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Carina's avatar

For me, the concept of punching up/down is useful in very limited contexts, when it helps us to consider *what* we’re mocking exactly. For example, when people made fun of the NYC mayoral candidates for thinking a house in Brooklyn costs $100,000—I’d call that punching up in the sense that it’s mocking how wealth makes people oblivious. But if someone calls Trump fat or Clinton ugly, that’s not ‘punching up’ despite their positions. It’s not like I cry about it, but mocking someone’s looks, even if they’re the most powerful person on earth, will never be punching up.

When people decide who is punching up based on the identity of the target vs. the speaker, I’m in total agreement with Freddie—it’s impossible. Plus, the whole concept of punching up, as we use it today, makes people lazy and cruel. It has become a green light to be a bully, as long as you’re targeting ‘bad people’ such as Trump supporters.

You can really tell that for some writers, a switch flipped when they realized they could be sadistic assholes if they picked the right targets—and they found it really fun and exhilarating, and never looked back.

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Anthony's avatar

I very much agree with your broader point about the undesirability and unworkability of the "punching up/punching down" framework, but I especially love how quickly people like Harvilla who claim to subscribe to it will either change the rules or ignore reality to justify their own tastes. Another great example is the reaction to the more recent Chappelle specials and his jokes about trans people. People who loved Chappelle Show at its heyday needed to assure themselves that they had always been good guys but Chappelle had changed, so they adopted the line "he used to punch up but now he's punching down." But as Jesse Singal noted in a Substack post, during the period that Chappelle was supposedly "punching up", one of his most popular running bits was "crackheads are funny because of their willingness to totally debase themselves for crack."

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