I wouldn’t claim the ability to produce the most inappropriate such message; simply a highly inappropriate one in response to that question, immediately and reflexively, whether I wanted to or not.
It is, however, superior to your suggestion for a number of reasons:
1) It’s considerably more achievable to spell out a three simple-word message with no punctuation in recognisable swastikas on an easter egg than it is to spell out a five complex-word message with punctuation in recognisable heroin needles in the same medium.
2) Swastikas are an immediately recognisable and highly historically, socially and politically charged symbol in a way that needles simply are not. You’d have a hard time even getting people to recognise a pointy blob piped onto a piece of confectionery as a hypodermic needle, let alone conveying the idea that it was for the purpose of injecting heroin.
3) “Fuck the police” is also an existing politicised statement, primarily associated with black gangsta rap group N.W.A., but also a broad anarchist sentiment taken in isolation, while “Your Child’s Leukemia Is Hilarious!” is simply a highly distasteful fabricated statement without any precedent impact. It makes people go “ew”, unless they actually have a child with leukemia, in which case it’s just grievously cruel.
4) It’s composed of radically opposed concepts, instead of randomly disjoint ones. Swastikas and gangsta rap lyrics emphatically do not belong together. More generally, anarchist and fascist statements aren’t the most cosy of bedfellows. Heroin needles and leukemia hilarity are just randomly thrown together. Mine is subversive in structure, whereas yours is just surreal.
5) It’s generally punchier. People can interpret the components immediately, and then their brains encounter resistance as they try to put them together. You get a sudden “WTF!?” moment since it’s easy to read but hard to understand. With the heroin needle leukemia hilarity suggestion, the reader is presented with two quite hard-to-interpret elements, so the confusion happens at the wrong point. It’s hard to read, but easy to understand, and the payload isn’t worth the cost of delivery. It’s like a shaggy dog story as opposed to a snappy one-liner.
6) When someone says “Your Child’s Leukemia Is Hilarious!” they’re clearly just going for the most shocking and distateful ideas that they can think of, since very few people think terminal childhood illness is genuinely funny. Once you realise that, you dismiss it as kind of childish. But people do use swastikas as symbols of their allegiance to horrific ideals, and people do say “fuck the police” and mean it, because they have legitimate and complex issues with authority figures and social institutions. Taken independently they could be serious statements. Only in combination do they become a jokingly obtuse, clearly over-the-top gesture of intentional offensiveness.
Back to the broader point, I believe people with the faculty I am claiming to possess would instantly and intuitively find mine more entertaining than yours, because they will likey favour inappropriate humour.
I probably share your sense of humor. But just two nitpicks:
It’s composed of radically opposed concepts, instead of randomly disjoint ones.
Since the neo-Nazi activities are often illegal, the Nazis may quite easily say “fuck the police”. I am not too familiar with the Nazi subculture, but (therefore?) I would be able to mistake the combination for a genuine expression of political opinion (not sure about that if they happened to be painted on an easter egg).
I believe people with the faculty I am claiming to possess would instantly and intuitively find mine more entertaining than yours
This sounds tautologically trivial, unless the faculty is defined more precisely than it was.
I’ve met (way) more than my fair share of anarcho-communists. They’re real, fairly intelligent and reasonably well educated people who simultaneously hold what I believe to be radically opposed and mutually conflicting philosophies. The fact they exist doesn’t make those philosophies any less radically opposed or mutually conflicting. It does make them kind of funny, though.
As regards the tautology claim, I’m not saying people who share my sense of humour will prefer things I also find funny. I’m saying that my sense of humour is informed by my tendency to spontaneously formulate inappropriate responses to situations. Impropriety is in many ways an aesthetic property, and other people with that tendency to formulate inappropriate responses to situations will have an aesthetic appreciation for it when they see it carried out by other people.
I wasn’t meaning that existence of Nazis fucking the police implies absence of contradiction in that action, but rather that “fuck the police” and swastika aren’t necessarily immediately perceived as symbols of opposed ideologies. I know what a swastika symbolises, but as for “fuck the police”, my internal ideology analyser returned a rather generic “political contrarian” label, under which Nazis can be classified without difficulty. Needless to say, I have no knowledge of gangsta rap.
(In a sense, putting two contradictory ideologies together makes them somewhat cancel each other and makes the whole thing less inappropriate. Combining two compatible symbols would have a stronger effect, as long as inappropriateness is the main goal.)
I think a distinction needs to be drawn between “inappropriate” and “shocking”. Shock is about the magnitude of anticipated response, whereas impropriety is about things being out of place. They can go hand in hand (the most inappropriate things usually have a shocking aspect), but they don’t quite work in the same way.
If you want to maximise shock, you transgress the biggest taboos you have available, but if you transgress too many at once it stops being shocking and starts being farcical. If you want to maximise impropriety, you need to provide something tailor-made to transgress the specific taboos of the situation you’re in. By way of example, if a gynecologist wolf-whistles while giving a patient a pelvic exam, that’s inappropriate. If he stabs her to death, that’s shocking. If he chops her up into bits and feeds her to orphans working in his sweatshop that manufactures clubs for killing baby seals, that’s farcical.
The contradictory nature of “fuck the police” in swastikas is somewhat farcical, making it irreverant about serious issues in a way that isn’t as bluntly shocking. This is probably the “cancelling out” you mention. It could certainly be more shocking, but it’s supposed to be out of place, not to generate a response of high magnitude.
