Wisecracks: Humor and Morality in Everyday Life

Wisecracks

Wisecracks

Humor and Morality in Everyday Life

David Shoemaker

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2024 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2024

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-83296-8 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-83298-2 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-83297-5 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226832975.001.0001

Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life

from MONTY PYTHON’S LIFE OF BRIAN

Words and Music by Eric Idle

Copyright © 1979 MONTY PYTHON PICTURES LTD.

All Rights in the U.S. and Canada Administered by UNIVERSAL–POLYGRAM INTERNATIONAL TUNES, INC.

All Rights Reserved    Used by Permission

Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Shoemaker, David, 1964– author.

Title: Wisecracks : humor and morality in everyday life / David Shoemaker.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023033210 | ISBN 9780226832968 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226832982 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226832975 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Wit and humor—Moral and ethical aspects. | Wit and humor—Social aspects. | Wit and humor—Therapeutic use.

Classification: LCC PN6147 .S46 2024 | DDC 152.4/3—dc23/eng/20230830

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023033210

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

To all of my hilarious friends . . .

. . . if only I had some.

Contents

Introduction

Part One. Humor, Morality, and the Relations between Them

Chapter One. You Had to Be There!: The Nature of Humor

Chapter Two. That’s Just Not Funny!: How Morality Does (and Doesn’t) Bear on Humor

Part Two. Morally Troublesome Wisecracks: A Guided Tour

Chapter Three. Back When I Was in ’Nam . . .: Deceptive Wisecracks

Chapter Four. Lay Off!: Mockery, Misfortune, and Meanness

Chapter Five. Somebody Ought to Throw Those Boys a Basketball!: Stereotyping Humor

Part Three. Finding Funny

Chapter Six. I Feel Your Hilarious Pain: Flawed Senses of Humor, Flawed Senses of Morality

Chapter Seven. Always Look on the Bright Side of Death: How and Why to Find the Funny in Pain and Tragedy

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

Index

Introduction

When I told my buddy Mark that I was going to write a book on humor, his immediate response was But that assumes you know something about it.

Now that’s what I’m talking about!

No, seriously, that’s what I’m talking about!

Nearly every book or article that’s been written on humor focuses on canned jokes, those packaged bits of funny that we tell or retell one another, with their familiar setups and punch lines, the ones that may start with, Did you hear the one about . . . ? or A priest, a rabbi, and a duck walk into a bar. This book doesn’t have much to say about jokes, which are actually pretty rare in our everyday lives. We may occasionally watch a comedian’s new Netflix special on a Friday evening, pass along jokes we’ve heard to our friends at the bar every once in a while, or act out our favorite bits from a Saturday Night Live sketch to our colleagues now and again. These canned materials are certainly one source of amusement in our lives. But by far the more prevalent source comes from the banter, teasing, mockery, prankery, taking the piss, leg-pulling, joshing, and quippery that happen between people in everyday life who know each other, sometimes pretty well. These knockabout humorous exchanges are informal and interpersonal. They are familiar funny features of daily conversations, part of our back-and-forth dialogues with each other, whereas the jokes we tell are monologues, prepared performances that interrupt ordinary conversations. The more informal witty exchanges I want to focus on often involve multiple parties attempting to one up each other, trying to make ever funnier contributions to an ongoing amusement party. They are what I’m calling wisecracks, which are made, not told, and they are the main focus of this book.¹ (A quick remark about notes, the first of which has just appeared: They will provide references of work cited, more detailed philosophical exploration of some of the issues raised for those interested, and additional opportunity for more of my dumb wisecracks. Please feel free to ignore them.)

As we’ll see, there’s not always a hard-and-fast distinction between jokes and wisecracks, but the basic difference I want to emphasize between them has to do with where the funniness is typically located in each. The funniness in jokes is found primarily in their logical or semantic structure. Many writers like to point to the incongruity of jokes as the source of their funniness, perhaps involving the introduction of some unexpected mismatch, the exploitation of some ambiguity in the language, or a switcheroo in how ordinary scripts might go. Consider a classic moron joke:

The Space Agency of Moronistan announced today that they would send a manned mission to the sun. When asked how they would withstand the heat, they responded, Oh, we’ll go at night.

