Noël Carroll. Southern Journal of Philosophy. Volume 58, Issue 4, December 2020.
Toward the end of his book Jokes, perhaps the best known philosophical treatment of the subject, Ted Cohen includes a notorious joke about a group of young Black men who are deterred from committing a gang rape by being thrown a basketball. This is a joke that perplexes Cohen and that he admits plays into stereotypes that presuppose the mindless obsession of Black youths with basketball as well as their unbridled sexuality. He agrees that the joke is morally bad and that it would be a better world without it. But he denies that its evil compromises its alleged funniness.
He writes: “Wish that there were no mean jokes. Try remaking the world so that such jokes will have no place, will not arise. But do not deny that they are funny. That denial is a pretense that will help nothing.”
In this paper, I want to challenge the claim that the moral defectiveness of a joke, especially a racist joke, cannot ever compromise its capacity to be funny. First, of course, I need to say what I mean by “funny.” I am assuming that it amounts to being “comically amusing.” So, what does it take for a joke to be comically amusing? Typically, a joke has two parts—a set-up and a punch line. The set-up is usually either a question, often a riddle, like “Why did x do y?” or it is a narrative which leads up to a pause, followed by an absurd or incongruous conclusion. In the latter case, the narrative can be long or very short.
For example, “John calls his friend Peter on his cell phone and warns Peter, ‘Drive carefully, there’s some maniac on the highway who is driving in the wrong direction.’” Peter responds “One! There are hundreds of them.” Peter’s response is incongruous: How could there be hundreds of people driving in the wrong direction? Then we realize that Peter is the maniac, which makes a kind of sense of the punchline. But it doesn’t really make much sense. After all, think of how psychologically improbable it is to conceive of a person so dimwitted that he is unable to realize he is headed in the wrong direction when everyone else is coming at him; it violates the principle of charity relevant to interpreting behavior. Peter is basically a moron, an unlikely or incongruous fictional being imagined for the purpose of compounding palpable absurdities
So, one part of being funny or comically amusing is that the joker and the audience recognize the absurdity or incongruity of the punchline. That is not to say that the set-up may not also involve absurdity or incongruity. It may involve talking animals, angels, English-speaking cavemen, not to mention wildly improbable events, miracles, and so on. But even if the set-up is sober, the punchline is generally perceived to be absurd or incongruous, and it requires that the listener make certain absurd or improbable assumptions in order to minimally appear to connect the punchline to the set-up in a way that gives a false or, at least, exceedingly slim, impression of coherence.
The exception that might immediately come to mind are jokes like “Why did the chicken cross the road?” or “Why do firemen wear red suspenders?” where the answers are anything but improbable. These are metajokes— jokes about jokes in which the punchline is incongruous for a punchline just because it states a bald truism. Punchlines are supposed to be incongruous. Children especially love these kinds of jokes, once they have gotten the hang of the way in which jokes work.
Being funny is a response-dependent property of a joke. It requires that that audience get it. Getting it, in turn, requires understanding the punchline, which involves recognizing the incongruity and grasping exactly what is askew about it, including its “incoherent coherence.” This incongruity will be some deviation from the way in which the world is or should be or believed to be not only in terms of logical, physical, grammatical, semantic, and mathematical laws, but also in terms of norms of morality, hygiene, intelligence, etiquette, decency, custom, sexual behavior, and virtually any other domain of human practice, including joking itself.
However, comprehending the incongruities propounded by the punchline is not enough. One must also enjoy them. One must take pleasure in contemplating the absurdity, if only for a moment.
Given this understanding of what it is to be funny, I want to argue that, against Cohen, sometimes evil jokes, like racist jokes, can fail to be funny precisely because of their moral defectiveness. Moreover, I hold that the qualification “sometimes” here is not inconsequential, because it covers exactly the instances where we would expect this to be the case.
Cohen is not very forthcoming about why he thinks jokes, like his racist basketball joke, are funny, despite their ethically vile content. Let me suggest two considerations that someone of Cohen’s persuasion might have for holding it.
First, consider the ethnic joke: “How do you know that a Newfie has been using your personal computer? There’s white-out on the screen.”
(I apologize to those readers who are too young to know what “whiteout” is).
Anyway, when I first heard this joke, I had no idea what a Newfie was, except that it was a person. But I laughed at the joke. I also told the joke to others who had no idea who Newfies are. But they got the joke as well. They recognized the absurdity of the behavior; they understood that no one using a personal computer could conceivably act in such a self-defeating manner; and they enjoyed contemplating or thinking about the incongruity of the situation. They found the joke funny, despite the fact that they had no beliefs or feelings about Newfies, that is to say, people from Newfoundland in Canada. So, it seems that there is something funny about the joke that has nothing to do with the ethnic identity of the putative subject of the joke.
