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Notes
See Stacey Patton and David J. Leonard, “Don’t believe her defenders. Amy Schumer’s jokes are racist,” The Washington Post (July 6, 2015); Monica Heisey, “Amy Schumer: Comedy’s Viral Queen,” The Guardian (June 28, 2015).
Patton and Leonard, Op. Cit.
See Maggie Brown, “Why won’t Channel 4 say sorry for Frankie Boyle’s Katie Price joke,” The Guardian (June 17, 2011).
‘Humorousness’ is popularly used to mean ‘the state of attribute of being funny’. In this paper, however, I also use the word to mean ‘the state or attribute of being an instance of humor’. This usage lacks the implication of success: a stand-up comedy routine will, under the latter definition, be ‘humorous’ even if it amuses no-one.
I propose that the theorists I consider in section four have, by and large, become bogged down in precisely those kinds of questions.
The effect that humorousness has on moral value, when it has any such effect, is, I think, typically an exculpatory one: one says something that would be terrible, if one was speaking seriously; but one is joking, so one’s speech act is acceptable, or anyway less morally troubling. But there are reasons to think that certain pieces of humorous speech, in certain circumstances, can in fact be worse than an equivalent piece of non-humorous speech. Evidence from social psychology suggests that sexist jokes can prime us to be tolerant of sexist behavior with greater effectiveness than straightforward sexist speech, since they encourage hearers to approach sexism with a light-hearted attitude (see Thomas Ford, “Effects of sexist humor on tolerance of sexist events,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 26 (2000); Thomas Ford, Wentzel, E. R. Wentzel, and J. Lorien, “Effects of exposure to sexist humor on perceptions of normative tolerance of sexism,” European Journal of Social Psychology 31 (2001); Thomas Ford and Mark Ferguson, “Social Consequences of Disparagement Humor,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 8 (2004); Julie A. Woodzicka and Thomas Ford, “A framework for thinking about the (not-so-funny) effects of sexist humor,” Europe’s Journal of Psychology 3 (2010)); and sometimes the fact that one springs for humorous speech at all indicates an inappropriate attitude to the situation at hand (see Merrie Bergmann, “How Many Feminists Does It Take To Make A Joke,” Hypatia 1 (1986): 78-79).
David Benatar, “Prejudice in Jest,” Public Affairs Quarterly 13 (1999): 191.
See Philips, “Racist Acts and Racist Humor,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 14 (1984): 76.
Ibid.: 82.
Ibid.: 81.
See Benatar, Op. Cit.: 192-93.
Once again, we can apply the caveat that, while the debate in question centers around racism, the arguments Anderson gives have analogs for immorality of other kinds in humor.
See Luvell Anderson, “Racist Humor,” Philosophy Compass 10 (2015): 503.
See Jorge Garcia, “The Heart of Racism,” Journal of Social Philosophy 27 (1996); Anderson, Op. Cit.: 505.
Ibid.: 506.
Robin Tapley, “Just Joking,” Philosophy at Yeditepe 1 (2005): 180.
Ibid.: 183.
Granted, this is an extreme case: most cases in which persons claim to be ‘only joking’ do not feature such cartoonishly vicious behavior. But that’s okay, since at this juncture I only mean to foreclose on the skeptical view that no humor is ever morally bad, and this example succeeds in that endeavor.
Ronald De Sousa, The Rationality of Emotions (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), pp.289, 290.
See David Benatar, “Taking Humour (Ethics) Seriously, But Not Too Seriously,” Journal of Practical Ethics 2 (2014); Noël Carroll, “Humour” in J. Levinson (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Lawrence Lengbeyer, “Humor, Context, and Divided Cognition,” Social Theory & Practice 31 (2005); Aaron Smuts, “The Ethics of Humour,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 13 (2009).
Lengbeyer, Op. Cit.: 311. I thank an anonymous reviewer for bringing it to my attention that Lengbeyer’s work follows the kind of framing of moral questions about humor that I recommend.
See David Benatar, “Taking Humour (Ethics) Seriously, But Not Too Seriously,” Journal of Practical Ethics 2 (2014): 30.
Victor Raskin, Semantic Mechanisms of Humor (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing, 1985), p.100.
See Noël Carroll, “On Jokes,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 16 (1991): 296.
See Kenneth Boyd, “Peirce on Assertion, Speech Acts, and Taking Responsibility,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 52 (2016): 21-22; John MacFarlane, “Making Sense of Relative Truth,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 105: 320.
See Michael Beaney, The Frege Reader (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1997), p.22; Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness (Princeton: Princeton University Publishing, 2002), pp.73-74.
See Noël Carroll, Beyond Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp.333-34; “Noël Carroll on Humor and Morality,” Philosophy Bites Podcast.
My claim is not that this will necessarily hold in every single case of a joke told by a group member, versus the same joke in the mouth of an outsider. My claim is that a general rule of this kind holds: if we are given very little information other than the speaker’s membership or non-membership of the group her speech is about, we will typically have moral instincts of the kind I have described. I think Rock’s bit follows this general rule; but I do not claim that no counter-example to it could ever be found.
We can see this kind of phenomenon posited in the critical response to statements that Kanye West made in 2018, in which he dismissed slavery as ‘a choice’ made by black people in the USA. West is himself a black American, and many of his detractors on social media have pointed out that, by placing some of the blame for slavery on the shoulders of slaves, he was giving a gift to white supremacists who would be able to use his blackness as a tool to promote their cause. Having someone who is himself black dismiss the dehumanization and coercion involved in the American slave trade carries more weight, for those who seek to popularize those views, than merely having them spoken by (yet another) white racist.
See John Morreall, Comic Relief (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2009), pp.98-100.
Ibid., p.99.
See Simon Weaver, The Rhetoric of Racist Humor (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2008), pp.76-77.
See Aaron Smuts, “Do Moral Flaws Enhance Amusement,” American Philosophical Quarterly 46 (2009): 154.
See David Benatar, “Taking Humour (Ethics) Seriously, But Not Too Seriously,” Journal of Practical Ethics 2: 30.
Ted Cohen, Jokes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p.12.
And, indeed, even that might not be necessary: thanks to the conversational rule of accommodation (see David Lewis, “Scorekeeping in a Language Game,” Logic 8 (1979): 347), one’s audience might very well fill in the details necessary for the joke to work, even if it has not previously heard of the existence of the stereotypes the joke makes use of.
In writing this paper I was helped immeasurably by my discussions with colleagues, advisors, and reviewers. In particular I would like to thank Noël Carroll, Miranda Fricker, Nick Pappas, John Greenwood, Matias Bulnes, Genevieve LaForge, Dan Abrahams, Jan Swiderski, Carolyn Garland, Rose Bell, Chang Liu, Joe Bowen, Daniel Muñoz, Kirun Sankaran, Adam Levinson, Chris Smith, Thomas Ford, Andrew Olah, Nicolas Porot, Dan Harris, Jennifer Ware, and an anonymous Journal of Value Inquiry referee for their contributions.
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Butterfield, P. Focusing on the Gap: A Better Approach to the Ethics of Humor. J Value Inquiry 56, 283–302 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-020-09776-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-020-09776-9