I wouldn’t claim the ability to produce the most inappropriate such message; simply a highly inappropriate one in response to that question, immediately and reflexively, whether I wanted to or not.
It is, however, superior to your suggestion for a number of reasons:
1) It’s considerably more achievable to spell out a three simple-word message with no punctuation in recognisable swastikas on an easter egg than it is to spell out a five complex-word message with punctuation in recognisable heroin needles in the same medium.
2) Swastikas are an immediately recognisable and highly historically, socially and politically charged symbol in a way that needles simply are not. You’d have a hard time even getting people to recognise a pointy blob piped onto a piece of confectionery as a hypodermic needle, let alone conveying the idea that it was for the purpose of injecting heroin.
3) “Fuck the police” is also an existing politicised statement, primarily associated with black gangsta rap group N.W.A., but also a broad anarchist sentiment taken in isolation, while “Your Child’s Leukemia Is Hilarious!” is simply a highly distasteful fabricated statement without any precedent impact. It makes people go “ew”, unless they actually have a child with leukemia, in which case it’s just grievously cruel.
4) It’s composed of radically opposed concepts, instead of randomly disjoint ones. Swastikas and gangsta rap lyrics emphatically do not belong together. More generally, anarchist and fascist statements aren’t the most cosy of bedfellows. Heroin needles and leukemia hilarity are just randomly thrown together. Mine is subversive in structure, whereas yours is just surreal.
5) It’s generally punchier. People can interpret the components immediately, and then their brains encounter resistance as they try to put them together. You get a sudden “WTF!?” moment since it’s easy to read but hard to understand. With the heroin needle leukemia hilarity suggestion, the reader is presented with two quite hard-to-interpret elements, so the confusion happens at the wrong point. It’s hard to read, but easy to understand, and the payload isn’t worth the cost of delivery. It’s like a shaggy dog story as opposed to a snappy one-liner.
6) When someone says “Your Child’s Leukemia Is Hilarious!” they’re clearly just going for the most shocking and distateful ideas that they can think of, since very few people think terminal childhood illness is genuinely funny. Once you realise that, you dismiss it as kind of childish. But people do use swastikas as symbols of their allegiance to horrific ideals, and people do say “fuck the police” and mean it, because they have legitimate and complex issues with authority figures and social institutions. Taken independently they could be serious statements. Only in combination do they become a jokingly obtuse, clearly over-the-top gesture of intentional offensiveness.
Back to the broader point, I believe people with the faculty I am claiming to possess would instantly and intuitively find mine more entertaining than yours, because they will likey favour inappropriate humour.
Hm. Very well then. I suppose I’m just an old curmudgeon who doesn’t understand inappropriate humor. At least it’s better than puns.
I probably share your sense of humor. But just two nitpicks:
Since the neo-Nazi activities are often illegal, the Nazis may quite easily say “fuck the police”. I am not too familiar with the Nazi subculture, but (therefore?) I would be able to mistake the combination for a genuine expression of political opinion (not sure about that if they happened to be painted on an easter egg).
This sounds tautologically trivial, unless the faculty is defined more precisely than it was.
I’ve met (way) more than my fair share of anarcho-communists. They’re real, fairly intelligent and reasonably well educated people who simultaneously hold what I believe to be radically opposed and mutually conflicting philosophies. The fact they exist doesn’t make those philosophies any less radically opposed or mutually conflicting. It does make them kind of funny, though.
As regards the tautology claim, I’m not saying people who share my sense of humour will prefer things I also find funny. I’m saying that my sense of humour is informed by my tendency to spontaneously formulate inappropriate responses to situations. Impropriety is in many ways an aesthetic property, and other people with that tendency to formulate inappropriate responses to situations will have an aesthetic appreciation for it when they see it carried out by other people.
I wasn’t meaning that existence of Nazis fucking the police implies absence of contradiction in that action, but rather that “fuck the police” and swastika aren’t necessarily immediately perceived as symbols of opposed ideologies. I know what a swastika symbolises, but as for “fuck the police”, my internal ideology analyser returned a rather generic “political contrarian” label, under which Nazis can be classified without difficulty. Needless to say, I have no knowledge of gangsta rap.
(In a sense, putting two contradictory ideologies together makes them somewhat cancel each other and makes the whole thing less inappropriate. Combining two compatible symbols would have a stronger effect, as long as inappropriateness is the main goal.)
I think a distinction needs to be drawn between “inappropriate” and “shocking”. Shock is about the magnitude of anticipated response, whereas impropriety is about things being out of place. They can go hand in hand (the most inappropriate things usually have a shocking aspect), but they don’t quite work in the same way.
If you want to maximise shock, you transgress the biggest taboos you have available, but if you transgress too many at once it stops being shocking and starts being farcical. If you want to maximise impropriety, you need to provide something tailor-made to transgress the specific taboos of the situation you’re in. By way of example, if a gynecologist wolf-whistles while giving a patient a pelvic exam, that’s inappropriate. If he stabs her to death, that’s shocking. If he chops her up into bits and feeds her to orphans working in his sweatshop that manufactures clubs for killing baby seals, that’s farcical.
The contradictory nature of “fuck the police” in swastikas is somewhat farcical, making it irreverant about serious issues in a way that isn’t as bluntly shocking. This is probably the “cancelling out” you mention. It could certainly be more shocking, but it’s supposed to be out of place, not to generate a response of high magnitude.
You would probably be somewhat distressed by how many police are neo-Nazis and how tolerated they are by their fellows.
How many, how well, how many of the neo-Nazis who commit crimes are also neon-Nazi police and says who?