The funniness of this joke comes from the incongruous idea of a space agency with such ridiculously stupid engineers. But the funniness is completely contained within the joke itself. It can be fully and equally recognized in hearing someone tell it to you, overhearing someone telling it to someone else, seeing it on TV, reading it on the internet, or receiving it in an email or text message.

Wisecracks, by contrast, are intentional bits of humor whose funniness is found not just in their formal features but also in their interpersonal features. When we tease others, for instance, often what’s funny isn’t found just in our quips themselves but in the reactions of those we are teasing. When I pull your leg, its funniness isn’t going to come simply from the false remarks I make; it will come, in addition, from the fact that I fooled you for a bit with those remarks, that I got you. When two people of shared ethnicity make a crack that exploits some stereotype about their group, its funniness may come only from their shared disdain for that stereotype or for the people who believe that stereotype. These are all contextual, interpersonal matters.

Sometimes, of course, the difference between prepared jokes and wisecracks may not be all that clear. For example, some professional comedians relay anecdotes in a wisecrack-ish form—informally, spontaneously, and incorporating audience feedback—and some interpersonal teasing takes on a joke-ish form, as when Black teenagers play the dozens, crafting increasingly outrageous insults of each other (often about their mothers). But there remains a recognizable distinction between jokes and wisecracks, at least of the kind I’m most interested in, and it’s one that motivates this book. Wisecracks are the kinds of witticisms we make with each other. And it’s with that with that we arrive at the fundamental problem.

Because the funniness of jokes essentially comes just from their formal features, on their own they don’t raise much moral trouble (despite what some people think). Only wisecracks raise genuine moral trouble, precisely because their funniness—or lack thereof!—is so interpersonal. Wisecracking is a way that people interact with other people, a way of treating other people, and, as such, wisecracks are explicitly subject to the norms of morality. But wisecracks are also subject to the norms of humor. And the overarching aim of this book is to reveal just how intertwined both sets of norms actually are. Whether a wisecrack is funny—or just how funny it is—can sometimes depend on what moral or immoral features it has, just as its moral status can sometimes depend on what funny or unfunny features it has. Further, a good sense of humor actually requires a good sense of morality, just as a good sense of morality requires a good sense of humor.

Working through Mark’s wisecrack illustrates and expands on these points, and it also helps introduce the chapters to come. First, Mark’s remark was funny, but why? After all, on its face it seems to be a kind of insult. He sounds like he’s saying that I’m not funny, that I know nothing about humor, so I couldn’t possibly write an informed book on humor. But given that I’m implying that I do know something about humor by taking on this project, this would be a pretty harsh thing to say. Indeed, were he just to say all that explicitly (You’re not funny, so why think you could write a good book about humor!), it wouldn’t be funny at all. So what’s going on?

The answer is that he’s not actually insulting me, and I know he’s not insulting me. Instead, he’s merely acting as if he were. But then why is acting like you’re insulting someone funny? Imagine a stranger, who, overhearing my announcement that I’m writing a book on humor, pipes up and says, as if he were insulting me, Well, that assumes you know something about it! That’s not funny; instead, it’s just weird. The funniness of Mark’s identical comment thus must have something to do with the fact that we know each other.

Faux insults from people we know can be funny. What about real insults? They can be funny too. Suppose I’ve already self-published five books on humor, each of them worse and more unfunny than the previous one. Hardly anyone bought them, and those who did regretted it. Mark knows all this, and when I announce yet another book on humor, he wryly remarks, I’m sure this will be the one that turns it all around for you! This is a sarcastic insult, saying the opposite of what he means, which is that I really am unfunny, and this will most definitely not be the one that turns it all around for me. But how he says it is also funny.

