For 14 weeks, you have been asking: Who is Gossip Bro? This is Gossip Bro speaking. I am the man who loves a good joke. I am the man who does not sacrifice his love or his values to public opinion or political correctness or any depraved combination of the two. I am the man who has deprived you of mindless censorship and thus has destroyed your little game of self-pity, and if you wish to know why your game is up—you who dread knowledge—I am the man who will now tell you.
You have heard it said that this column is offensive, misinformed, ignorant, vulgar. You have said it yourself, half in fear, half in hope that publicly identifying the problem would absolve you of complicity. You have cried that sexism and racism are destroying the once illustrious humor column of the ever-illustrious Chronicle, and you have cursed Gossip Bro for his unwillingness to practice in his humor the sort of mild, pedestrian and inoffensive communality from which banality both etymologically and semantically derive.
A great feminist named Karen Owen once said, “Well-behaved women rarely make history.” I reference this because in her discovery of the many meanings of the word “viral,” Miss Owen made a point which can be paralleled with mine: Well-behaved Monday, Monday columns rarely get letters to the editor.
Since humor, to you, consists of restricting things we can and cannot joke about in the name of appeasing the masses, you have demanded more and more restrictions with every successive column: “You can’t say that!” “No Holocaust jokes!” “Leave Harriet Tubman alone!” I reject these demands, and I do not believe anything can ever be, or should ever be, taboo. I invite disagreement with this, of course, which is why I view the amount of letters to the editor not as a wake-up call to mute my off-colors but as a barometer of the health of public debate.
I do not consider the sensibilities or sensitivities of the hoi polloi when I produce my work, nor do I consider the ever-immature “I’m offended” as a claim on or argument against my writing.
As a brief aside, I was just validated in my lack of faith in the collective wisdom by none other than the Google search bar, while writing this very column. As I began to search for Susan B. Anthony to achieve a better understanding of feminism, I typed “susan b” —fully expecting this to be sufficient for the first search suggestion to reveal the famous suffragette. Suzy B, however, was not the first suggestion, because more people have evidently searched for “Susan B Komen” (an erroneous spelling of Susan G. Komen) and, of course, Susan Boyle. You will forgive me if I am slightly distrustful of anything that the majority agrees upon.
The point is that the encroachment of the censor is not a thing to be welcomed. In fact, heroes like Julian Assange have been WikiLeaking all over Swedish women just to make this point. Bowdlerization is not the solution to any of your problems, nor has it ever been the solution to anything; you all, however, possess a unique faculty which makes expurgation unnecessary and which is the solution to everything.
Its name: the mind.
You have the power to observe with your senses and integrate your observations with your mind. You see a thing, and from there you may choose to learn from it, get offended by it, discard it, etc., but you have that choice. Gossip Bro, who is accused of turning columniation into calumniation, is no different. You were free to judge it—you have judged it—and to preemptively deprive anyone of that freedom based on a hazy notion of what might offend him is to insult his intelligence and emasculate his own judgment. Let him decide for himself whether he wants to appreciate it as satire or dismiss it as jejune pap. I am indifferent to the nature of the opinions that are evoked in response to my column—I care only that those opinions are possible.
In the name of a return to humor, you have requested that I temper my remarks or else cease to write for The Chronicle entirely. With my final column, your wish has been granted. But if you wish to go on laughing, what you now need is not to return to humor—you who have never known any—but to discover it.
Fratlas Nugged.
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