Negative Humor: Religion Jokes.

Negative Humor: Religion Jokes. 

It was a decent day to be outside, considering the recent weather changes. I had just stopped to talk to one of my friends on the steps outside my dorm while he was talking to another student. After being introduced to this student, I sat down and began talking with them. It’s Ash Wednesday and I’m talking about fasting and going to get ashes and the other things that happen during Ash Wednesday. Out of nowhere, my new acquaintance makes a joke that was something about not being friends with me or that he wasn't supposed to like me, because he is a different religion. For a minute I didn’t know how to take it. Considering that we had been nice to each other up to that point, and he smiled at me and acted like it was a joke when he said it, I decided to take this as a joke. I quickly responded that I didn’t make judgements based on religion and tried to move on in the conversation. 

For me, this moment was really awkward and I wasn’t sure how to handle the joke that the student made. I realized that it was a negative joke that immediately stipulated that two people couldn’t be friends based on religion. While I’m not sure if anyone was put down during this joke, it still seemed negative to me because it created a standard that someone couldn’t be friends with someone else based on the fact that I’m Catholic. I don’t think that he intended the joke to be offensive to me, but was instead playing off of some tension that he perceived the two religions to have with each other. However, I wasn’t aware of a tension between the two religions so the joke just seemed to be strange, unexpected and negative to me.

My friend that was in the conversation with me is also Catholic. Most of my attention was focused on the person who was making the joke, so I don’t remember if he laughed or had a reaction to the joke. As far as I could tell, we just moved on past the joke.

When I thought about it later, I realized that this wasn’t the first time I had heard or even made a joke that was similar to that one. While this joke wasn’t really offensive to me, I think that because I was actively looking for negative humor I finally recognized it for being a joke that could potentially offend someone, especially since I didn’t understand the joking hostility in the first place. I think that if I learned one thing about this experience it would be that I won’t be making any more religion jokes. Just because it makes sense to you, or you don’t think it would offend anyone, religion is generally a topic that probably should not be joked about.