reply to post by Phage
OH, DEAR ME!
Here I am again agreeing with Phage! LOL.
Clearly the world is coming to a . . . transition . . . lol.
Have long felt similarly.
IIRC, several years ago I touched on the topic in a msg exchange with one of the 3 Amigos. The reply was that certainly humor was desired--within the
T&C, of course.
Evidently that's a serious rub and hamper on the humor.
Certainly a ton of humor is at someone's expense. And, in normal threads, I can certainly see why civility would suffer at a lot of humor.
And plenty of harsh, ruthless stabs have pretended to "merely" be "humor."
However, I agree with you that humor often springs to mind before I have to slap my fingers and stifle the temptation. Sadly.
Some of us are probably able to take humorous zings even at ourselves and our sacred cows without . . . uhhh . . . having a cow.
Clearly, many can't.
And the iron-clad civility requirement means that humor HAS to essentially, functionally be
INOFFENSIVE.
That's a hard criteria to meet in many cases.
Even if there's no serious malice in the humor, the humorist CANNOT control
HOW SOMEONE TAKES the humor.
And to many on ATS have hair-triggers when it comes to TAKING OFFENSE. Some seem to have made it a hobby. Others have made it an occupation and still
others have made it an addicted obsession.
I don't know if there is a solution.
But it seems to me we could have a smokey back room where humor of a non-sexually explicit; non-racist; non-violent etc. nature could be let fly
safely without considering it a violation of the T&C.
Folks who were inclined to be offended could stay out. Those who chose to read there would be ignored if they wailed over even robust humor that most
could tell was not malicious.
Of course there would always be judgment calls. But I think it would be worth a 4-6 month experiment.
Sigh.