Transcription:
With the Oxford comma:
we invited the strippers, jfk, and stalin.
[A picture showing a cartoon image of 4 people. JFK, Stalin, and 2 strippers.]
Without the Oxford comma:
we invited the strippers, jfk and stalin.
[A picture showing a cartoon image of 2 people. JFK and Stalin, both dressed in the same stripper outfits as the strippers in the above image.]
Humorous disinformation like this is why there are so many morons when it comes to grammar.
We invited JFK, Stalin and the strippers is the correct way to say it; no confusion, with the proper names first.
The “and” is a substitute for the comma. Keeping them both is redundant.
This is not disinformation. At worst it’s elevating one specific academic opinion over another academic opinion. But the Oxford comma is recommended by many fine institutions, including Oxford University Press, APA, and Chicago Manual of Style (on the other hand, Cambridge and The New York Times prefer to avoid it). To suggest this is disinformation is itself the only disinformation here.
There are, apparently, cases in which it can cause confusion. However, in my experience, this is far less common than cases where it can prevent confusion. Rearranging sentences is, at best, a patch that can work in some situations but not others.
Getting rid of it is inconsistent. Complex lists with comma-separated clauses separated by semicolons always use a semicolon after the penultimate entry, even by people who would not recommend the Oxford comma. It also makes for greater consistency within its own sentence: you see a comma, you know there’s a new entry in the list—much simpler visual parsing.
Getting rid of it breaks the connection between the written and spoken word. “A, B, or C” has a pause after A and after B. “A, B or C” implies there is no pause after B. But there is, if the latter is intended to mean the same as the former.
A or B, C or D, and E or F is much easier than “A or B, C or D and E or F”.