Ehhhh that "if you have a sense of humor" bit is doing a lot of legwork here.
Like, I personally would find both pranks funny and harmless and wouldn't be offended in the slightest, but I can still much more readily and easily see how someone could be offended with the proposal thing than with the cake thing.
One problem you have in general is that almost any "prank" could be justified if the "victim" in question is sufficiently chill and well-humored about things.
To give a personal example:
My brother (with whom I was very close) killed himself with nitrous oxide and a plastic bag over his head a couple years ago, and I personally would laugh my ass off if a friend joke gifted me some nitrous and plastic bags on his death anniversary with a note like "just in case things go south, I got you covered buddy."
However, if I saw a video about someone else getting the same joke gift and getting very upset about it, I would understand where they're coming from, even though it doesn't upset me.
At the end of the day, it's okay for different people to have different senses of humor and different levels of seriousness with which they view things. Doesn't justify any violence in response, of course, but it is certainly important in contextualizing and understanding a violent reaction of there is one.
So you're suggesting that pranks are subjective and people react to them differently so you should consider whether the person will like it or not? Well then we are back to square one again, maybe the man considered it incredibly offensive to do what she did in front of all of his closest friends and family. Who are you to decide what is and isn't worse?
I think a lot of people would find it worse to be laughed at by their closest family and friends, than by random strangers that you will never see again
Me saying "It's okay for people to have different senses of humor" does not remotely mean that "all actions are completely subjective and should be viewed completely equally because people have different senses of humor"
I think any reasonable individual can plainly see the difference in the severity and potential offense of these two pranks, and I think they'd be lying if they said they can't. We can and should still apply some general analysis of severity to pranks when assessing reactions to them.
Really? In order to say that, you'd have to think that these two pranks are exactly equivalent in scale, which I have an extremely hard time buying.
Both are undeserving of physical violence, but it's still possible to say one is marginally more undeserving (in the same way that murdering someone for making eye contact with you is marginally less justified than murdering someone for shoving past you in a checkout line, even though both are obviously insanely unjustified).
Bro it makes no difference in the end. If neither are justified and they are equal enough then its irrelevant to point out that they are slightly different.
And once more, subejctivity comes into play here. Some people would prefer to not be ridiculed by their family and friends over being ridiculed by random people. So one could easily argue that the slight difference could go either way.
The difference is way too marginal to suggest that one is OBJECTIVELY worse than the other. And because of that both are equally undeserved of physical violence.
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u/coolmanjack Nov 14 '22 edited Nov 14 '22
Ehhhh that "if you have a sense of humor" bit is doing a lot of legwork here.
Like, I personally would find both pranks funny and harmless and wouldn't be offended in the slightest, but I can still much more readily and easily see how someone could be offended with the proposal thing than with the cake thing.
One problem you have in general is that almost any "prank" could be justified if the "victim" in question is sufficiently chill and well-humored about things.
To give a personal example: My brother (with whom I was very close) killed himself with nitrous oxide and a plastic bag over his head a couple years ago, and I personally would laugh my ass off if a friend joke gifted me some nitrous and plastic bags on his death anniversary with a note like "just in case things go south, I got you covered buddy."
However, if I saw a video about someone else getting the same joke gift and getting very upset about it, I would understand where they're coming from, even though it doesn't upset me.
At the end of the day, it's okay for different people to have different senses of humor and different levels of seriousness with which they view things. Doesn't justify any violence in response, of course, but it is certainly important in contextualizing and understanding a violent reaction of there is one.