Truly Tasteless Jokes

Any Blanche fans out there who don’t subscribe to Harper’s magazine? For few of you, a site called Longform that archives non-fiction just made ”Being Blanche” available online.  This tell-all memoir by the woman behind the pen name appeared in Harper’s last June.  It’s hilarious, and now it’s free.

This Letter to the Editor appears in the July 2011 issue of Harper’s magazine.  My response follows:

In confessing her authorship of the Truly Tasteless Jokes series of the 80s and 90s [“Being Blanche,” Miscellany, June], Ashton Applewhite disingenuously claims that her books “made fun of everyone.” On the contrary, what made her books masterly was the way they distilled misogyny and racism and made these vicious sentiments widely available to the middle-class public, whereas before they had at least been kept in the closet. While her handful of jokes about WASPs were toothless, filled with the gentle self-mockery of those comfortable in the driver’s seat of social power, the vast majority of her wisecracks picked on the same social groups Ronald Reagan was targeting through neoliberal economics and the rollback of civil rights. These jokes were not, as Ashton Applewhite absurdly suggests (quoting her friend Luc Sante) a “sigh of relief,” but were part and parcel of the Right’s general attack on feminism and civil liberties, an attack that continues to this day.
John Sanbonmatsu
Worcester, Mass.

Ashton Applewhite responds:

Far be it from Blanche to claim the moral high ground, but I can’t imagine what closet Mr. Sanbonmatsu is referring to (and since when are closets a good thing?).  These jokes were the source of water-cooler and playground merriment long before I collected them. Why assume that the middle-class was somehow in the dark until then (and why the middle class)?  Perhaps Mr. Sanbonmatsu feels that I lack respect for his heritage? (The Japanese are so advanced . . . the beach comes to them.) As for WASP jokes (What do WASPs do instead of having sex? Rule the country.), I’d love some vicious ones. Send them to trulytastelessjokes.com.

Constipated Reactionaries and American Taliban suffered through tightly wound sphincters and knotted bladders while they endured a fifteen minute radio segment featuring Truly Tasteless Jokes author Ashton Applewhite (aka “Blanche Knott”) Saturday evening, 6/18/2011. The ever-courageous News Talk Radio 77 WABC New York’s John Batchelor Show (hosted by Paul Vigna) spoke candidly with Applewhite about the origins of the infamous Truly Tasteless Jokes series, noting that Applewhite/Knott was the only author ever in the history of the world to have enjoyed the carnal pleasure of having four (4) books on the New York Times Best Seller List simultaneously.

In this cunningly provocative interview, host Paul Vigna (Editor Note: “Vigna” — not “vagina”) explores the effect the Truly Tasteless Jokes series had on the (mostly teenage male) youth of the 1980s and the potentially consequential uprising of tasteless politically correct fascism on college campuses the following decade.

Listen to this candid interview and understand the healing power of humor, the true history of crowd sourcing and the reason why an apology for TTJ is not necessary.

Listen here:

truly_tasteless_jokes_radio_061811

For the full interview as well as a link to many excellent John Batchelor Show pocasts click here.