Hey, as the original poster on this thread, I'm sorry if it was offensive. I just find cats cute and I hate startup mindsets. When I posted, I was thinking about how cat knight thinks they're doing something productive while everyone else understands he is not.

@mnin thanks for your message, I understand. Personally, I think that humor works in a spectrum. It is like a forest, there are parts of it that are more dangerous than others. If you venture far enough in some direction, you might find the forest extremely offensive and maybe no longer a forest at all.

What I have some trouble reconciling is where to place satire and farse in this forest. By their nature, they are bound to offend. Both are social commentaries in the form of funny jabs. Sometimes they are not even funny and more on the ironic side. If you write satire and you haven't offended anyone, then it is really satire? Same goes for farse.

Not all comedic content is satire though. You can't pass racist and misogynistic shit as satire. Just like people want to defend their prejudices (and crimes) with arguments of "freedom of speech" and "humor", I agree with you that they are not all the same or even valid arguments in many cases.

So, thanks again for nudging me into a more analytical mindset. I studied humor at my uni for a while – it was part of learning to be a scriptwriter – and lots of what we studied is coming back to me now. I remember being quite impressed at the time by the works of Vladimir Propp (I believe excerpts of Problems of comedy and laughter, Leningrad 1983) and how he made me understand what I didn't like about some forms of American Humor (I have a special hatred of practical jokes). Through his work (and probably other authors I can't remember) and later discussions, helped me understand how something this stuff works.

The best image image I can conjure for others here on the thread is that of a rising tide. The sand on the beach is all humor, the water is our critical thinking about it. As the tide rises, it touches more and more of the sand. This symbolises our growing understanding about forms of humor, our rethinking of what is acceptable. When I was studying humor at the uni 20 years ago, that tide was in a position that represents my comfort zone. These days it is much higher and it forces me to rethink much of what I took for granted.

There are many forms of humor. Our comprehension of it evolves. You can think critically about it, and decide that something is no longer acceptable.

An example of it happened in Brazil. During my youth there was an extremely popular humoristic TV show. Basically gags and sketches with a fixed crew. A large number of gags were racist. That was a reflection of Brazilian society, which is still very racist, but now we understand and most of us see how problematic it was.

Tropes and archetypes play a large role in storytelling. We have internalised many of them as a species to the point that they are immediately recognizable. These are not bad things. I think it is kinda impossible to tell a story without using any trope or archetype.

These are like rice. When making a dish, rice is recognizable. What you take away from the dish, is what you added on the rice and how you prepared it. Same thing with stories (and humor), the tropes are there but what you added, what you chose to spotlight, your vision on top of it, is what will make it good.

The damsel in distress is an outdated trope. In the cat meme and the programming language strip, they serve as the rice, something recognizable that is used by the author as a framework to build their humor on top of. Even though, the damsel is not the focus of the humor – it is not a practical joke on them – it is still an outdated trope and the same gags could have been constructed on top of a different rice.

Those thinking this is too much to ask for, remember that other tropes have gone the same way. Who can look at the white saviour trope without rolling their eyes? I can't, but when I was younger it was everywhere, and we liked it.

Same with many outdated archetypes. There was a long period in American TV and literature that foreign people, specially from Asia were portrayed with a ton of prejudice. These were fucking common. People liked them. Now we know how racist those were.

The damsel in distress is at the same time an outdated trope and an outdated archetype. It is firmly fixed in our imagination, specially those my age who grew up with stories about knights and stuff. Dislodging this is hard.

There is always a potential to use such tropes and archetypes in interesting inverted ways, like how movies such as 500 days of summer subverts the manic dream pixie girl trope.

To leave you all in a subversion of the damsel in distress, here is The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton: