Original skit by Joman

A few weeks ago, I was doom scrolling through my various social media feeds when a skit by Joman stopped me in my tracks. The scene opens with a man dressed in exaggerated aristocratic attire, complete with a top hat and monocle. There is a nametag stuck on his jacket that says, “Hello my name is RULING CLASS” with the last 3 letters underlined. He’s holding a skull with the casual confidence of someone raising a glass at a formal dinner. With complete sincerity he announces, “I unequivocally condemn all forms of violence.”

Only after that declaration does the full absurdity of this character become clear, as it is soon revealed they are perched atop a mountain of bones, surrounded by a devastated landscape, yet he insists on his own innocence with perfect composure. The humor comes from the precision of the exaggeration. It is a playful distortion of reality that still manages to feel uncomfortably familiar.

As the scene continues, he enters into a brief exchange of thoughts with a man standing on the ground below him, who keeps pointing out that the aristocrat’s words do not match the reality surrounding him. The more plainly the contradiction is pointed out, the more agitated the aristocrat becomes, until he abruptly declares the man below him a “terrorist” and demands that he be seized. Vehicles marked “Ignorance and Cruelty Enforcement” roll into view, answering his call without hesitation. That is how the skit ends: not with accountability, but with the machinery of enforcement mobilized against the person who dared to describe what he was seeing.

At the time, I appreciated the skit for its craft and its absurdity. It felt like a clever overstatement, a comedic way of highlighting a dynamic we all recognize but rarely name. In the past several days, however, it has returned to my mind for a different reason. What once felt exaggerated now feels almost restrained.

After Renee Nicole Good was shot by an ICE agent, the public reaction was immediate and raw. People were grieving, angry, confused. And then came the official response: a call to “tone down the rhetoric,” warnings that criticism of ICE could cause “more bloodshed,” and reminders that officers fear for their safety.

The focus shifted away from the dead woman almost instantly. The harm became background noise. The institution became the victim. I condemn violence, says the man on the bone pile, who was perfectly comfortable with it when it was building the world he wanted, and only discovers his hatred of it once he is on top of the bones instead of beneath them, yet later reaches for it again to silence the person who names what he cannot afford to admit.

And then, just days later, a video went viral of an ICE agent walking up to a woman who was filming him, something she had every legal right to do, and saying “Have you not learned from the past couple of days” before snatching her phone out of her hand.

That line hit me like a punch. Have you not learned? What, exactly? That documenting power is dangerous? That criticism is a provocation? That the lesson of a woman’s death is not accountability, but obedience?

Real life felt like the skit again, only without the costumes. Terrorist, seize him, except this time it was not a joke. When a group sees itself as the default, its pain feels universal, and everyone else’s pain feels optional. That is the psychology of normativity.

Look at the reaction to Charlie Kirk’s death, how instantly it was declared a national tragedy, a symbol, a moral emergency. Meanwhile, other deaths, equally real and equally human, were brushed aside, explained away, or treated as deserved. The explanation changes every time, but the conclusion never does. Our people matter more. Our fear matters more. Our narrative matters more.

Once you see that pattern, it becomes impossible to unsee. Some people still insist the Confederacy was not really about slavery, even though the states involved said so plainly at the time. The story gets rewritten into something more flattering, and the uncomfortable parts are pushed out of the frame. The same thing happens in religious spaces, where people who believe they understand the true version of a faith reshape it to match their own fears or priorities, and then insist that this newer version is the original one. And the danger is that none of this depends on whether the revised story is true. It only depends on whether the people telling it believe it. Once the frame is set, everything outside it is treated as irrelevant or invented, and any attempt to widen the view is seen as an attack.

Privilege is the authority to name the world and expect everyone else to agree.

The monocle stayed with me in a way I did not expect. In the skit, it is not a real monocle at all, but a pocket watch with an eye drawn onto it and taped to his face, and it captures something essential. From a distance, it looks convincing. It performs authority. Yet the moment you look closely, it collapses. It cannot withstand scrutiny. And that feels inseparable from the dynamic the skit is illustrating. So much of what we are told to respect or fear functions exactly like that monocle. Impressive until examined. Authoritative until questioned. Held together only by the hope that no one will look too closely.

That is why the Joman skit will not leave my head. Because what once felt like exaggeration now feels like a mirror.

He condemns violence while standing on the consequences of it. He urges calm when people are grieving. He treats accountability as provocation. He calls dissent danger. His pain always outranks everyone else’s.

The skit was supposed to be absurd. But the world keeps catching up to it. And that is the part I cannot shake. The world didn’t suddenly become absurd. We were just taught to overlook the bones beneath our feet.