Of course, this kind of riddle-joke belongs to a broad family of racist and/or ethnic jokes: jokes whites tell about Blacks, Englishmen tell about Irishmen, Irish Americans tell about Italians, the French about the Belgians, the Belgians about the French, Hindus about the Sikhs, Americans about Poles, Blacks about honkies, Jews about the imaginary inhabitants of Chelm, and so on.
These jokes very often seem interchangeable. That Newfie joke can appear to be retold in any one of the variations above. So, if that Newfie joke remains funny despite its apparently varying ethnic invectives, why should the preceding variations be any different? That is, there seems to be something funny about this genre of joking, irrespective of whether or not they are told maliciously.
In addition, isn’t there something about the very nature of jokes that explains this? Jokes traffic in the incongruous and the absurd. The punchlines appear at odds with the way things are or should be or so believed. They are demonstrably false, inappropriate, implausible, impossible, illogical, and/or otherwise offensive to good sense, morality, custom, and so forth. When asked, with a wink and a change in intonation, “Did you hear the one about x?” you know that you are being invited to imagine a fiction where everything you believe is the case or should be the case is up for grabs. Thus, since the very existence of the joke-frame reassures you that you are about to be subjected to nonsense, why should you care about the apparent malice of the racist or ethnic humor? It’s all pretense or make-believe anyway.
Undoubtedly, this is the basis of the of the well-known disclaimers such as “It was only a joke” or “I was just joking” or “I’m only kidding.” That is, since it is a joke, it is marked as false, as not serious; therefore, it should not be taken seriously. Perhaps this is what the comedian Kevin Hart meant when he said that “comedy is comedy.”
In any event, to steal a line from Sir Philip Sidney, humor affirms nothing. A joke is not an assertion. Typically, a punchline, with the exception of some metajokes, is nonsense, is marked as such, and is intended to be enjoyed as such for that reason. And since the joke is not an assertion, the speaker cannot be taken to believe it and, hence, should not be blamed for it. He/she/they was only kidding.
Moreover, not only does the joke-frame establish this, but it is reinforced by the reappearance of features of various joke genres, including recurring characters like morons, priests/ministers/rabbis, angels, traveling salesmen, as well as frequently repeated joke structures and the often magical, supernatural, and other reality-defying events that constitute the content of the joke. Everything about the context of the telling of the joke as well as much of the internal structure and content of the joke alerts the listener to the fact that “This is not serious. It is just a joke.” So, don’t be disturbed by it. Just enjoy the incongruities, the absurdities. Attend to the crafty way in which the joke redeploys the gambits of the moron joke, the apparent malice of the racial or ethnic (sexist, classist, or homophobic) joke, notwithstanding. That’s what is funny.
A second reason to think that the moral defects of racist and ethnic jokes do not affect their potential to block comic amusement is that in many cases the stereotypes and even the very joke texts employed by hostile outsiders toward the racial and ethnic groups in question are shared by the insiders of those groups. The Irish, Jews, Blacks, and rednecks, among other groups, share many of the self-same stereotypes and even the joke-texts that their detractors mobilize against them. The Jews tell jokes about their own financial savvy, whereas anti-Semites may broker the same jokes to confirm Jewish chicanery. The Irish may tell jokes about their drinking prowess in a celebratory mood, whereas their enemies rehearse it as further evidence of Irish fecklessness. And male, African American jokes about sexual voraciousness may be retailed by racists in the name of animality, but by Black people with different intentions.
For an example of the phenomenon that I have in mind, consider an example from a nonracial or ethnic joke genre, namely, the lawyer joke.
NASA has developed the capability to send someone to Mars. But there is one hitch. They can send someone to Mars, but they can’t bring him back. Understandably, given this, they don’t have too many volunteers. But they do have three: an engineer, a doctor, and a lawyer.
They ask the engineer “What would it take for you to go to Mars?”
He says: “A million dollars.”
They say: “You realize that we can’t bring you back. So, why do you want a million dollars?”
He says: “I went to MIT. I had a wonderful education. I’d like to endow a scholarship so that some deserving student can have the same experience that I did.”
They write that down and call in the doctor.
And they ask him: “What would it take for you to go to Mars?”
He says: “Two million dollars.”
Again, they remind him that he’s not coming back and ask him why he wants the money.
