There was a magical time called the 1980's when you could walk into your neighborhood Brantanos Bookstore (Do these even exist anymore?) and buy joke books that made fun of black people, gays, Mexicans, etc. Then it became the 90's and this thing called Lollapalooza happened where everybody wore flannel shirts and all the girls were grrrls who just wanted to talk about how you were oppressing them with your penis. Nobody laughed at racist/homophobic/etc. jokes anymore because of something called being politically correct. The movie PCU pretty much explains it all. It's got Jeremy Piven when he was funny before he was on Entourage and became a total douche bag. What happened to you Piven?!?!?!? Remember how you were in Say Anything and were all funny and shit. That was awesome. Try and be more like that. Does anybody actually write joke books? Maude Thickett, I am calling shenanigans on you! Is it just me, or does Maude Thickett sound like a made up name?
5 Outrageously Offensive Jokes from the 1980's:
1. What do flowers and Len Bias have in common?
They both die two days after they've been picked.
2.Why did Dwight Gooden give up so many walks last year?
He liked freebasing.
3. What do you call a dead baby born in the morning in Ethiopia?
Good eating.
4. What do you call rich people pissing on you?
Reagan's trickle down theory.
5. How did the Statue of Liberty get AIDS?
From the mouth of the Hudson.
If you weren't alive in the 1980's, you probably don't get them. Even though I was alive in the 80's, I was in grade school so I didn't really know what was going on so I asked my dad to explain these jokes to me. Here are his answers:
1. In the 80's there was this magical drug called cocaine. It was so popular that even people who didn't really do drugs were pretty into it, and if you didn't do it, it sucked because it made everybody who did do it into a total asshole but they didn't realize it because they were too busy going to the bathroom every five minutes to do more blow. Anyway, there was this college basketball player named Len Bias who was really good, and he got drafted to play in the NBA. To celebrate, Len decided to do a little blow. Unfortunately, it made him have a heart attack, and he never got to be a famous basketball player who made lots of money. Boohoo. Ironically, even though everybody was doing cocaine in the 80's, Ronald Reagan, who was a bad actor who became the president some how (See explanation #4), decided to start this program called DARE to keep kids of drugs. Len Bias became the poster child for why you shouldn't do drugs. My mom told me that you should never do drugs because Len Bias only did drugs once, and he died. Now, I am pretty sure that my mom was lying. Shame on you mom!
2. Another joke about athletes and drugs. Dwight Gooden was a really good baseball player who fucked himself up doing cocaine. If you were really into coke, you graduated from putting it up your nose to something called freebasing. Freebasing is basically like smoking crack, but not exactly. I have never been really sure what the difference is.
3. There was this country in Africa called Ethiopia where everybody was starving to death. For some reason, people seemed to think that this was hilarious so there were a lot of jokes about starving Ethiopians in the 80's. I am not sure if the Ethiopians ever got anything to eat, but you don't really hear much about them so I assume they are doing better.
4. Ronald Reagan was a really bad actor who made a movie where his co-star was a monkey. Since he was such a shitty actor, he decided to get into politics. First he became president of the Screen Actors Guild, then he was governor of California, and finally he was elected to president. All the hippies from the 60's became burn outs in the 70's who started to feel guilty so they got all religious and became just like their parents who they were rebelling against in the 60's. There were also these young people who grew up in the 70's when everybody was having orgies and doing drugs and dancing to disco music. Because young people like to rebel they decided to become conservative assholes who drank a lot of Perrier. These horrible people were called yuppies. So the lame ex-hippies and their evil spawn the yuppies thought it would be a good idea to make this shitty actor president...twice. He was even worse at being president then he was as an actor. He cut government spending so poor people got even more poor, pretended that the Russians were evil commies who posed a threat to the USA even though the country was basically falling apart, and ignored this new disease called AIDS that people started to get. Rich white people liked him, though, because he wanted to make them even richer which was supposed to be good because of something called the trickle down theory. He ended up getting Alzheimer's disease, and it is thought that he might have begun to suffer from the disease while he was still in office which could explain a lot.
5. AIDS was this new disease that made you sick and then killed you. Nobody cared about it first because it seemed like only gay people and junkies got it, but then some straight people got it and all of the sudden it was a big deal. Everybody started to freak out that they were going to get it, but that never really happened like they said it would. It turns out that gay people and junkies are pretty much the only ones who get it.
Thanks, dad. It's all clear now. The jokes still aren't that funny.
