Decoder Ring - Truly Tasteless Jokes
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3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 7 December 2021
⏱️ 44 minutes
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Summary
Note: This episode is about offensive material, and so contains explicit and offensive language.
Truly Tasteless Jokes were a series of joke books that dominated the bestsellers list during the 1980s. An equal opportunity joke book: Truly Tasteless Jokes were collections of jokes ranging from Helen Keller, to dead babies, to sexist and racist jokes that from the vantage of 2021, seem entirely abject. For readers in the 1980’s though, these books were ubiquitous. On this episode we dig into the history of these books and their author Ashton Applewhite. It’s a story that involves the tangled history of 1960’s free speech politics, conservative backlash, and the strange moment in the 1980’s when left and right wing speech politics converged to help make these books mainstream.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Before we begin, I want to give you a heads up that this episode not only contains foul and offensive language. |
| 0:06.8 | It's about foul and offensive language. |
| 0:28.0 | One of the best-selling books of 1983 is a slim paperback that could fit in the back pocket of a pair of jeans. |
| 0:32.6 | It's all black, on the front, on the back, on the spine. |
| 0:38.8 | The only splash of color comes from the title, which is written in a simple red font, |
| 0:45.6 | and from the author's name, which is in a florid white cursive, the kind you might see on a wedding invitation. |
| 0:50.7 | The cursive is a joke, though. |
| 0:55.9 | It suggests you're about to read something elegant and refined, but you're not. |
| 1:04.7 | You are really not. Because the book is called Truly Tasteless Jokes. It is a 116-page compendium of corny, crass, sick, dirty, sexist, ethnic, and racist jokes. The chapters have titles like Dead Baby, Helen Keller, |
| 1:13.5 | Polish, Jewish, Wasp, Black, ethnic jokes variegated, homosexual, handicapped, and so on. |
| 1:21.4 | Most of the jokes are a sentence or two, some are a few paragraphs, and they run the gamut from |
| 1:26.6 | relatives of the dad joke to much stronger stuff. |
| 1:30.8 | On the tamer side are cracks like, why does a dog lick his balls? |
| 1:35.9 | Because he can. |
| 1:37.7 | In the mid-range, you get jokes like this. |
| 1:40.3 | What do old women have between their tits that young women don't? |
| 1:45.1 | A belly button. |
| 1:50.9 | And then there are the ethnic and racist jokes which deliver endless dehumanizing stereotypes. |
| 1:57.6 | Polish is a synonym for stupid. Jews are greedy. Mexican are lazy. The chapter of jokes about black people contains just about every racist trope you've ever heard |
| 2:01.2 | and every slur too. Most of the jokes in the book are still in circulation, in private |
| 2:07.3 | conversations and on the internet. But in the early 1980s, you could buy them for $5.99 at the bookstore, |
| 2:14.1 | at the drugstore, at the airport, and millions and millions and millions of Americans did. |
... |
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