The woman who turned Truly Tasteless Jokes into publishing gold

When is a joke, not a joke? The outrage over Jimmy Carr’s “career ending” (his words) joke about the genocidal murder of Roma and Sinti people has breathed new life into this age-old question.

When Carr told the now infamous joke, couched in warm-up spiel warning audiences that his set would involve laughing at “terrible things”, many of the punters did indeed crack up. Taken out of the context of the dark room of a comedy show and displayed on social media and newspaper pages, fewer people seem to be chuckling.

It’s quite clear that only a handful of people believe that Carr really thinks it was “positive” that the Nazis killed gypsies, as his joke suggested. Carr’s shtick has always been cruel, low-hanging-fruit comedy. It’s never been my cup of tea, but then again I’m not a teenage boy laughing at "how many babies can you get in a blender" jokes. Instead, the controversy stems from the idea that Carr’s humour might embolden a public who really do hold prejudices about the traveller community.

Much like the supposed “hate speech” of Dave Chappelle’s routine about trans people, which was said to have tapped into a far-right animosity towards sexual difference, or Lenny Bruce’s profundity which was deemed so dangerous to public health he had to be locked up, Carr’s critics are less concerned about him than they are about those who hear his jokes.

This fear of the awesome power of the comic is nothing new. The disconnect between a chortling public and handwringing critics was perhaps best exampled back in 1982, when the bestselling joke collection Truly Tasteless Jokes was published by Ballantine Books. Ashton Applewhite, publishing under the name Blanche Knott, spent her free time as an assistant at a publishing house collecting offensive and “tasteless” jokes - she’d ask people at bars, talk to colleagues, even get them mailed to her. (The latter books were crowd-sourced from thousands of jokes sent in by the public.)

After realising that these jokes about really terrible things - like racism, sexism, homophobia and every other evil ism under the sun - could shock people into laughing, Applewhite reached out to publishers. Despite several rejections, including one house that condemned her for even daring to Xerox the jokes over, the book was published emblazoned with the cover subheading: “Warning, this book contains jokes that will offend everyone.” Truly Tasteless Jokes and its sequels were bestsellers for years; Applewhite is still the only author to have four books appear on the New York Times bestseller list simultaneously.

At the time, the main critics of Applewhite’s assault on the sensitivities were conservative pundits, who worried about what they saw as degrading pop culture would corrupt a young generation. Applewhite’s jokes about the difference between “parsley and p____” (no one eats parsley) or why Helen Keller masturbates with one hand (so she can moan with the other) were deemed too amoral to be aired in public.

More recently, the Truly Tasteless Jokes has taken a beating for an entirely different form of corruption. A 2021 podcast for the American magazine Slate produced a damning interview with Applewhite, in which host Willa Paskin blamed Truly Tasteless Jokes for feeding a culture of white supremacy, bigotry and hatred.

Despite Applewhite’s defence that the book set out to offend “everyone”, with the intention of poking fun at bigotry instead of reinforcing it, Paskin argued that jokes at white people’s expense could never be equal to those aimed at people of colour, because of the all-important social definer of privilege.

Two months later, when I got Applewhite on the phone on the 40th anniversary year of Truly Tasteless Jokes, it was clear that she was conflicted. Now 69, the New Yorker is quick to tell me that she is “not super interested in doing an interview about cancel culture and the jokes”, that she had written a “serious” book about women following her divorce, and has a new book out centred around ageism that she’d prefer to talk about.

Applewhite says that “cancel culture is stupid and reductive and punitive”, but she also thinks Carr shouldn’t be allowed to joke about the Holocaust. But with a little prodding, she is refreshingly defiant. “I did it because I thought they were funny,” she tells me. And though her assertions are couched in what feels like a learned response to the kind of hostility she received from Slate, saying things like “what I understand now that I didn't begin to understand when I was in my 20s is the role of privilege”, it’s clear she doesn’t agree that the book was some kind of celebration of bigotry. “If you go through a book that makes fun of virtually everybody, you can make an argument that exposes these stereotypes for the ridiculous and arbitrary things they are.”

Teetering on the edge of the line between laughing at someone and laughing with them is often where some of the most successful comedy finds its sweet spot. Context matters. When Richard Pryor stands up on the subway in See No Evil, Hear No Evil and shouts “what do you mean I’m not white”, no one would dream of calling the cancel cops. But pushing the limits of what is deemed acceptable has always been funny - from Elaine being unable to control her sniggering during a piano recital in Seinfeld to Frankie Boyle’s "sexist" Mock The Week joke about the Queen.

We seem to have forgotten what a cathartic thing laughing is. There’s a reason why people tell jokes at funerals; it relieves the tension. This is a fundamental part of human nature, Applewhite argues. “Why do we why we laugh at slapstick? You know, the guy slips on a banana peel and goes wonky. And your conscious brain says, ‘oh, geez, I hope he didn’t fracture his skull’, but you're still laughing.”

What is perhaps more offensive than mocking gypsies in an orchestrated set centred on offending an audience is grandstanding Tory cabinet ministers like Nadine Dorries threatening Netflix with action, while serving in governments that keep discriminatory legislation on the books to penalise traveller rights in the here and now.

Those who say "You Can’t Say That” are in denial - trying to keep at bay the secret knowledge we all hold that laughter isn’t something you can control. If you don’t like Carr’s joke, turn off the telly.