Even if I can recognize this wisecrack as an attempt at a funny put-down, however, I may or may not find it funny, that is, I may not in fact be amused by it. Indeed, while the funniness of wisecracks comes in part from their interpersonal nature, that same interpersonal nature is what also may give rise to anger, if there’s some mistreatment thought to be contained within it. And if Mark’s wisecrack were to make me angry, it’s going to be psychologically difficult, if not impossible, for me to be amused at the same time.

As it turns out, the funniness of Mark’s original faux insult, and my ability to find it funny, depend on a lot of things. He must know and like me, I must know and like him. I have to give him the benefit of the doubt that he’s not actually insulting me and that he doesn’t have any malice toward me, and he must know that I know and like him and will give him the benefit of the doubt. He must also know that I know that he knows that I know and like him and will give him the benefit of the doubt. We must be friends, in other words, of a familiar sort. All of this information enables me to know that he doesn’t mean what he says as an insult, even though he’s pretending that he does.

But none of this yet explains why a friend pretending to insult me is funny. Why isn’t it instead, like a stranger pretending to insult me, just weird? Answering this question more generally is the aim of chapter 1. Many people are going to come to the table thinking that there’s nothing more to what’s funny than what different individuals in fact find funny: If I’m amused by something, they think, then it’s funny to me, and if you aren’t amused by it, then it’s not funny to you, and that’s that. Put like that, the view is wrong, but it does have a wee bit of truth in it. In order to find out what makes things funny, we do have to make some reference to how people feel about it: things are funny because of their specific way of interacting with our senses of humor. It’s our humor sensibility that determines what’s funny and what’s not. But it’s not just anyone’s actual amused response that determines what’s funny, because people can be, and often are, mistaken about what’s funny or not. If you think that it’s funny when a police interrogator tortures an innocent suspect, say, you’re just wrong. People can also be mistaken in declaring some things not funny that are: Mark’s faux insult was indeed funny, and those who think otherwise are wrong. How to determine whose responses are right and whose are wrong is a fascinating story that I hope to make clear by the end of chapter 1.

Wisecracking, as we all know, can have many dark sides. First, some wisecracks are exclusionary. Humor among members of in-groups about members of out-groups often seals the borders between them. Private jokes do this by speaking a language deliberately obscure to outsiders. Mockery may do this by presenting those outsiders as lower, as lesser, than insiders.

Second, sometimes there are asymmetrical relationships in which only one side gets to engage in teasing or mockery of the other, and this hardens hierarchy. We see this phenomenon most clearly in studies of organizations in which bosses tease or mock their employees, and the employees (for fear of losing their jobs) have to take it and can’t tease or mock their bosses back.²

Third, some humor just plain hurts. Mockery, in particular, when it’s done by insiders to outsiders (to those who are different, socially excluded, nerds, the disabled, etc.) can reinforce exclusion, difference, and the pain of being an outsider. This is the kind of humor that involves laughing at someone, and we all know how painful being laughed at can be.

Fourth, some hurtful humor has next-generation bad effects, shaping otherwise innocent people in ways that cause them to become hurtful to others down the line. A study of autistic teenagers in China revealed that several of them engaged in aggressive humor, mercilessly teasing and ridiculing other students, a type of humor that most studies suggest that those with autism typically don’t engage in.³ When the authors investigated more deeply, they found a heartbreaking explanation of why: These kids had been so mercilessly teased for being different when they were younger that they saw this kind of humor as the only way to fit in with others, and so that’s what they practiced themselves.⁴

Fifth, certain kinds of identity-based humor, wisecracks directed at people that reference their group membership (e.g., their gender, class, ethnicity, or race) can generate what’s known as a social identity threat, where what’s communicated to the targeted person is that they are at risk of being devalued, rejected, or of becoming the target of discrimination because of their group membership.⁵ It also just plain hurts, as it reminds people of their oppressed or marginalized status.

Sixth, because of their context dependence, occasional reliance on hard-to-read intentions, or serious subtlety, lots of wisecracks may be easily misunderstood, and that can fracture relationships.

