Updating Jokes for Modern Sensibilities

[Rifferee]

Bill owns a company and wanted to change part of his product he doesn't stand behind. He isn't being dragged out via scandal or court order, he thinks part of his product was "shitty" and is gonna make them less shitty. Some people welcome it and some people think they should decide what he does with his own company. Bill is changing Bill's work because he wants to - there's no pitchforks here. Many of these instances aren't even jokes - they're the stuff you wish you didn't say when driving home from a party. There's no art or craft being lost in these edits.

[Rifftrax_Official]

Bill owns a company and wanted to change part of his product he doesn't stand behind. He isn't being dragged out via scandal or court order, he thinks part of his product was "shitty" and is gonna make them less shitty. Some people welcome it and some people think they should decide what he does with his own company. Bill is changing Bill's work because he wants to - there's no pitchforks here. Many of these instances aren't even jokes - they're the stuff you wish you didn't say when driving home from a party. There's no art or craft being lost in these edits.

No one (I think) is saying that he cannot retroactively remove jokes he (or the others) don't like anymore. At least, I'm not.
I guess I'm asking more of a philosophical question no one has yet addressed: where is the line? Why are some groups suddenly off-limits?
I get that Bill's political persuasion has likely led him to the decision that suddenly something he said in the past needs to be removed now. He can do what he wants, but realistically LOTS of things all three of them have said makes fun of this or that person or group of people. 

I guess it just seems like the biggest sin in the world right now is to offend gay and trans people. I'm just curious, what makes them so untouchable?

I don't expect a cogent answer. Honestly, I'm wondering why I even brought it up. Everyone is so politically divided. The conservatives will say it's a crock and the liberals will clap for Bill and praise him. (Unless, of course, he wrote a tweet refusing to remove the 'offending jokes', then the conversation would be reversed. Conservatives would be applauding him and the liberals would be demanding action -- like they did when they heard Mike wasn't all on board with LGBTQ).

[RealPaigeWWE]

As either a man or a woman, i demand they delete all jokes that are about either men or women. And, as either a dog owner, a cat owner, or someone who has no pets, I will also require them to delete all jokes that are about dogs, cats, or anything that isn't a dog or a cat.

[NotRichBatman]

Philosophically, I'd vote for leaving these things untouched.
But if we're gonna take this personally, let's at least put the stricken jokes out there. Otherwise what the hell are we talking about?
Again, I bet the jokes in question were barely recognizable as comedy. Prove me wrong!

[Anarchemist]

I love Bill Corbett and don't actually see his self-awareness as a negative. I follow him on Twitter too and generally love his tweets. If anything it has made me like him personally more. Turns out he isn't just funny, but is a genuinely good human being. It's Mike I am afraid to learn too much about. Over the years I have heard a few things, but it's been easy to ignore. Of the 3, I find Bill the most consistently funny.

Why? It is because Mike is a Christian? Not a Democrat? That Mike and Bridget give a lot of time and money to charity through work with their Church? Do you demand complete ideological conformity before you can like or befriend someone? Should Mike and Bridget be cancelled?

---

Wow dude, you can really project. Who the fuck is talking about cancelling anyone? Granted, anyone who has heard the Mike/Bridget riff of Charade may want to cancel them just for that painful riff.  But you assume I hate Christians? Or "not Democrats"?  Or I am anti-charity??  The only thing I heard was that he was conservative, which is fine. I am not. Therefore, knowing this fact, I'd just as soon not take a deep dive into Mike Nelson's political beliefs. You somehow translate that into demanding ideological conformity?  That is fucking idiotic. In so many ways. Yeah, I can't like Mike Nelson because him and his wife go to church and help the needy. Oh wait! I have actually already liked Mike since the 1990s! And I have no interest is ruining that by delving deeply into his life. If It turned out that Kevin Murphy was a Nazi, until it really affected the jokes, I don't want to know. I do not NEED to know. It seems more that YOU need to know how Mike and Bridget spend their free time for YOU to like them, because unlike you, I don't know shit about their church-going. My point was that I do not need or want to know, whereas it seems like not being a Democrat holds tons more importance to you perhaps. That's the way projection works and you, wow dude, you can really project.

