So, if wimpy effeminate Michael Jackson were to b!tchslap Lucy Lawless, the really buff actress who played Xena, who could supposedly take it without serious injury, that would be funny?
My mother-in-law, a passive-agressive lady who's husband is a recovering alcoholic (30-years dry, but she's not forgiving nothing) simply LOVES the Funniest Home Videos where a guy gets a brick right in the "meat and two veg". You don't have to be Freud to get that one.
In my experience, it's nothing but taking a cheap shot by promoting a cheap laugh by using a cheap gag. Some things ought to be off limits. No one would think of getting a laugh today in the movies by showing a black person doing a minstrel show, a stingy Jew, or "playfully" slapping a woman around "because it is funny." If we are going to "respect" people, then it should be everybody, and I don't care if the Left drags out the "its funny because men are evil bastards and deserve it" excuse. It is no more funny than "America deserved what it got on 9-11".
Having seen Lucy Lawless in person, yes, I think it could be quite funny if the context made it clear that Mr. Jackson wasn't doing any harm to Ms. Lawless.
In my experience, it's nothing but taking a cheap shot by promoting a cheap laugh by using a cheap gag.
That just about sums up all slapstick humor and just about anything the Three Stooges ever did.
Some things ought to be off limits.
Some things are. I don't think a blow to the groin is one of them, despite having experienced a pretty hard one myself. By the way, they do have similar sex-oriented humor directed at women, usually revolving around PMS and/or labor pains.
No one would think of getting a laugh today in the movies by showing a black person doing a minstrel show, a stingy Jew, or "playfully" slapping a woman around "because it is funny."
That's because men, as a class, haven't been enslaved, hurded into death camps, and there aren't shelters full of men beaten to the point of hospitalization by women. It is because men really aren't all that vulnerable that people can laugh at this vulnerability.
With respect to minstrel shows, you should watch Spike Lee's movie Bamboozled, which revolves around the idea of a modern minstrel show. At one point, one of the militant blacks starts laughing at the show and says that he thinks it's actually pretty funny. Minstrel shows are not off limits because they aren't funny. They are off limits because of their historical context.
If we are going to "respect" people, then it should be everybody, and I don't care if the Left drags out the "its funny because men are evil bastards and deserve it" excuse.
I don't think that's why it's funny, any more than people thought the Three Stooges were funny because they liked watching Jewish men get bashed over the head. If you watch the movie Something About Mary, it has humor worse than simply getting hit between the legs. But it also laughs at retarded people, has a lengthy scene based on essentially killing a pet dog and shocking it back to life, and makes fun of an older woman's sagging breasts. Yes, there are people who probably think all of those topics should be off limits and that movie certainly crosses the line of good taste. But the real question is why people find those things funny and I think the answer is a lot less political and freuidian than you do.
It is no more funny than "America deserved what it got on 9-11".
And putting a groin kick in the same league as 9/11 seems as absurd to me as all the liberals comparing anyone conservative to Hitler. Put the analogy down and step slowly away before someone gets hurt.