Seventh, some wisecracks are deceptive, involving pulling the wool over someone’s eyes, deliberately preventing them from seeing some truth that everyone around them can see. But deliberately deceiving someone is immoral, isn’t it, so aren’t such wisecracks immoral as well?

This is a lot of darkness. As a result, some people insist that whenever wisecracks have any of these immoral features, they just aren’t funny. These people are right that some forms of wisecracking humor do have immoral features. But they are wrong in thinking that those features eliminate all the humor. True, a brutally cruel wisecrack may not be funny at all. But sometimes cruelty in a wisecrack is precisely what makes it funny (or funnier). Once the view of the general relation between humor and morality is set forth in chapter 2, we’ll be ready to explore over the following three chapters the specific moral worries raised by deceptive humor, mockery, and stereotyping wisecracks.

First, though, you might well wonder, given all the dark sides and moral risks of wisecracking, why we should bother defending it at all? After all, what are we even defending? A little amusement? Sure, that may be enjoyable for a second, but who cares about such a trivial pleasure when immorality may be at stake?

As it turns out, there are many reasons to engage in the wisecracking life, beyond the enjoyment any individual crack may bring. First, those who make you feel amusement’s pleasure are going to be people you’re likely to gravitate toward, to want to hang around. Amusing people are likable, they’re fun, and they make you feel good. Humor brings people together. Debbie Downer doesn’t have any friends.⁶

Second, many wisecracks involve self-deprecating anecdotes. In telling these, you invite listeners’ sympathy and protective warmth. A self-deprecating humor style generally also seems to increase one’s emotional and psychological well-being, better enabling one to cope with various setbacks.⁷ And other people are obviously drawn to emotionally healthy people.

Third, in making wisecracks about your experiences, you create or reinforce enjoyable bonds with those who also have had similar experiences, inviting empathy and identification. Wisecracking between close friends assumes lots of shared background and knowledge, generating or buttressing intimacy between wisecrackers.

Fourth, wisecracking signals, and can bring about, reconciliation. As John Morreall insightfully notes:

When two people are quarreling, one of the first things they stop doing together is laughing; they refuse to laugh at each other’s attempts at humor, and refuse to laugh together at something incongruous happening to them. As soon as they begin to laugh once more, we know that the end of the quarrel is at hand.⁸

Fifth, between those who aren’t yet in a personal relationship, humor can reduce uncertainty and social distance, increase cooperation, and generate trust.⁹ In general, a good sense of humor is strongly correlated with social competence. Humorous people are more cheerful, and so, again, are more likely to attract friends. They are better able to manage their emotions, so they seem far less volatile and more inviting.¹⁰

Sixth, wisecracks of various kinds also serve to create and reinforce group boundaries. When in-group members make fun of those outside the group, yes, it may exclude those others, but it also makes the insiders feel like special club members. Teasing within the group thus serves to bond its members.¹¹ Wisecracking is particularly powerful at reinforcing bonds within families. Loving siblings sometimes tease and mock each other mercilessly, and it is in fact an expression of their strong love for each other (especially for family members who have a harder time expressing affection straightforwardly). More generally, though, underdogs together make fun of their bullies, and this too unites them, makes them stronger. Cancer survivors make wisecracks with each other about their ordeals, bringing them closer together. These are all familiar phenomena.

Seventh, wisecracks provide a fascinating way to identify, test, or alter the status of relationships that one is in. Suppose I hadn’t known Mark very well: We’d only hung out at the bar a bit and played pool together a few times. Then one day I announce my plans for this humor book and he says, That assumes you know something about it. On the one hand, I could respond by feeling offended, thinking, You don’t know me well enough to tease me like that! This thought alone is quite revealing. On the other hand, I might recognize the humor in the remark and see it as a sign that he regards me as in fact a closer friend than I had realized up until that point. We only tease the ones we love, perhaps (at least in certain ways). And I may come to regard him now as a closer friend. That is, the wisecrack serves, in its way, to make us closer friends than we had been just one moment before; it bonds us. This is one of the great powers of wisecracking.¹²

Do I need to go on? These should all be familiar points that we don’t really need empirical investigation to verify (although there’s plenty). These facts generate powerful reasons to appreciate and engage in wisecracking humor, to join in on the amusement party, and so to refine and widen the range of our humor sensibilities so as to be more inclusive in what we find funny, both to increase the range and type of relationships we can enter into and to reap the vast prudential benefits of being in those relationships. Good stuff!

