Do you mind that joke?

Inappropriate humour or insensitive jokes is something that we have to put up with almost on a daily basis on social media. Often bracketed under the umbrella term, troll, these ‘mindless’ jokes are not only a big annoyance but also baffling. Why do some people feel the urge to joke about the most sensitive of issues, be it rape, race or gender? They expect others to join in on the fun or argue it out with them, all the while calling them out for being too ‘politically correct’ and taking these jokes too seriously. But, studies have shown that these jokes have very real effects including desensitisation, normalising gruesome crimes and also promoting a negative attitude towards those who are the butt of jokes.

Even celebrities, who are huge influencers and are generally very censored in their conversations, are not averse to joking about sexual assault and more. Salman Khan recently compared his state of mind after his practice in the wrestling ring for Sultan to that of a ‘raped woman’. In the west, comedians such as Lena Dunham have been known to joke about rape and Donald Trump, known to be outlandish with his choice of words, has even made fun of people with disabilities. We examine the psychology of people who make offensive jokes.

Karthik Lakshmanan R.M., a counseling psychologist and the author of several books, says, “Often, these are people who are looking for attention and don’t have other qualities to attract attention, such as knowledge or qualifications. They might also have low self esteem, and so, they use such jokes to boost themselves up. There is nothing productive that they want to do out of this.”

Psychologist Dr Mini Rao agrees. “These are people who enjoy negative attention. They want to instigate people into having conversations with them but only have superficial knowledge.” She goes on to add, “People who have influence like celebrities will definitely affect the masses and cause desensitization about real issues. There is a certain mob mentality that humans have, where people get swayed by the crowd’s opinion.”

Dr Rao points out that it is a disturbing trend as it can affect survivors of abuse, rape, racial and caste violence, when such jokes are being made on their situation and can make them regress in therapy. “For a survivor, rape jokes amount to trivialising the trauma that she faced. It is an extremely dangerous way to respond to their pain. It is as though you’re making light of what they went through, and have no sensitivity or care for what they faced, physically, mentally and emotionally,” says Gita Jayakumar, a life coach who deals with non-violent communication. She goes on to say, “As for society at large, such humour not only trivialises a horrific crime that we should all be trying to end, but also pushes us to absolve ourselves of our liability. When I work with young men, I find that the culture of rape jokes harms them by damaging their capacity to function outside the framework of patriarchy. It makes them feel like they have to buy into the patriarchal mindset to fit in even if they don’t want to — because not fitting in brings its own set of challenges.”