He says: “I went to Johns Hopkins for medical school. I had a terrific experience there. I would like to endow a scholarship to a deserving youth who could benefit as I did.”
They write that down, then invite the lawyer in and ask him what he wants.
He says: “Five million dollars.
They ask him: “For what?”
He answers: “Two million for you, two million for me, and we send the engineer.”
Those of us who are suspicious of lawyers, like me, feel this joke reveals the truly reprehensible nature of the legal profession. But my brother-in-law, the lawyer, loves it too. He feels it celebrates a certain form of ingenuity. But since a legal skeptic like myself and a legal booster like my brother-in-law both find the same stereotype and even the same joke script funny, its power to amuse putatively must be independent of the apparent invective that pleases me so much.
Or, to take an example more germane to the topic of racist jokes, consider this joke from the time of the civil rights movement in the sixties told both by civil rights activists and by Southern policemen. It took the form of a riddle.
“What do Southern policemen call a Negro PhD who teaches Classics at Harvard? Professor N.” Presumably, the African American activists told the joke in order to bolster morale by poking fun at the demonstratable ignorance of their oppressors, while the Southern cops told it to flex their authority and power and in order to celebrate their control.
Nevertheless, since both the activists and the police enjoyed the same incongruity, it might seem natural to infer that there is something funny about the joke, even when it is told with evil intent.
In order to deal with these observations, I will need to say something about jokes and then something about comic amusement, respectively.
First, jokes, or, perhaps more accurately joking. Joking is essentially an oral art, or, if not an art, then a practice. It moves by word of mouth. Jokes are told and are invented to be told.
When I was growing up, my father was a liquor salesman. He traveled from bar to bar and from liquor store to liquor store selling booze. Along with his order book, he carried the most recent jokes he had just heard from one bar to the next. It was good for business. He was always welcome. He always arrived with some new jokes and left with some, moving them from one liquor joint to the next. And as those jokes moved, they changed, adding parts, subtracting parts, picking up new details, including accompanying gestures, verbal accents, sound effects, and so forth.
Like other oral artforms, jokes are not stable. Like sagas, they undergo change with virtually every telling. Jokes can transform their identities. The joke about the Jew who builds two synagogues on an otherwise isolated, desert island, which many of my friends believe is a uniquely Jewish joke, can be and also has also been told as a Southern Baptist joke. The famous joke known in America as “The Aristocrats,” which celebrates the virtuosic reinvention of its remorselessly gross set-up, has a different punchline in England where it is called “The Sophisticates.” Indeed, think how often you’ve encountered a joke only to comment that you heard it with a different punchline. Both the set-up and the punchline of a so-called “joke” are indeterminately variable.
When I learn a joke, I never leave it alone. I never repeat it intact. I always make it my own. I add voices and details and plant my own false clues. I suspect that you do as well, adding new touches virtually every time you tell it and probably never telling it exactly the same way again. There are no necessary and sufficient conditions for joke versions. They bear only family relationships to their relatives.
Jokes are not like works of literature like poems, short stories, or novels. Ontologically, they are not a thing, or even a special kind of thing, such as an abstract object or a type. Jokes are actions, specifically performances.
In that respect, jokes are like oral artworks such as sagas. But unlike the Iliad, Odyssey, or Mahabharata, no joke—and, in particular, no racist joke that I know of—has been regimented into its canonical form. Instead there are just versions that stand in family relations to each other.
At one time, I thought that there were joke types of which joke-tellings were tokens. 5 But trying to fix the identity conditions for joke types seems so elusive to me that I have given up the idea of joke types. There are just the tellings, which resemble each other in some respects that are neither necessary nor sufficient. The emphasis on joke-tellings was what was right about thinking in terms of joke tokens, although the notion of joke types itself was misguided.
Of course, there are joke books and have been at least since ancient Rome. And nowadays there are lists of jokes online. You can type in “British jokes” or “dead baby jokes” or worse into your search engine and find hundreds of joke texts in the given category. But the written text online or in a joke book is not the joke proper. Rather, it is a script, or more accurately, a recipe for the telling of a joke.
The joke text lies there dead on the page, ready to be told. Perhaps one indication that the joke proper lies in the telling is that the joke text can be told well or not. It can succeed or fail. Some people can take the joke recipe—no matter how unpromising—and transform it into laughter, embellishing it with asides, accents, contextual references, gestures, facial expressions, and even sound effects. Others cannot tell a joke no matter how hard they try. The difference between these two people is art—the art of joking.
