QUICK COMMENT ON JAMES GUNN'S FIRING

Here's another one of my reworked forum-posts, beginning with a quote from my favorite literary critic, Northrop Frye:

In melodrama two themes are important: the triumph of moral virtue over villainy, and the consequent idealizing of the moral views assumed to be held by the audience. In the melodrama of the brutal thriller we come as close as it is normally possible for art to come to the pure self-righteousness of the lynching mob.

We should have to say, then, that all forms of melodrama, the detective story in particular, were advance propaganda for the police state, in so far as that represents the regularizing of mob violence, if it were possible to take them seriously. But it seems not to be possible. The protecting wall of play is still there. 

Frye wrote this in the 1950s, when some intellectuals viewed bestselling authors like Mickey Spillane (who did a LOT of "brutal thrillers") as threats to the intellectual landscape. Frye is arguing that there's a "protecting wall of play" that keeps people from becoming literally infected by the mood of the lynch-mob, which, about ten years previous, Gershon Legman seriously argued was going to happen.

How does this apply to nasty jokes? I think that there's a "wall of play" in Gunn's tweet-jokes. They may not be good jokes, but he's not claiming that he attacked some kid after watching THE EXPENDABLES (one of the more coherent jokes), he's talking about how the movie made him feel "manly" enough to do it-- which I would bet he didn't *really* believe back in the day.

The gist of your post seems to imply that if a real rape-victim read Gunn's jokes, or jokes like them, they would feel terrible to see their trauma trifled with. But if it's a joke, it's NOT REAL. I can't tell a real victim how to deal with trauma, but their pain is not coming from a joke, it's coming from a real act of violence.  Gunn's tweet-jokes are not to my taste, but I have seen black-humor jokes I found funny. Yet no matter where you go, you can find someone, somewhere, who's offended by any joke. 

Black humor is part of our culture, and maybe of every culture, even if some cultures don't want to admit it. I can understand why some people conflate the joke about something bad with the act that actually is bad. But I can't agree with the conflation.