We’ve thus got excellent reasons to engage in the wisecracking life, but we may also have serious moral qualms about doing so. My title points to a kind of pun: Wisecracks may both bridge cracks and crack bridges, bond people and divide them. Which one occurs depends crucially on what role, if any, empathy plays in the exchange. This is the first of two subthemes running throughout the book. Not enough empathy can lead to callous or cruel wisecrackery of the sort that generates hurt, exclusion, discrimination, or worse. But too much empathy can—surprisingly—be bad as well, breeding overly sensitive people who never want to tread on anyone’s feelings, who think kindness is incompatible with the tiniest bit of meanness or deception, and who get morally upset by any wisecracks that incorporate such things. Both types of people—the under- and overempathic—have bad senses of humor and morality, and it’s not a coincidence why.

Empathy can be extended too much or too little. To get the social benefits of wisecrackery, you have to deploy empathy in moderation. You have to know what people can take and what they can’t. You have to know the types of humor they’ll enjoy and those they won’t. But you also have to know when you ought to sympathize with their misfortunes and when it’s OK to emotionally detach from those misfortunes and make fun of them for those misfortunes. Being a successful wisecracker means both that your wisecracks are funny and that they are well-taken. That is, the success of your wisecracks depends in part on what you mean for them to do. This is the second main subtheme of the book: What crucially matters in responding correctly to both the funniness and the moral status of a wisecrack are the wisecracker’s intentions and motives, which amount to what the wisecracker means by it and what his or her attitudes are toward others affected or targeted by the wisecrack.

Many people today disagree with this view. They maintain that how we should respond to both jokes and wisecracks is at least sometimes determined independently of what anyone means by it and is instead determined exclusively by how some people take it, that is, by whether some are morally offended by it.

I aim to argue against this view, but it will take some doing. How we ought to respond to wisecracks does depend fundamentally on the intentions and motives of those who make them, as well as on the relationships and contexts within which they are made. These contextual factors are the only way to differentiate between morally innocent and morally heinous wisecracks, for example, that are otherwise identical to each other in terms of their content.

Now back to the outline of the book. From the general relation between humor and morality laid out in chapter 2, chapters 3–5 will focus on three specific moral troubles associated with some kinds of wisecracks. Return to Mark’s zinger. It could well have been presented in different ways, and these differences would have translated into differences in both its degree of funniness and how I might have taken the remark. Suppose first that when I told him I was going to write a book on humor, Mark had said, I’m just kidding here, but that assumes you know something about it. The qualification announcing that he’s just kidding would squash any humor in his subsequent quip. Suppose, alternatively, that my previous book had been critically trashed and a commercial failure, facts that I’m still very sensitive about, so Mark said: Oh, I see what your motto is: ‘Give the people more of what they don’t want.’ This remark, while funny, stings me; indeed, as in the earlier example, I may have a hard time finding it funny. Finally, suppose he’d leaned in and said, Hmmm, isn’t Shoemaker a German name? You’re right, the Germans are well known for their humor stylings. I’m sure it’ll be a big hit. This remark sarcastically plays with an ethnic stereotype, disparaging Germans for their poor senses of humor. But doesn’t morality counsel that we avoid such stereotyping?

Each of these alternatives raises a specific type of moral concern. The first reveals that deception is a component of some humor. His humor-killing I’m just kidding here signals that he doesn’t really mean what he’s about to say (as if he’s insulting me), but if he’d left the just kidding out, it would indeed be an attempt to deceive me—if only for a second—about his actual beliefs of my humor qualifications, a deception for the sake of amusement. Some may think this isn’t real deception, but they are wrong. Indeed, a huge swath of wisecracking humor does require actual deception in order to be funny. For me to prank you or pull your leg in a funny way, I have to get you to believe something false, full stop. Perhaps, then, this isn’t immoral deception? It is, as it turns out, but certain immoralities may often be justifiable nonetheless, as long as there’s enough funny in them and there aren’t other objectionably immoral elements in play.

