It's Not Funny

Sarcasm is not funny. I don't care what anyone says. Sarcasm is a form of bullying and needs to be labelled as such. Notice who is laughing when someone makes a snide remark. It is not the person at whom the remark was aimed.

I have been patiently trying to instil in my teenage son that sarcasm is not a form of humour. Dylan would have me believe that this kind of insensitive behaviour is fashionable. He informs me that I am one of the only people he knows who doesn't listen to a popular radio station every morning in which the DJ phones random people and pulls pranks on them.

In a motherly attempt to experience the world through his eyes I decided to listen in to the said radio station one morning. The DJ was pulling a prank on a jealous girlfriend whilst her boyfriend was at the gym. The boyfriend was in on the act as was another woman who was set up to hit on him whilst he was on the phone to his girlfriend.

I found the experience rather like having a dental procedure. It was laborious and excruciating. In fact I didn't laugh once and the reason why?

The girlfriend was stressing and I felt for her as she was humiliated in front of thousands of listeners. Here were a bunch of people who had deliberately and meticulously staged an event that would reduce this poor girl to anger, worry and panic, whilst the rest of the population at large had a laugh at her expense. By listening to the show I felt I had incriminated myself by being a voyeur. I was one of the bullies and it didn't feel nice.

That form of entertainment, if you can call it that, is no less brutal than the kid in the school playground who is taunting a classmate by throwing his lunch box around, cheered on by his mates.

I can't believe that adults would choose to numb their senses and reinvent bullying in their adult playgrounds. Seriously! So the kids grew up but the games just reinvented themselves. It's now OK because it is a form of National entertainment. We rebuke that little bully who belittled our precious child in front of his peers, but we laugh on a larger scale at someone being decimated at a National level.

It's time to wake up and call things what they are. It is not OK to justify bullying as a form of entertainment. If the person being laughed at is not laughing too, then someone is suffering and I don't want to be laughing at their tears.

Apparently if you place a frog in a pond of water and you gradually raise the temperature of the water, the frog will never discern the need to jump out. It will remain in the water until it is cooked to death. Now, likewise, if humanity doesn't question the way things are, we are likely to land up like cooked frogs.

We need to question how we have become conditioned to doing things. We need to question what we accept and we need to dare to speak up when we don't agree. We need to dare to be different. We need to find our voices and speak up for the weak, the humble and the victims.

Let's take a stand against bullying in all its forms. Let's laugh with people and not at them.

Have a great week

love
Nicolette