The joke text is a recipe. And just as a recipe for your grandmother’s favorite dish is not literally delicious, neither is the joke-text funny. Your grandmother’s recipe only becomes delicious when you interpret it— figuring out for yourself what she meant by a “pinch of salt” and maybe adding some garlic on your own for flavor. Similarly, you take the bare script of the joke-text and interpret it, the way a pianist interprets a composition by Chopin, although with the joke there is no authoritative score. The recipe is up for improvisation in every respect.
Just as an opera diva can turn an advertising tune for chewing gum into an aria, the person who is endowed with and/or who has nurtured a sense of humor can transform a passing incongruity into an event.
It may sound strange to say that a joke text is not funny until it is enlivened by a performance. But I submit that if you find it amusing as you read it on the page, that is because you are hearing it in your mind’s ear as being told—perhaps by yourself as you are planning to tell it or by some humorist beloved by you. When I read Groucho Marx’s witticisms, I imagine Groucho’s voice speaking them just as when I read Ted Cohen’s book Jokes, I hear him.
Also, we don’t go back to the joke book and reread it again and again as we might a poem. If we look it up again, it is because we’ve forgotten it. Yet we are always ready to hear a joke version again because with each teller and even with each telling we anticipate a variation, something new if only in the emphasis, the detail, the timing, the accent, or in the strategy of indirection. Indeed, there is some evidence that people enjoy best the jokes that in some sense they already know.
Of course, there are people who write jokes. But I think that they are like speech writers. They write instructions to be modified in the telling of the joke as suggested by the audience, the context, and the moment. Moreover, such recipes themselves are works in progress, always open to modification in performance.
So, what does this excursus into the nature of joking tell us that is relevant to Cohen’s claim that the moral defectiveness of a joke, including a racist joke, does not affect its funniness? It tells us that to assess this claim, we need to focus on the telling of joke variations.
Earlier I claimed that understanding the funniness of a joke is a matter of its being comically amusing; I have further proposed that this requires comprehending the perceived incongruity of the punchline and enjoying it. This proposal takes on board the so-called incongruity theory of humor, probably the conception of humor accepted by most philosophers and psychologists today. However, the incongruity theory of humor, though widely endorsed, is subject to a number of serious objections. One of the earliest was advanced by Alexander Bain, who pointed out that the perception of incongruity does not necessarily result in comic amusement.
For example, psychologists have observed that when a familiar caregiver of an infant makes a weird face in its presence, the infant is apt to laugh. But when a stranger does likewise, the child is likely to cry. Incongruity can be a disturbing stimulus. This is true not only of infants. Confronted with incongruity, we reflexively stand on-guard—alerted to deviation, we begin to mobilize in preparation to respond when things strike us as not as they should be. Thus, merely being exposed to an incongruity—whether cognitive, moral, hygienic, sexual, or some other form of transgression or violation—is not sufficient to induce mirth. Something needs to qualify the incongruity.
Two ways of qualifying the relevant incongruity that come to mind immediately are: 1) that it not invite a tendency on the part of the listener to treat the incongruity as a problem to be solved—as an epistemic challenge—as a physicist might respond to an anomaly in her data, and/or 2) that it not engender anxiety—as an emotive challenge—in the way the infant is frightened by the stranger’s “funny face.” The former case is probably what Kant had in mind when he identified a joke as a matter of an expectation coming to nothing. But the latter case is more relevant to our topic of racist jokes.
For the telling of a joke version to be funny, the incongruity of the punch line should not provoke anxiety, which includes that it should not be perceived as threatening, as Aristotle might say, to me or mine, where “mine” extends to all those encompassed by my moral concern.
One might be tempted to discount the importance of allaying anxiety as part of the comic work the teller needs to do in order to induce comic amusement. But as Peter Sagal, the host of the radio show Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me, recently told Marty Moss-Coane in an interview on Radio Times on WHYY concerning his new book The Incomplete Book of Running, a comic needs the audience on his side if they are going to greet his joke versions with laughter. If the audience feels at odds with the comic, they are not going to find his/her remarks amusing. It is essential to the success of the joke version that it be disarming. Contemporary humorists specializing in cringe humor flirt with getting as close to the border of upsetting their listeners without crossing it, because upsetting them risks silence.
In order to be comically amusing, the incongruity in the punchline of a joke variation needs to be perceived to be incongruous. But upon almost immediate reflection, the listener realizes the incongruity in question presents no challenge. It is mere nonsense, intended to be enjoyed as such. Whatever energy has been mustered to respond to the perception of incongruity dissipates. From a state of reflexive preparation, we relax. From tightness to lightness. That phenomenological sense of release or levity is an integral part of being comically amused. But it will be blocked if the incongruous stimulus is threatening or otherwise anxiety producing.