[Riffling]

I've been thinking about this as I just edited The Film Crew's 'The Giant of Marathon' which has some homophobic and transphobic jokes which left me cold. I didn't remove any of them. I think we can appreciate the time and place in which they were made, and that thankfully, we've moved on as a society at large. I'm in favor of this notion though, especially when it's done by the original creator.

I can't find the source or recall all of the context, but I recently was reading an interview with a comedian who was talking about 'adult diaper' jokes they had made. And they started asking the question 'who is this joke about?' If you've now reached an age where you are caring for parents or grandparents who need them, some of the shame that they experience losing this independence, and you recognize in all likelihood you will too someday, some of those jokes aren't funny anymore.


Personally, I remember making "edgy" jokes that now make me cringe because I've now experienced the things I joked about. I'm older. I've now lost friends to drugs, family to gun violence, I've cared for someone as cancer slowly took every part of that person, including their life. I'm not saying all jokes on these subjects are off-limits, but there are a lot of ways to be unnecessarily callous which I think is coming from a place of ignorance, not malice.

Largely, people don't remember what you said, only how you made them feel, I can only try and hope to have a net-positive impact on others I interact with.

[Garugemu]

Personally, I remember making "edgy" jokes that now make me cringe because I've now experienced the things I joked about. I'm older. I've now lost friends to drugs, family to gun violence, I've cared for someone as cancer slowly took every part of that person, including their life. I'm not saying all jokes on these subjects are off-limits, but there are a lot of ways to be unnecessarily callous which I think is coming from a place of ignorance, not malice.

Ridicule generally involves some level of callousness and cruelty. Almost anything ridiculous can be seen as tragic in another light. The people involved in these movies often spend years of their lives making them, with very little to show for it artistically, no matter how difficult the work or how earnest the efforts were. Much of the comedy within "good" bad movies results from the perceived contrast between the seriousness of those involved and the plainly deficient results.

I'm against altering past riffs for the sake of present political or moral expediency. I'm "on the left," so far as that matters; I just dislike bowdlerizing. There are bad, unfunny, stupid, and distasteful jokes in MST3K and in past riffs, but I do think these experiences are useful where they fail as comedy. They force us to confront the past and others as they actually were, not as we'd like them to be. That obviously wasn't the intent, yet it's part of what gives them places in time without making them simply nostalgic.

Even though the issue is minor in the case of Rifftrax, and I'm not going to stage protests or anything like that, I think it's a mistake to change them. But, beyond political or moral concerns, the economic calculation goes: "the people who care about transphobia or homophobia or the like will get angry on Twitter and create divisions in the fanbase or maybe even try to 'cancel' us, damaging our revenue, while the people who prefer to keep things as they are won't do anything or will seek out the older versions elsewhere online." That's almost certainly correct.

[kkt]

i just want to be able to watch the Jurassic Park riff with my gf's kid without hearing Mike and Weird Al bully a child about his (in their eyes) unclear gender identity. it's nasty and it's unnecessary. it has no historical value. it can go.

really tiresome hearing from the 'slippery slope crowd' about how their personal liberties are somehow being violated by a private company making changes to their own product. it's borderline trolling.

you can disagree if you like, even stop supporting them, but likening it to some kind of attack from, ahem, 'rainbow people', in the broader culture is so off-target, dramatic, and selfish. most people are not going to miss that a small matter involving RiffTrax specifically is being blown out of proportion into an excuse to be dismissive of and angry at broad groups of people who are ultimately not much different that yourselves.

[Zatteen]

So you made a thread to point out that they are cutting old jokes that they no longer want for reasons of being better people and when people actually agreed that, yeah, "trans people exist!" (at best, and frequently they're worse) isn't a joke worth keeping and that has made "the rainbow crowd" the bad guy? Which launches into "trans people are untouchable now!" Maybe calm down? Jokes aren't supposed to hurt people for no reason. The whole punch up not down thing. If anyone is seeking a reason to get offended by something "they took away my ability to call people he-she" or whatever is that. Had there not been a tweet and a post would you even have noticed?

[WangDoodle]

Modern progressives = If Pol Pot shopped on etsy.

ebook burning

How can people learn from their mistakes, and the mistakes of others, if all evidence of those mistakes gets erased?

Huey Long was on the money, back in 1935.