Americans are afraid to be seen as homophobic? Or my joke was not funny?

by philg

From the NBAA show in Las Vegas, I posted the photo below of a rubber ducky wearing a Statue of Liberty outfit and holding a sign reading “FAG”:

Keeping in mind that the swag at an American business jet conference is targeted at Americans born circa 1960, I thought that this was at least somewhat humorous. Yet none of my American-born Facebook friends were willing to go on record with a “like”. Are they afraid of being seen as homophobic? Or is there nothing funny about this marketing project?

16 thoughts on “Americans are afraid to be seen as homophobic? Or my joke was not funny?”

  1. Maybe its my day to hold the stupid stick: what’s the joke? I don’t care if dissecting a joke kills it; someone enlighten me.

  6. Oh wow, you guys are very funny.

    “fag” is a term that some homosexuals use in casual speech with each other. It is also a negative term when used by non-homosexuals about homosexuals.

    I am old enough to have grown up with the above being the generally accepted case.

  7. I should caveat that I am not implying phil is homosexual, and that humorous usages by homosexual or heterosexual people are an exception.

  11. I guess the answer is “there is nothing funny about a rubber ducky dressed as the Statue of Liberty and holding a sign reading ‘fag'”.

    The target market at the show was people who were in high school in the 1970s when calling someone a “fag” was not a compliment. Given that most folks don’t know anything about bearings, I would have expected a bearing-related item reading “German bearings from Schaeffler’s FAG division.”

  12. philg: I didn’t laugh until I read comment #3, but I did laugh so I don’t think there’s anything defective with your sense of humor. The problem is probably that the joke depends on understanding a fairly complex context and many people miss or don’t know some essential element of it. Yes, the presence of a word which in some contexts can be used as a slur probably suppresses laughter for some people who are uncertain of the context, but I wouldn’t necessarily call that “afraid of being seen as homophobic”.

  13. I’m pretty sure this swag is from FAG (Fischers Aktien-Gesellschaft), the famous German manufacturer of ball bearings and abrasives.

    Before we were married wife worked for FAG in Schweinfurt Germany for several years. She is a Texan fluent in German. On paper she was working in one of their American plants, be in reality she worked in Schweinfurt in the grinding wheel divison.

    At the time I was a navigator/electronic warfare officer in the U.S. Air Force, and it was kind of weird to visit the plant that was the target of the disastrous B-17 raid of August 1942.

    Lots of history associated with FAG. One factoid I just learned was that FAG made the largest ball bearing assembly in history for the CIA. The CIA needed these parts to build the Hughes Glomar Explorer, the huge ship that was used to recover the sunken Soviet submarine K-129.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schweinfurt%E2%80%93Regensburg_mission

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Fischer

    http://i.imgur.com/OzRpylh.jpg

  15. Where I grew up and went to high school in the late ’70s – early ’80s, if someone called you a fag, you had to fight that person, or else you really were a fag. It was a real problem if a girl called you a fag.

  16. Jim Howard, the ball bearings at the link do not look too huge, I think bigger ones are used in large hydro-electic generators and such. Probably Fischers Aktien-Gesellschaft offered the best price. Were they making similar assemblies in WWII? I recall anecdotes that Wermach Tiger I and II tanks’ touret movement was very smmoth due to large ball bearing with many spheres used but heavy Soviet IS tanks could destroy them with their slow but heavy 120 mm cannon with binary missle without using armor – penetrating ammo, just by completely blowinng Tiger turrets off its ball bearings.

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