We recently found out that some person (whom I won’t name here) sent a letter to a con we performed at. This correspondence, if I may paraphrase, informed the management that Disorganization XIII are a pack of crude, nasty homophobes who shouldn’t be allowed out in public.

We are crude, of course. And there’s a strong argument for nasty – we are, among other things, basically insult comics, and nasty is kind of what we do. I’ve regretted letting Angelo out in public many times. But it takes a… special kind of person to call an openly gay man a homophobe. (Or perhaps he didn’t know I was gay? It comes up every ten minutes in every panel we do, but maybe he missed it. Every single time.) In fact, you have to dig a long way down our member list to find someone who’s not gay, bi, genderqueer, furry, or otherwise of unorthodox sexuality.

Happily, the con that got the complaint is run by bright folks that know bullshit when they read it. But I figured this was a good time to explain to you all how we operate around here, to prevent anyone else from getting, ah, confused.

In short, many of the things we say are funny because we’re not supposed to say them. We say them anyway because – well, mainly because we want to be funny, but also because we refuse to let anyone’s sexuality (or race, or religion, or anything else) be deleted from public discourse just because someone’s decided it’s not nice to talk about.

We make jokes, for example, just by saying that certain anime or video game characters are gay. It works, people laugh. Part of this, I’m sure, is just shock value. Mostly, though, it’s that they are gay, and almost everyone, including the writers, sits around desperately pretending that they’re not. Or they’re not gay, and half the internet sits around desperately pretending that they are.

I said people laugh at these jokes. What I should have said was that most people laugh. A few stay stony-faced and silent, and make not-quite-openly prejudiced comments to the effect that we ought not get our gay in their anime. If our humor is homophobic, we apparently suck at it, because the homophobes are not amused.

We make jokes about Jews — for example, that one of the recurring villains on Captain Planet was a blatant anti-Semitic caricature. Little kids were watching this show through most of the nineties – the nineties, in the United States of America — and nobody seemed to notice. We at Disorganization XIII think that’s funny.

We make jokes about furries. This is a group desperately trying to be taken seriously amidst what can only be described as a fad of prejudice against them. Meanwhile Sega keeps giving Sonic the Hedgehog characters names like Cream the Rabbit. And we think that’s funny.

We make jokes about Nazis. (Not that anyone’s jumped up to defend them, really.) One of the great threats to the world of the last century, the cause of millions of dead soldiers in battle and millions of dead civilians in atrocities, has been reduced to a convenient source of zombies in mediocre cartoons produced in a country once allied with them. We think that’s funny, too.

There are some people who will be offended by jokes on these topics, no matter what the jokes actually say. We’re going to keep telling them anyway. I won’t let anyone censor my sexual orientation out of anything, including my comedy. That’s called “being in the closet,” and I got tired of that shit back in high school. I’m sure Angelo and Kirk and Baalesh and the others feel the same way about their own minorities.

Silence is fear. We are not afraid.

A rant post by Rob on November 19, 2008