Comment by lbarrow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lbarrow | Hacker News Reader

I think it's a fair point that bots should strive to be useful and not just mock people's mistakes, but in the 8 years since this was written the whole "punch up, not down" idea in comedy has gotten a lot of criticism and is kind of passe at this point, at least in my experience.

Human beings simply do not exist on a single monolith spectrum of power; who is "up" or "down" often depends quite a lot on context. If an underemployed white male comedian makes a joke about Kamala Harris, is that punching up or down? _Parasite_ is a movie that mocks a rich family even as it portrays their poorer help as scheming and untrustworthy - is that up, or down? To steal an example from this excellent Freddie de Boer post on the topic, if an adjunct professor runs afoul of a student, are they really the ones in the position of power?

Anyway Freddie sums the whole thing up much better than I could: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/punching-up-and-punchin...

In this comment you seem to be reading "punch up not down" as a very binary, fixed rule, as if it is a being used as a commandment. I don't think many people think of it that way. Of course you can make comedy about poor and disadvantaged people if you want to, the point of the phrase is that when you do so you you think carefully about it.

> In this comment you seem to be reading "punch up not down" as a very binary, fixed rule

de Boer's blogpost paints it as the opposite: it's a nebulous, indefinite phrase used to try and simplify a complex reality into something that's easy to understand. de Boer reckons that the only consistent usage is "up" referring to "people I don't like", and "down" referring to "people I like".

Yes, I disagree quite strongly with the blogpost. He writes

> For it to make any sense at all, human beings would have to exist on some unitary plane of power and oppression, our relative places easily interpreted for the purpose of figuring out who we can punch

I think this is obvious bullshit. You need a strict, easily interpreted hierarchy of oppressor and oppressed in order to implement this strawman version of the punching up/down rule. This straw man is what I was referring to when I described it as a "commandment" in my previous comment.

On the other hand when the "rule" is interpreted in a more realistic way. Which is something like "make comedy about whoever you like, but consider carefully why you want to make fun of these groups of people, and consider the context of what you're doing", then you don't need this strict hierarchy at all.

To be explicit: I don't think the concept needs a consistent definition of "up" and "down" in order to be useful.

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