The second sarcastic version of Mark’s wisecrack—Give the people more of what they don’t want—is an example of mockery. Mockery aims to sting the mocked person, at least a little bit. I don’t build you up in mocking you; I only aim to knock you down to size. So there seems to be a kind of meanness to it. But isn’t aiming at meanness immoral? As we’ll see in chapter 4, while there’s definitely a sting in mockery, it’s often nevertheless perfectly OK to engage in and be amused by it. More controversially, the demands of inclusivity may sometimes morally justify, and even morally require, mocking people often thought to be out of bounds for such treatment. Defending this point will involve a discussion of the punching up/punching down distinction that many are fond of. It’s a distinction that doesn’t withstand critical investigation very well, as it turns out.

The third version of Mark’s wisecrack, about German humor (or the lack thereof), plays with an ethnic stereotype. This is one example of stereotyping humor, and chapter 5 is all about these and others, mostly racial and gendered jokes or wisecracks. Many people think that stereotyping humor is mostly immoral, that it just can’t be funny, or, even if it is, that no one should engage in or be amused by it. But as it turns out, it’s really hard to get a precise bead on what is objectionable about it, and it’s even harder to see why people should never engage in or be amused by it, especially given the possibility of certain attitudes and contexts among makers of jokes and wisecracks. Racism and sexism are by no means funny; indeed, they are immoral, full stop. But some jokes and wisecracks that play with racial and sexual stereotypes can be funny, and sometimes people may have good reasons to play with them.

I’m well aware that this is very dicey territory. In order to investigate whether attempts at stereotyping humor can be either funny or morally permissible, and to show how much context and intentions matter, I have to mention actual knife-edge examples of it, in the form of both jokes and wisecracks. These may well be cherry-picked for callout, cancellation, or consequence. I’ll push back on the morality of doing so in these middle chapters.

It can of course be hard to navigate this complicated moral terrain when wisecracking. Those who do so well are those we describe as having good senses of humor. But what is a sense of humor, let alone a good one? This is the topic of chapter 6. A sense of humor is an actual sense, a way of perceiving certain features of the world. A good sense of humor perceives comic features of the world well. But what does that mean? To best answer this question, I explore what’s going on with some people who have impaired faculties of comic perception. Some autistic people, for example, may have difficulty finding the funny in a certain kind of absurdist humor or insult comedy. Some psychopaths and narcissists find humor only in aggressive ridicule and sarcasm. Some people with mania find too many things funny. Some people with clinical depression have a hard time finding anything funny. Why? It will again have something essential to do with empathy and its impairments, and our answer will again reveal the tight relation between a good sense of humor and a good sense of morality.

Still, there are some people without any psychological disorders or deficits in empathy who nevertheless have poor senses of humor. They either find too much humor in things they should not be amused by, or they find too little humor in things they should be amused by. Should they be corrected, and if so, how? In the final chapter, I offer some practical advice. What I recommend to improve one’s sense of humor is to develop a finely honed sense of the absurd, a way of sometimes seeing one’s own life, and the lives of everyone around one, as without a point, as not mattering. This may seem a strange and dangerous recommendation: Aren’t psychopaths, for example, the best (worst) illustrations of people who don’t take the value of life seriously? I guess you’ll just have to tune in to chapter 7 to see how I get out of that one. It won’t surprise you to hear that empathy once again plays a crucial role, but in its Goldilocks form: You can’t have too little or too much; it has to be juuuust right.

It should be obvious that humor plays a powerful and sometimes morally troublesome role in our everyday lives, but this role and its implications and connections have not been previously exposed and explored. In what follows, I aim to do so. Of course, that assumes I know something about it.

Part One

Humor, Morality, and the Relations between Them

[ Chapter One ]

You Had to Be There!

The Nature