Revisiting Truly Tasteless Jokes

Why does my son watch these horrible Instagram influencers who spew misogyny, racism, and hate? There’s Andrew Tate, arrested on human trafficking charges. And Dan Bilzerian, who literally threw a porn star off a roof. I want to yell that my generation was different, that we were better, that we never fell for such garbage.

But then I remembered Truly Tasteless Jokes.

I was thirteen when someone passed me the book on that long bus ride from camp to Hershey Park, and I knew I was holding something special. It was a secret portal into adult humor—the kind of stuff that would get you grounded just for knowing it existed. This was the 1980s, that lawless time before warning labels. No gatekeepers, no protection—just forbidden fruit waiting to corrupt curious kids like me.

We’d huddle around our contraband. If you were there, you remember the jokes. If not, they’re too tasteless and horrible for me to print here. We’d memorize them and trade them like baseball cards, each one more shocking than the last.

It was taboo. It was like looking at dirty magazines, but somehow more accessible because they were just books in the bookstore. Just an aisle away from the Nancy Drew books. What I didn’t understand then was that this wasn’t just some random collection of offensive humor—it was a cultural earthquake.

A Cultural Phenomenon

Truly Tasteless Jokes wasn’t just an offensive book series. It was a legitimate cultural phenomenon. At one point, Blanche Knott had four books on the New York Times bestseller list simultaneously—the first time that ever happened.

The books were so popular that more respectable authors and publishers complained that the New York Times bestseller list was being defiled. This led to the creation of the “Advice, How-to and Miscellaneous” category on the bestseller list.

Looking back, Truly Tasteless Jokes was a product of its cultural moment. The 1980s were Reagan’s America—a deliberate rejection of the political correctness of the 1960s and 70s. As cultural critic Luc Sante observed, they were “a sigh of release, a sign that we weren’t living in the politically correct Sixties and Seventies anymore, and could behave like pigs if we wanted to.”

It was the original anti-PC phenomenon, a middle finger to civil rights progress and social consciousness. The jokes weren’t just offensive—they were intentionally, aggressively offensive. They were a backlash.

The Woman Behind Blanche Knott

The author on the cover was listed as Blanche Knott. I’d always thought this was a female pen name for a male syndicate who wrote the books—like Franklin W. Dixon was to the Hardy Boys. But the books, including dozens of sequels, had a single author—the improbably named Ashton Applewhite..¹

Applewhite was an underpaid assistant editor at St. Martin’s Press, earning just $8,500 a year while writing book jacket copy. Between assignments, she collected offensive jokes on cocktail napkins and “While You Were Out” slips, stuffing them into her desk drawer. Her original title was her favorite joke: What’s the Difference Between Garbage and a Girl from New Jersey? The punchline: garbage gets picked up.

When the manuscript first made the rounds, one editor at Penguin said, “If we published this, the little bird would have to hide its head under its wing in shame.” A woman at another publisher told the agent, “We can’t publish this here. I’m not even sure we can Xerox this!”

But Ballantine did publish it. And America spoke—loudly, to the tune of millions of copies. It sparked copycats and even a VHS tape. The tape is fairly lackluster; however, it does include early clips of Andrew “Dice” Clay, who perfectly captured the spirit of the jokes in the book.

The Reckoning

There are different ways to look at the legacy of Truly Tasteless Jokes. The documentary Tasteless featured comedians defending the book and comedy in general, even when it sometimes hurt people, positioning it as a fight against cancel culture, with performers arguing that humor serves as a necessary release valve for society’s tensions.

Contrast that with the Decoder Ring podcast, where the host insisted on highlighting how awful the book was and demanded that Applewhite apologize for writing it—which she eventually did. While the impulse is understandable—these jokes are horrible—there was something deeply counterproductive about the whole exercise. The host was so focused on moral purity, so determined to distance herself from the content, that she completely missed the point.

That kind of heavy-handed liberal righteousness, that desperate need to prove you’re on the right side, that reflexive “you can’t talk about that” energy—that’s exactly what caused this phenomenon to emerge in the first place.

Going Forward

Here’s the thing about teenagers and offensive content: they’re going to find it. Whether it’s Truly Tasteless Jokes in the 1980s or Andrew Tate on Instagram today, kids are drawn to transgression. They want their forbidden portals into adult humor and adult rebellion.

The question isn’t how to eliminate that impulse—it’s how to channel it constructively. When we create an environment where certain thoughts and jokes are so forbidden that they can’t even be discussed, we don’t make them go away. We just make them more powerful.

We need to resist the urge to sort everything into neat moral categories—good or evil, acceptable or unacceptable, worthy of cancellation or worthy of praise. Real people are messy. Real growth happens in the gray areas. When we demand that everyone meet some impossible standard of moral purity, when we insist that past mistakes define present character, we’re not creating a better world. We’re creating a world where we’re terrified of authenticity, and growth becomes impossible.

Footnotes

1. Applewhite tells her story in Being Blanche, a 2011 Harper’s Magazine piece that’s worth tracking down. The article is paywalled, but most libraries provide digital access to Harper’s archives—and it’s an incredible read that reveals the woman behind the phenomenon. ↩︎