• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer, February 15, 2017

So you’ve made yourself into a successful online influencer! Congratulations! That means you’ve figured out how to turn what is essentially a meaningless, narcissistic activity – your social media ramblings – into a lucrative career promoting products and services you’ve probably never even used.

And that’s great – but be careful! Now the pressure’s on for you to crank out more and more content to entertain your followers and maintain your viral cache, and there are some dangerous pitfalls and missteps you need to avoid.

You especially need to avoid making tasteless jokes about incredibly offensive topics, because that might give people the mistaken impression that you’re a crass piece of shit.

“Ok,” I can hear you saying to no one in particular on your Web cam, “but isn’t that really just common sense? I mean, surely if you’re savvy enough to build an online following of millions of people, you’d probably realize there are some topics that it’s better to avoid?”

The answer is no apparently!  It seems people who have made millions of dollars peddling nonsense don’t necessarily have common sense!  That’s why, as a service to influencers everywhere, this blog post will give a quick overview of topics you probably shouldn’t joke about – as well as some you can!

Before we begin, let’s review some basic guiding principles. Generally speaking it’s probably best to avoid joking about horrible, tragic, real-life events that involved the suffering of huge numbers of innocent people, or even just innocent individuals.

This is because of something called “morality,” and it extends to some other areas, so pay attention!

The list of topics to avoid joking about includes the Holocaust, slavery, HIV/AIDS, cancer, people with congenital disabilities, mass shootings, 9/11, ISIS mass murders, Darfur, any incident of genocide (e.g. Khmer Rouge, East Timor, Rwanda, etc.), war veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder, rape, domestic violence, opioid orphans, any sort of violence against children, most cases of suicide, innocent people killed by police, innocent police killed by people, most political assassinations, natural disasters, freakish amusement park accidents, industrial accidents, accidental mass poisonings, cruelty to animals, and desecration of sacred objects.

But don’t give up hope! For some reason people don’t really care about whole categories of human suffering, even events that affected millions of people.  Why don’t we care? Who knows!

But rest assured it’s totally fine to joke about the following topics: any incident that occurred before c. 1800 aside from colonialism, e.g. Vikings or the Black Death, the sinking of the Titanic, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Hitler’s suicide, Jonestown, any sort of cult-related mass suicide, cannibals, serial killers, cannibalistic serial killers, STDs other than HIV/AIDS, prostitution as long as you focus on the “johns,” krokodil, people getting hit by cars while looking at their smartphones, and the likely extermination of life on earth by aliens or humanity’s own folly.

Okay, now you’re ready to go entertain, inform, and – most importantly – sell people stuff! Happy influencing, jackasses!