tom_ 18 hours ago

I'm not sure. Times change, and things that were acceptable become not so - and vice versa.

  • iterance 18 hours ago

    It's not just acceptability. Jokes written even just five or ten years ago often fail to land on modern audiences. That taste in humor changes is neither morally positive nor negative. It's easy to look for deeper meaning in the notion that what once was funny now isn't, but often, there isn't a deeper meaning to find. Life is different now; so too must humor change.

    • PlunderBunny 16 hours ago

      When I re-watch comedy like ‘The Young Ones’ or many other funny series from the 80s or 90s, I don’t find it funny any more. It’s not that the jokes weren’t good and that I didn’t find it funny at the time, it’s just that humour changes. In that case, it’s nothing to do with the jokes becoming ‘unacceptable’.

      • harvey9 12 hours ago

        I find Yes Minister funny now, and I'm too young to have watched when it first aired.

relaxing 17 hours ago

I’d be pretty upset if the value of my home was harmed because someone decided to make it common knowledge that the town I lived in was crap.

  • jimnotgym 17 hours ago

    That is a very British take. Constant worry about the value of something you don't want to sell. Thinking about your home as a financial investment, rather than a...home.

    • stuaxo 12 hours ago

      Unfortunately it's become embedded in the system with the houses themselves becoming vastly over inflated.

    • mschuster91 10 hours ago

      > Thinking about your home as a financial investment, rather than a...home.

      Sadly, the way all Western economies have devolved over the last decades, real estate equity is the only form of wealth that at least some part of the 99% has for retirement.

      • lotsofpulp 7 hours ago

        Broad market index funds have performed spectacularly over the last few decades, and far more than 1% have them (or could have had them) for retirement. It has been the standard recommendation since I graduated college in the early 2000s.

        Of course, many people prefer to invest in extra big and luxurious houses/cars/vacations/restaurants/alcohol/coffee/etc out and I would even throw in educations with low ROI, rather than broad market index funds.

        This is specifically about those who had been earning money in the ~1980 to ~2010 period, for the vast majority, their house should not have been the only equity.

  • JumpCrisscross 12 hours ago

    > pretty upset if the value of my home was harmed because someone decided to make it common knowledge that the town I lived in was crap

    I could argue this for the journalism disclosing Flint’s lead problems. The root cause isn’t the commentary. It’s the reality. Balancing one’s property value is the fraud conveyed on a prospective buyer.

  • brewdad 14 hours ago

    Presumably, anyone looking to buy your home would visit and quickly ascertain whether or not your town is crap.

s1artibartfast 17 hours ago

Not necessarily. I think the interesting idea the article dances around is changing attitudes and sensibilities. In many ways, I think media of the 90s and even 2000s had a different balance of optimism and cynicism. Critical commentary was an edgy (or in this case humorous) counterpoint. 1999 saw dark edgy and dystopian films like the matrix, fight club that felt like a warning, criticism of a future to be avoided.

Similar subjects today are noticably darker without the buttress of social optimism. Films like The Joker seem less like a cautionary tale and more like a documentary. Is the joker now the protagonist?

  • zeristor 10 hours ago

    Or could it be about “Othering” these destitute places, and realising far more of us are engulfed in humdrum of life collapsing.