I've written a few times on this blog about the inane "A Joke A Day" email service (I'm sure there's more than one) which I would often subscribe to for email accounts that, back in the day, were free but which I never used. Often those email accounts would expire if you didn't have email coming to them, but because I thought it was (at least initially) funny to have email accounts at startrekonline.com & muslimonline.com (both sites, & my email addresses, are long defunct), I'd sign up for an account & then subscribe to the A Joke A Day service. One account I use still gets them, & I rarely read them, but am too lazy to unsubscribe. I recently thought, what if I actually saved them, then featured what I consider the best, or funniest, or worst, or most notable, or simply something to talk about once a week? & so I shall.
But I'm not sure how long I'll be able to sustain a "series" like this, since the average A Joke A Day is pretty lame. Moreover, unlike most humor, it tries so desperately hard not to offend.
Here's the A Joke A Day I got yesterday, which is a perfect example of two really dumb aspects of the A Joke A Day joke, one of which is the desire not to offend:
A man with a wooden eye was very sensitive about his eye for fear of people making fun of him. One day this man decides to go out & have some fun. So he goes to a bar & orders a beer. Then, out of the corner of his eye he sees a woman with a flat face. He thinks,” Well, she wouldn't make fun of me because she would understand how I feel." So he finally gathers up the courage to talk to her, he goes over & asks her, “Would you like to have dinner with me sometime?" & the woman answers, “Would I!!!" (Wood Eye) The man, obviously offended, screams, "Flat face!!!" & storms out of the bar.
Have you ever heard anyone described as having a "flat face"? I haven't, & when I googled the term, I got first & foremost www.flatfacefingerboards.com, a website for (it says) "all your fingerboard needs," & this definition from the Urban Dictionary: "Racial slur aimed at Asians & Pacific Islanders."
This may undercut my point - it certainly seems offensive - but I don't think it's a common term, & I don't think that the editors of the A Joke A Day mailing list knew it was anything but a euphemism for the word they really should have used, which is the deeply offensive term "ugly."
(By the way, according to this article, humans all have flat faces compared to the apes from which we evolved.)
I don't know why they didn't use the word ugly, but then again I don't know why teachers these days refuse to fail kids. There are surely ugly people, & being one myself, I think it's fine to note such things. I hope I have qualities that balance my lack of physical attractiveness, just as I'm sure some very pretty people are as shallow as a petri dish. The word "ugly" would not offend me, & I don't think it would offend most self-aware ugly people.
(I was just thinking I should send them an email about the "flat face" thing. Do you think they'd issue an apology?)
The other aspect is the incredible condescension they display when telling these jokes. The set-up is utterly ridiculous - who has wooden eyes? Dolls, I suppose, but no one else. But I understand the hoops a joke must go through to get to its pun. However, the average A Joke A Day so distrusts the intelligence of its reader - who, you know, has subscribed to a joke that it needs to make perfectly clear - in the middle of the joke - its painfully obvious pun. I repeat:
“Would you like to have dinner with me sometime?" & the woman answers, “Would I!!!" (Wood Eye)
I confess the A Joke A Day compilers don't always do that - if the pun is a homonym, for example, they'll simply use the appropriate spellings - like if someone in the joke says "right" but the listener hears "write," they'll use the spelling the speaker understands. But in a situation like the one above, they will usually (& literally) spell it out. Because they imagine their average subscriber is dumb as dirt.
Which we may be. Since we might be offended by the term "ugly."
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