I have argued whether or not a joke version is comically amusing or funny is a matter of its performance, which obviously occurs in a context where a specific teller addresses a specific audience. It should be equally clear that this is also the case when it comes to the perception of the moral defectiveness of a joke version. That is why the performance of an apparent ethnic or racist joke told by a non-self-hating member of the group referenced in a joke text may be ethically innocuous, whereas the performance of the same joke recipe by a racist or ethnic bigot will be most probably be perceived as morally defective.
The racist performance will be immoral because it is a functioning part of a harmful system of racial oppression, intended to reinforce the relegation of its target group or comic butt to an inferior cognitive or moral status deserving of unequal treatment. That is the kind of authority the Southern policemen were celebrating in the previous joke variation about the African American Classics professor from Harvard.
Insofar as the audience for the Southern policemen’s version of the Black professor joke are African Americans, they will most likely to find it not comically amusing, unless they regard it ironically, because they will recognize it as a threat. Similarly, morally sensitive listeners who are not Black will similarly not be amused insofar as they regard Blacks as persons encompassed by their moral concern and sympathy. Nor is their anxiety irrelevant to whether or not the joke version is funny, since being nonthreatening or disarming is an essential feature of humor.
Thus, some joke performances can fail to be comically amusing or funny precisely because they are racist or otherwise morally defective (e.g., sexist, homophobic, etc.).
But what of the notion that jokes are always false—merely meaningless nonsense that affirms nothing—a matter of just joking? How can palpably false statements about the intelligence or morality of racial or ethnic groups, whether African Americans or Newfies, be threatening. They’re absurd. And the joke tellers know they’re absurd, and listeners recognize that intention. That’s why it is, as they say, “only a joke.”
But though humor typically traffics in what is literally false, it may nevertheless also communicate assertive propositional content. Satire, of course, functions that way. Moreover, notice that the absurdity propounded in most racist joke versions most frequently takes the form of the conventional figure of speech hyperbole. A hyperbole is literally false, but, so to speak, it points in the direction of truth. “I’m so hungry that I could eat a horse” is literally false, but it communicates “I’m very hungry.” Saying of a racial or ethnic group that they would make corrections on their personal computers with white-out is virtually unimaginable, but it communicates “They’re an incredibly dumb bunch.” It is probably what Grice called a conversational implicature. So, the fact that the joke version at issue is literally false does not disqualify it from functioning as a means of reinforcing a system of racial discrimination. And, for that reason, anxiety is an apt response for the targets of the joke and morally sympathetic, sensitive listeners. For them, the intimation of the threat cancels the prospect of comic amusement.
Clearly, this conclusion only applies to some listeners. It concedes that racist joke-tellers are likely to be found funny by racist audiences, whether they be conscious or unconscious racist listeners. But that is to be expected on the assumption that joke versions are funny or not contextually, depending upon the intentions of the joke tellers and the cognitive and conative make-up of the listeners.
But isn’t it really the responses of the morally sensitive listeners that we care about? Of course, the racists take pleasure in racist jokes. They’re racists. What would be distressing is that morally sensitive listeners, all things being equal, enjoy such joke performances. But as I’ve tried to show, contra Cohen, morally sensitive listeners can deny racist jokes are funny justifiably in terms of, what we might call, the comic contra.
In summary, I have tried to defeat the claim that a joke’s potential for comic amusement is never compromised by its moral defectiveness, where the particular object of our concern are racist and ethnic jokes. (although my argument could be extended to other sorts of humor, including sexist, homophobic, classist, and disability humor). I have based my argument on the contention that jokes are an oral art form or practice and that, as such, it is spoken joke versions, related by family resemblance, that are contextually, on the one hand, funny, and, on the other hand, morally defective. Furthermore, the funniness or comic amusement of a joke version depends upon the perceived incongruity of the punchline being non-anxiety-producing or unthreatening. This is a necessary and not a contingent feature of comic amusement. A racist joke performance with racist content will be recognized as morally defective because threatening by morally sensitive listeners, whether members of the race in question or otherwise. For them, the joke version will not be funny. Therefore, sometimes—indeed, on the occasions where the joke-telling is addressed to a morally sensitive audience—a racist joke can be unfunny exactly because it is a racist joke. Its moral defectiveness will unseat its humor. Morality and humor are not as utterly remote as Cohen claimed, especially when the joke-teller is not just kidding.