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Early 2000s entertainment too. A good portion of the edgy jokes could be considered funny because they were made on the assumption that "We can laugh about this, because we all know racism and sexism is bad, right?".
And then 2015ish happened and it became obvious that a lot of people weren't laughing AT the -isms but rather WITH.
EDIT: Which slur did Ross use, BTW? I haven't watched that show in eons, and I don't remember any.
Round of applause to Deep Space 9 for holding up after all these years, half that station was bi at the very least.
The alternate universe on that show was the horniest thing in TV for decades.
Season 1 Bashir probably needed an HR meeting abput his continued sexual advances on Jadzia.
Don't worry, Garak was working on fixing him.
haven't seen friends but as someone familiar with the zeitgeist it's almost certainly "retarded"
which was also all over adult swim at the time and is recently having its renaissance
I've noticed that lately. It went from being everywhere to nowhere and now it's creeping back up. I'll be honest here, I miss the word but if it's hurting that many people who haven't done anything then you're a fucking piece of shit if you use it.
I was rooting for the "gay" renaissance where people talked about how gay everything was but changed it to mean awesome instead of shitty.
I’m gonna say something bold:
Surprisingly not a problem for some shows, good example is Simpson golden age.
There is a gay episode but it’s mostly about Homer overreacting.
A lot of the satire of Simpson is trying to be functional in a dysfunctional system, which has aged like the greatest wine that frank grimes can’t afford.
I think a lot of the time it's Gen Z not understanding context. There was overt racism, but a lot of media that is considered racist now was either depicting the experience of people at the time or making fun of racists.
Blazing Saddles. Took me a bit to understand this when I was younger. When I first saw it, I thought it was simply outdated humor. Then I thought it was edgy. Then I finally grasped that the whole joke is actually directed at racist white folks and that their racism just makes them look really stupid.
The quintessential example. Rocky Horror is another.
I'd also include the controversy around "Baby It's Cold Outside".
I'd say that's mostly true for comedy. But some of the earlier stuff was definitely like "point and laugh at this race". Like the original looney tunes and stuff had some that were rough. They got better about it later but those early episodes had a few that were a little...close lol
We can put King of the Hill in that camp as well I think.
I think it's a better and more rounded show than any of them.
I wish I could get people to care about health care and wages as much as they care about mean words. So many seemingly don't mind being robbed blind as long as our ruling parties using the correct terminology.
As Talleyrand once said: "An important art of politicians is to find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the public."
I had a hardcover book sitting on my shelf. Got it at a yard sale a while back. "The 13 Crimes of Science Fiction," it was published in 1979 and most of the stories are much older.
The level of racism was pretty amazing. One story referred to a mugger as a 'black buck' Another was set centuries in the future and had an anthropologist keeping some 'primitive' people in high tech chains and cages.
Agatha Christie is probably one of the most popular writers of the 20th Century, and one of her classics is now published under the title "And Then, There Were None."
If you've ever seen a movie, play, or game where a group of people are invited to a house only to be killed off one by one, you've seen something influenced by "And Then, There Were None".
Generally the victims are symbolized by figurines on the mantelpiece which get gradually destroyed one by one as the murders progress, eventually leaving "none".
The previously published title was the incredibly culturally insensitive "Ten Little Indians", and the figurines were just that.
The original published title, in the UK, in 1939 - an era when we DID IN FACT KNOW BETTER was "Ten Little removeds".
They did not change the title in the UK until 1985(!)
Is quoting Wikipedia now banned on Lemmy? I was under impression arsehole censoring mods here were mostly focused on removing mentions of Israeli genocide of Palestinians.
It’s automated. Instances can setup a list of words that will automatically get removed. Has nothing to do where it comes from.
Also, jordanlund is a mod himself, so…
Bots will automatically remove certain words regardless of context.
I used to see this all the time in the old Sega game "Phantasy Star Online" where objectionable chat was replaced with "*".
So "Nice shoes!" became "Nice s****!"
You couldn't arrange to play a game on "Sa****ay".
And god help you if you lived in a "ba*****t".
I'm surprised how many people seem offended by this comic. I found it pretty relatable. That doesn't mean I "don't understand context", or think the writers were bad people, or that the shows aren't worth watching. It just means I find it personally unpleasant to find these jokes in a work I'm otherwise enjoying.
When kids study older literature and media in school, generally when there's a slur or racist reference or joke, the teacher will stop and explain the context and get the kids to reflect on it and why it's probably not acceptable today. Even though I understand this and know it going in, I'm still kind of doing an abridged version of that in my head when something like this comes up in a show -- I've been following along, laughing with the writers, and then suddenly I'm backing up and distancing myself from one joke or idea. It's jarring, it pulls me out of the show, and it's just not fun.
In some cases it also comes across as incredibly lazy and unoriginal. So many sitcoms from that era have "the trans episode", "the gay episode", "the lecherous character" -- and they all make the same unfunny jokes, and it's a reminder than a lot of these shows, even in their time, were just not that creative. Plenty of modern shows have the same problem, but they don't draw attention to it by having large classes of "stock jokes" that simply do not land today.
