Sometime I like to take a break from telling you all what to think to tell you why you think that (Short Answer: Because I told you too). Now, some unwary liberals have stumbled onto conservative humor on some t-shirts from ThoseShirts.com and were quite shocked and appalled by what they saw. Digby feared that our humor meant we mean his ilk real harm, while maha says that this just follows a long line of violent conservative humor rooted in hostility.
She also says there is no such liberal equivalent.
Yeah, yeah; calm down. It’s just like the “there’s no liberal media” types who basically have King Kong trashing their living room but claim not to be able to see a monkey. But doesn’t such obtuseness bring up some hostile feeling in you? Maybe there is a point about right-wing hostility in humor, as, if you look at it, there are a lot of factors out there that can be pushing conservatives like me to a very hostile disposition which I could possibly be reflecting in my humor.
CONTRIBUTING FACTORS TO RIGHT-WING HOSTILITY
* We were able to steal two Presidential election, but unable to rig Presidential approval polls.
* Confusion resulting from that we hate women and minorities, yet love Condoleezza Rice’s warmongering and the punditry of Michelle Malkin.
* Our neo-nazi tendencies push us to anti-Semitism, but we’re also working on Zionist conspiracies to fight wars solely to benefit Israel.
* Walker: Texas Ranger was canceled years ago.
* Illegal immigrants are stealing our jobs (personally, I have tons of bills to pay for my college education in electrical engineering, so how can I compete with Pedro hanging out by the Radio Shack who will design custom Power-On Reset circuits for $2.00 an hour?).
* We got Halliburton the illegal wars it wanted, but it’s yet to deliver on the cheap oil.
All of that combined can lead to quite a bit of hostility, and, subconsciously, that could seep into our humor, our jokes revealing our violent intentions. How can we tell, though?
Obviously, Digby and maha lack any sort of science background to definitively detect latent hostility hiding in humor. Luckily, you have me, and there is no one more scientifical than Frank J.
Now, I contacted the humor department at Carnegie Mellon University (it’s an actual university; Google it), and they happen to have specific studies on hostility in humor. It is essential to note that humor is hostile by nature. While it feels good to laugh at something, it feels horrible to be laughed at. Studies have shown that being laughed at activates the same centers of the brain as when one is threatened with a gun (That particular study was done by having some people connected to a brain monitor and then having the entire staff come in the room and laugh at the people for how dumb they looked with all that equipment attached to them. The other test case had people connected to the brain monitor and told they were going to view a series of pictures, but instead Samuel L. Jackson runs into a room, points a gun at the subject, and recites a stylized version of Ezekiel 25:17. The control case had people connected to the brain monitor and just forgotten about until they got angry and left.).
To measure hostility in humor, the Franken Scale is used. It’s a linear scale for signifying the amount of latent hostility in a joke and ranges from 1 (no hostility) to 10 (“My name is Ted Rall.”). Before we use the Franken Scale on the right-wing humor in question, let’s use it on some simple examples so you can familiarize yourself with it. First, let’s start with a joke common among many children:

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