kurt vonnegut quote

Heard an awesome Vonnegut quote on the way home from work today. I've heard others of his here and there, enough to know that he seemed* to have a knack for capturing nuggets of truth in a humorous way, but this was perhaps the best I've heard yet. And that's why it pains me greatly that I can't remember it now, not even enough to find it on the internet somewhere. But what the heck, I'll give it a shot. It was something along these badly paraphrased lines:

All humor plays on some sort of insecurity we have about the world and therefore has some amount of truth to it. The best humor often hurts the most to those whose insecurities it plays on because it displays the deepest and most painful truths about those people.

Wow, I'm sure I completely butchered that, enough so that it's a crime to even attach it to Vonnegut's name. That's the best I can remember though. The actual quote was much better and much more to the point than that, but at least that's the basic premise of what he was saying.

This came up on a sports talk show, and the guy was talking about Don Imus' recent gaffe with respect to the Rutgers women's baskeball team. (Unfortunately, this misstep cost Imus his job.) His point was that people get so hyper-offended about seemingly insignificant words or simple mistakes on the part of those who uttered them because the joke reveals something deeply painful about those people while it gets laughs from others. Thus, anyone who gets terribly upset at such a joke, or at any words for that matter, should look within themselves and see what it is that just got revealed.

Now I'm not saying the Rutgers women are a bunch of "nappy headed ho's", and from what I can tell they're not the central characters spinning this whole thing up.** But I do think the ones who are so uptight have a lot of introspection to do concerning their own views of themselves, others (especially those they claim to be siding with), and the world. Take that for what it's worth.

[Correction: He referred to Rutgers, not Tennessee.]

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* Kurt Vonnegut died today. That's why the guy had the quote in mind in the first place.

** This is usually the case with such situations it seems. Why is it that we have armies of offense-claimers out there who reflexively react as though mortally wounded and leap to the "defense" of those supposedly on the receiving end of any comments they deem inappropriate, without first trying to understand the situation or even figure out if any offense was actually taken? Buncha crap, I tell ya...