Fatale Abstraction

I had just drunk the Last of the Mojitos, and communication skills were at an ebb, when...

Wow. Last night all the neighbors and a few visitors were hanging out on the deck at my apartments, and two idiots started trying to out-do each other with gross-out/taboo jokes. What is UP with that? Where is the sport in that? They were all groaners anyway, none of them laugh-out-loud. It was ugly and unkind , until one of them told a joke about black people, and then half the group laughed heartily, and the oxygen was sucked out of the room (which was the great outdoors) for the rest of us. *gasp* It was very uncomfortable because it was so unkind and uncalled for, whether or not there was a black person present, which there was. He sat like a statue, not dignifying the idiocy with a response. And the joke had come from a woman I would never in a million years have expected to hear that from. To make matters worse, her visiting friend brought it back up minutes later saying "that black guy joke was so fucking funny!" A blunt, clever neighbor retorted loudly "I don't know why you say it that way - why don't you just say 'nigger?' That's what you mean, and yeah, nigger jokes are really fucking funny." The black man high-fived the blunt woman, and I think they will probably be friends for life, now. I don't know if the drunk joke-tellers will remember the rebuke, but I wonder how you recover from that. I suppose we'll all learn something from it. I wish I had been bold and clever enough to front her at the time it happened, but I had not all my faculties. Disappointing, but satisfying that someone could at least point out the insult eventually.