Abstract
Jokes are sometimes morally objectionable, and sometimes they are not. What’s the relationship between a joke’s being morally objectionable and its being funny? Philosophers’ answers to this question run the gamut. In this paper I present a new argument for the view that the negative moral value of a joke can affect its comedic value both positively and negatively.
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Notes
See Deen (2013, esp. pp. 78-80).
Cases of political satire as practiced by, for instance, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and John Oliver, seem like especially good examples of these kind of jokes. Thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting these examples.
Each of these views, with the exception of amoralism, has its recent defenders. Berys Gaut (2007) is a strong comic moralist. Noel Carroll and Aaron Smuts (in at least one time-slice) both defend weak comic moralism. For Carroll’s classic defense, see Carroll (1996). For Smuts, see Smuts (2015a), Smuts (2011), Smuts (2010), and Smuts (2009). In more recent work, Smuts has switched to defending a view he calls ‘symmetric comic moralism,’ the view that not only can negative moral value negatively affect comic value, but also that positive moral value can positively affect comic value. See Smuts (2013). As I mentioned above, I’ll be setting to one side the issue of how positive moral value affects comic value for the purposes of this paper. Martin Shuster, Scott Woodcock, and Ted Nannicelli each defend versions of comic immoralism. See Shuster (2013), Woodcock (2015), and Nannicelli (2014). Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson are comic pluralists. (Indeed, they appear, besides myself, to be the only proponents of the view.) See D’Arms and Jacobson (2000) and D’Arms and Jacobson (2014). D’Arms and Jacobson’s view is somewhat complicated by the fact that, although they clearly think negative moral value can affect comic value both positively and negatively, they also think it is a kind of mistake (their word is “fallacy”) when it does so. Hence it can be tempting to desribe their view as an amoralist one, but this conflates the question of whether moral judgment can affect comic amusement with whether it’s ever appropriate for it to do so. Here, I won’t be interested in the question of whether the interaction between moral judgment and comic amusement is ever appropriate (but see fn. 14). (It’s worth pointing out that, Gaut possibly aside, it’s difficult to find examples of real, live adherents to any of the other two modally strong views. Presumably this is because the difficulty of showing either that it’s necessary or that it’s impossible that morality affects comedy in one way or another is quite high.) Thanks to an anonymous referee for urging clarity on this point.
In what follows, for the sake of brevity, I sometimes drop the modifier ‘comic.’
The problem of articulating the precise nature of the attitude involved in moral judgment is sometimes called the “specification problem.” For a nice overview of the problem (and an attempt to solve it) see Björnsson and McPherson (2014).
Hedberg (2003).
Smuts (2009, p. 156).
Smuts (2009, p. 154).
Smuts (2009, p. 155), emphasis added.
Beattie (1778, p. 424).
Beattie (1778, p. 424).
Of course, some philosophers think these interactions are required by norms of rationality. On the first, see Frankfurt (2004) and Frankfurt (2006). On the second, see Lewis (1986). This isn’t relevant at present, since the argument for moralism isn’t grounded on how agents’ attitudes are normatively required to interact, but instead on how those attitudes normally do interact.
Importantly, the fact that one attitude attenuates (or indeed strengthens) another does not affect which attitudes are fitting and to what degree those attitudes are fitting. Plausibly, what attitudes are fitting is a matter of the normative relationships that hold, or fail to hold, between facts or states-of-affairs in the world and our attitudes, whereas what attitudes attenuate or strengthen one another is a matter of how our psychologies actually work. So, for instance, the fact that desiring that P tends to make one more confident that P doesn’t show anything about whether or not it’s correct or fitting either to desire or to believe that P. Now, it might turn out, and seems plausible to suppose, that evidence about the interaction effects between attitudes is sometimes evidence regarding the conditions under which those attitudes are fitting. But for present purposes, we do not need this claim. The important idea, here, is merely that there are these interaction effects, not whether they are appropriate, or fitting. This is because the moralist’s argument, as we’ve just seen, depends only on thinking that the moral attitude can in fact attenuate the comic and, as we’re about to see, the pluralist’s argument depends only on thinking that the moral attitude can in fact strengthen the comic. Thanks to Daniel Jacobson for suggesting clarity on this point.
Smuts 2009, pp. 156-7).
Smuts (2009, p. 156).
Smuts (2015b) has given this point its clearest expression.
For a clear defense of the inadequacy of one theory, see Carroll (1991). In recent years, a fourth account of humor has come on the scene, motivated in large part by reflection on the cognitive-social evolution of the mechanisms underlying humor. This evolutionary account has been given the clearest articulation by Hurley et al. (2013). Moreover, these four accounts do not even begin to exhaust the theories of humor that have been offered. For instance, the semantic approach in Raskin (1979), the gestalt theory developed in Maier (1932) and the computer modeling account in Suslov (1992) are three more examples. Each of these views seems to capture some important aspect of humor. Although I think it’s plausible to think that no single unified (i.e., non-disjunctive) theory will capture the necessary and sufficient for humor, here I’ll simply assume that the correct view will incorporate the insights of competing views.
Beattie 1778, p. 348).
Morreall 2009, p. 11)
Beattie (1778).
Again, the incongruity theory should not be understood to claim that incongruity between attitudes is sufficient for humor, for not all cases of incongruity are humorous. For instance, consider the “joke”:
If Mary buys a sweater, Jon will too.
Mary buys a sweater.
Jon doesn’t buy a sweater.
Here, the “punchline” (Jon doesn’t buy a sweater) violates our normal mental patterns: the joke elicits incongruous attitudes. But I hope you’ll agree that the joke isn’t thereby funny.
C.f. (Smuts 2009, p. 156): “The fact that jokes judged to be immoral can still be found amusing is perfectly compatible with moderate comic moralism.”
The moralist might choose to reject the stipulated meaning of “incongruity” wholesale. But if she does, she will need to do so without robbing the incongruity theory of humor of its interest and explanatory power: she will, in effect, have saddled herself with the task of articulating a replacement notion of incongruity that can do the work of the original notion in the incongruity theory of humor without delivering the result that the moral con- and comic pro-attitudes are incongruous. I’m not optimistic about the prospects for accomplishing this, and in any case exploring this line would take me too far afield here.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for urging clarity on this point.
Smuts (2009, p. 154)
David (2001, p. 155).
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to two anonymous referees for their thorough, helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. Thanks also to Daniel Jacobson, Justin D’Arms, Matthew Kotzen, and Megan Mitchell for feedback and discussions of the issues.
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Sharadin, N. In Defense of Comic Pluralism. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 20, 375–392 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-017-9784-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-017-9784-3