When kids study older literature and media in school, generally when there's a slur or racist reference or joke, the teacher will stop and explain the context and get the kids to reflect on it and why it's probably not acceptable today.
I still remember how my English teacher gave context on usage of the n-word in Huckleberry Finn and how insightful it was for us at that age.
I have collected so many of the movies I remember fondly as a Gen X’er. From the ‘70s to the ‘90s. Holy shit the stuff I’d forgotten that was in them. Rape-y stuff, comments about underage girls and basically leering at them with tbe camera, suicides, misogyny, women as sexual objects and nothing else, racism… It’s bad. I’d started a movie or two with my kids and had a “oh no” moment when a part started that I’d completely forgotten about. Some of that still exists, but it’s there as a narrative and plot point about the character doing the shitty things rather than the casual and institutional way it was played before. Just goes to show you how times and people (can; some don’t) change. Some of that stuff was not unusual in life for me back then, I wouldn’t dream of it today.
The one that still gets me, and mostly because in this day and age of 2026 it still doesn't get as much homophobic backlash as I feel it clearly deserves is the pejorative: cocksucker.
In my anecdotal experience, 99.55% of the time, it's leveraged against men and used as a homophobic slur.
But even so, is sucking cock really that terrible of a thing to do? The vast majority of people with a cock enjoy the service. We literally celebrate the people who do it well for us personally, in most cases.
Why is it used as a slur?
Anyway, I'm off to suck some cock, see ya'll later.
Safe travels, cocksucker!
(Mods, please don't ban me. Please observe the context. Oh my god please jesus don't do it)
George Carlin (who is idolized and rightly so, mostly) had a line in one of his standup specials where he said "you show me a tropical fruit and I'll show you a cocksucker from Guatemala". Homophobia was just so normalized back then (this was the '80s). Eddie Murphy had a whole routine (which he has since apologized for, to his credit) imagining Mr. T as a homosexual ("Hey boy you lookin' mighty cute in them jeans!"). Robin Williams (also idolized here) routinely acted gay for the humor value of it (such as it was).
I feel like every time I tried watching Big Bang Theory, I got this vibe.
"haha that guy is such a fucking nerd!" was virtually every laugh-track riddled joke.
Hey that’s not fair to BBT, half of those jokes were “Sheldon is neurodiverse”
He said hello hahahahhahahaa....hahahahahaha omg omg bro omg he said- he said hahaha he said HELLO hahahaha
Seinfeld is in the top of my list. Kramer can show up in black face and they left the episode in but someone can't be a dark elf in Community.
They also had Kramer making the Native American noises and stomping the Puerto Rican flag. Basically anything racist, they had the racist guy do. And it was okay because he looked like he had mental health issues.
That flag episode the joke was that everything he was doing was taken the wrong way. He had accidentally set on fire a flag that was behind him and tried to put out the fire, then someone shouts "Hey, there's a guy stomping the Puerto Rican flag!" and he is chased by a mob...
It's like that Monk episode where he has to shake hands with a lot of people from a group and the last one is black, and right after shaking hands with the black person he cleans his hands with rubbing alcohol, so everyone thinks he is racist and everything he does in the episode just makes him look even worse - because it was taken out of context (he is a germophobe, he cleans his hands with rubbing alcohol after touching anything and anyone).
The entire point of a reality sitcom is that it takes place in reality.
Reality has racists. Racism is part of life. There is a difference between a racist character doing a bit because that is what the character would do. Vs a show that is racist because the writers and directors are racist.
Comedy has done dark humor and racist humor for 1000 years. If you stop allowing it, then you unironically actually just empower actual racists because your now removing a tool to undermine the racism.
Yeah it sucks when the racist joke or bit is done poorly and lacks the context or nuance to either shine a light on a problem, subvert expections or point out a flaw in society. Thus coming across as just crass.
But not every attempt is going to land.
This is the point cancel culture misses (and I absolutely support some cancellations).
Throwing it back even further, Blazing Saddles is a great example of a writer/director and some of the best comedy actors of all time using racism to undermine racism.
I've also experienced the opposite. Watching shows/movies from the 70s and 80s and thinking, "this is woke af"
And transphobic episodes of Family Guy and NCIS where Glenn's 'dad' is a woman and Tony finds out on a date that she's 'a man' and is speechless, disgusted and coworkers jibe him for it
Notably, the plot for Ace Ventura: Pet Detective
The ending scene is so rough these days. Kills the movie for me. The premise is "trans is disgusting" which is so much different than, say, the situation with Kramer stomping the Puerto Rican flag as an accident and being perceived as a racist. Context matters. And Ace Ventura really aged like milk.
90s? I went into my rewatch of How I Met Your Mother knowing it was problematic, but the entire show is basically just one long sexist joke with a disappointing ending.
