Half-Baked Hand-Wringing

I find myself once again brooding over the nature of the jokes people make online. They say in comedy that you should always punch up, which is another way of saying that you should only make jokes at the expense of people who can take it because they're bigger than you. You're not supposed to make jokes at people who are smaller than you. That's mean, and I hate mean jokes. I've made more than I'm proud of, but I know they're wrong.

I guess people can disagree about what makes someone adequately bigger than you. It's mainly all right to make fun of the president, because the buck stops there, as Truman said. It's not all right to make fun of poor little orphans forced out of their home by a fire. Is there an unclear middle ground? I suppose there is, and if those are judgement calls, then it makes me question the judgment of most people who write jokes online, professionally or otherwise.

These days it keeps coming back to Lindsay Lohan. Ten years ago, she was about the most promising young actress out there. About eight years ago, she started an initially gradual and later rapid descent into a mess of personal troubles. Of course, words like personal and private don't mean much to people, so the tragedy of her life has all been for our consumption since then. I'd say that some jokes might have been all right at the outset, but not now.

No, I stopped thinking that jokes about what a mess Lohan had become stopped being funny at least seven years ago, but the fact that she's been a sad train wreck for longer than she was an untainted success stops few people. The notion that she could actually forget her missteps in life and face up to her demons if left alone for any time at all probably never occurred to anybody, though I get the impression lately that she may be on the upswing.

I've got no stake in the matter personally, I ought to say, but like I said, jokes about somebody like that are in awfully poor taste to me. They just don't work, even if they are technically sound (and some are) because they depend on willingness to laugh at the downtrodden. I just don't happen to have that in my makeup. I know very well that more than enough people do, but you're not going to see me playing on that.