• MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca
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    1 month ago

    While there definitely is a trope about “wife bad”, and it’s fairly common, people complaining about their spouse is nothing new. Men were able to insert it into pop culture far more frequently in the boomer days before there was even a facade of equality (both for gender and for race).

    Now at least, there’s a facade of equality if not genuine equality and as others have indicated, a lot of the spouse demeaning comedy has fallen out of favour.

    So from the etymology of the trend, it could only be “wife bad” boomer humor to achieve the meme-like status that it has, when equality became a more important issue, those jokes fell out of favour.

    To be perfectly clear, my statements are largely genderless, and that is very much on purpose. Since a husband may not have a wife, and a wife may not have a husband. Equally a spouse may not have a husband or wife.

    I have done a lot to ensure that the language I use isn’t gendered because there are people who don’t identify as a gender or don’t identify as a single gender. To which, my comments are largely taking about people, not men and women, so genderless terms are more correct to what I mean by my comments.

    Yes, it’s a little cringe to imply that all marriages are unhappy marriages. I tell this joke because it falls in the arena known as “dad” jokes, which I personally enjoy. Additionally, it subverts expectations by implying the negative of what would be normally expected, which is the bread and butter of my preferred humor.

    This is emphasized by the fact of who I am and how my personality works. I like to give people something unexpected; I’ll give you one easy example of not being funny but also not doing what’s normally expected. If I walk into a room where a group of people are watching a sports game, I’ll ask “who is losing?” Since most people would ask “who is winning?”. It’s weird, I’m weird, and I’m okay with that.

    Do with that information as you will. The fact is I like going with the opposite of whatever most people would expect when it has no bearing on the information, it only inverts it. So rather than saying “the same right to be happily married as everyone else” I simply went for the opposite as I do with everything else. It’s a quirk of my personality.