Political Correctness and Humor. A contradiction?

Before writing about this sensitive topic I want to state two things about myself.

First of all I am an extremely tolerant person, in my honest opinion as long as the people involved in your actions are consenting adults and nobody gets hurt do as you please. I am proud to have friends with lots of different cultural backgrounds and love to learn about other cultures and their values. I am stating all this so explicitly to make sure that people are aware that hurting someone just because he is different to me is the LAST thing on earth I would do. So if anybody feels offended by the article I am about to write I apologize, as it is in no way my intention to offend or hurt anybody.

The second thing is that I love to laugh! I laugh at many things including myself no matter if the jokes are clever, satiric, sophisticated, goofy, naughty...as long as they are funny I laugh at them and this is where the problem for many people seems to start.

Of course humor is always a matter of taste, what one finds funny the other thinks of as boring and viceversa and when political correctness is involved the line you have to walk gets even thiner. I know we all have some things we are sensitive about but we should ask ourselvesif someone makes a joke about it, the following: Is this person trying to hurt ME or are they just trying to make people laugh and make sure people have a good time? I think in this situation it is important to check from this point of view. Being spanish one joke I often make myself is: "We cannot do proper economy but at least we can do soccer", so why should I be offended if someone else makes the joke hile it is ok if I make it? I also laugh dearly about jokes on the cost of women's parking abilities or our habit of going to the toilet in groups. Girls think about it: We actually GO to the toilet in groups! There are lots of examples for this sort of jokes and if you think about it they have one thing in common. The jokes are not about the actual people but about the clichés regarding some groups of people! In a way a cliché is a "mild predjudice", so if we make fun about a cliché we are making fun of a predjudice.

Political correctness is a good thing don't get me wrong. It was and is important for people to become aware of what minorities might find offensive and to avoid these things, but these days I often get the feeling that we are starting to over-do it.

An example is something I heard some time back about spanish grammar. In spanish (for those of you who don't speak it) there are two versions of the pronom "they" one is "ellos" for men and the other one is "ellas" for women, so far so good. If the group you are refering to is of both sexes you use the male "they" ellos. I as a woman have absolutely no problem with that, but apparantly other women have, as now they are changing that and it is now grammatically correct to use "ellas" if the majority in the group consists of  women. In theory this means that before talking about them you should  check if there are more women or men in the group! In my opinion when it comes to these extremes we are absolutely missing the point. Does this seriously matter to someone?

On the other hand it is a reality that usually women earn less money than men for doing the exact same job or people of african descent are not let into clubs simply because of their skin colour. Just to name two examples where there is still "work to be done". Aren't these the things we should be aiming at instead of the political correctness of jokes?

I personally think we should relax, when it comes to humor in the aspects of political correctness and put the focus for political correctness where is belongs, the real world! In humor it is about laughing, preferably at ourselves. It is not the real world, but a place to forget about the real world and just laugh.