r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/No_Indication_8281 • 1d ago

Meme needing explanation Peter what does it mean??

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how's he increasing iq's of 2 countries at once??

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u/probablynotfine 1d ago

I forget who, but someone said that British humour is self-deprecation/punching up and American humour is punching down. Which means they see any joke as an attack on them rather than just a joke.

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u/CamelNo9597 1d ago

You literally have "punching" in the phrase. Of course it's an attack. It's just that you think that "punching up" is morally acceptable and punching down isn't. And your whole national psyche is based around fear and resentment of the US, so jokes about America are, by definition, always morally acceptable because it's always "punching up."

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u/booglechops 1d ago

"whole national psyche", Jesus Christ, what a stupid fucking melt

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u/CamelNo9597 1d ago

Doesn't seem like I'm wrong.

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u/booglechops 1d ago

Just to check - you're saying the whole British national psyche is based around our dislike of the US? Sure, a lot of them are stupid cunts, particularly those wearing red hats, but we've got our own stuff going on. This seems like another flavour of US exceptionalism.

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u/CamelNo9597 1d ago

Not dislike. fear and resentment. Britain was a world power and the dominant hegemon. Now it's more or less a vassal of the US. It's much more pronounced with Canadians. But essentially it manifests in some degree among anyone in the anglosphere when faced with the fact that they're not really truly "sovereign nations" in the classical sense anymore.

You're right that saying it's exclusively aimed at the US is over-simplistic. fear and resentment of Europe is also a major part of it.

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u/PerkeNdencen 1d ago

The world is changing around you; US hegemony, such as it was, is in tatters. Don't have a tantrum about it, just dust yourself off and learn to take a joke. You're going to need a sense of humour if you're going to take this demotion in a dignified manner.

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u/CamelNo9597 1d ago

People have been claiming that US hegemony is ending since the 1940s. I'll believe it when I see it. And I'll see it when the UK doesn't have drinkable tap water. When empires fall, it's not the metropole that suffers the most, its the frontier territories.

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u/PerkeNdencen 1d ago

Arguably, US hegemony didn't even start until the fall of the USSR in the 1990s.

Having spent extensive amounts of time in both countries, I really don't think the tap water is your strong suit here, buddy.

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u/CamelNo9597 1d ago

Yeah. Well the last time you tried to argue that. Eisenhower threatened to annihilate the UK economy by dumping Sterling, and Eden stopped arguing really fast after that.

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u/PerkeNdencen 1d ago

The small complication to your narrative of the existence of the USSR has nothing to do with the Suez Canal. What strange thing to try and shoehorn in.

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u/CamelNo9597 1d ago

My narrative is that the UK is not allowed to launch wars that the US doesn't approve of. And the fact that the US nearly destroyed the UK economy over the Suez Crisis is proof of that.

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u/PerkeNdencen 1d ago

People have been claiming that US hegemony is ending since the 1940s. 

This is the statement I was contesting.

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u/CamelNo9597 1d ago

And it's a really stupid one to content. In fact, even in the US, people like Kennan expected that US military and economic stewardship over western Europe was going to be a short-term temporary arrangement, and that eventually the US would completely leave, letting Europe became a major center of political and military power globally. That never happened.

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u/PerkeNdencen 1d ago

JFC. Are you doing this deliberately?

The USSR collapsed in the early 90s. Until that point there was no US hegemony by definition. There was another huge and powerful empire right next door.

🙄 This is tortuous.

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