke loose. The cartoons were trying to put a magnifying glass on the fact that Islam, the peaceful religion that still condones impaling as a punishment for crime, has been overrun by erratic extremists, while moderates are left to suffer the consequences. Apparently, the moderate Muslims then took to the streets burning embassies and American flags (like we had anything to fucking do with this), and trampling 14 fellow moderate Muslims to death in the process.

I looked all over the internet and couldn’t find one puny website with these pictures, which proves one thing: the world is made up of madmen and pussies. Did the Danes suffer from running the cartoons? Not really. The Middle East has threatened to boycott Danish products, and considering the average household income of your run-of-the-mill Muslim family in say, Iran or Pakistan, that means that the Danes will be out a whole $100 or $200 per year.

Yet the world still couldn’t wait to apologize profusely for the cartoons. Again, what a bunch of pussies! I spent a great deal of the early to mid-90s working as a journalist and learning the craft. Here’s a lesson from Journalism 101: if you go out of your way to construct a message, have the balls to stand behind it. Taking a stand pisses people off especially when it is underlined with truth, and points out a problem that desperately needs to be addressed. If it’s done in a cartoon, usually most rational people can find it funny, I guess that’s not the case with our Middle Eastern and African embassy burning friends.

Thankfully, Iran has come up with the perfect solution to this awful problem of Muslims not being able to self-examine and find their sense of humor; they are going to have a Holocaust cartoon contest. I’m not sure how that differs from the cartoon they ran only months prior in the Iranian paper, the one depicting Anne Frank in bed with Hitler that alluded to the two having just performed a sexual act, but the Danes have already said they would run the Holocaust cartoon, because fair is fair, right? Besides a sensible call for modern day, moderate Muslims to reclaim their faith from extremists is exactly the same as making fun of a 60-year-old act of genocide perpetrated by a xenophobic madman.

Now as Jews, we are used to this shit, because the world pretty much hates us. Unlike our locational adversaries, we can take a joke. Once the Danes fulfill their pussy-whipped, ass-kissing obligation to run a ridiculous cartoon to try and be “fair” you won’t see a bunch of guys in yarmulkes leaving their accounting practices to burn down all of the Ikeas in town. No Jews will be trampled to death in big protests, and no embassies will be burned.

When those hateful cartoons poking fun at the senseless death of my Jewish brethren run in the Danish papers I’ll probably be able to find them quite easily on Google. There will be no hiding those cartoons, because the world knows that the Jews are far more rational people. We can take a joke, or in this case, a hit, and still come out on top, and it’s not just the Jews, but Americans, the British, Mexicans, sometimes the Europeans, and definitely the Australians.

I’m glad I live in a society where taking a joke is a badge of honor, and relishing your sense of humor is celebrated, because when I look at the alternative, it doesn’t seem like such a fun place to be, no matter how peaceful they claim it is, while they practice drowning their own daughters for flirting with strangers or stoning their wives to death for forgetting to cover their faces in public.