Humor as an Optics: Bergson and the Ethics of Humor

Abstract

Although the ethics of humor is a relatively new field, it already seems to have achieved a consensus about ethics in general. In this paper, I implicitly (1) question the view of ethics that stands behind many discussions in the ethics of humor; I do this by explicitly (2) focusing on what has been a chief preoccupation in the ethics of humor: the evaluation of humor. Does the immoral content of a joke make it more or less humorous? Specifically, I analyze whether a sexist joke is more humorous because of its sexism. Contra recent trends in the ethics of humor, I answer this question affirmatively. To this end, the paper presents a detailed and novel reading of Bergson's philosophy of humor, which I argue connects most easily and significantly to the alternate view of ethics I have in mind.

A Comedian and a Fascist Walk into Freud's Bar: On the Mass Character of Stand‐Up Comedy

“…A comic who captivates us does so when she reveals something to us about us and our world: it is importantly not a case of mere entertainment, but rather a case where what is being said strikes us as true, deeply so. Differences in humor, in what we find funny, reveal differences in what we think is important, in our very visions of the world (Shuster 2013), understood broadly in the rich phenomenological sense suggested above, and as referencing the deepest moral foundations that underwrite our “total vision of life” (Murdoch 1997, 80). What we see and what we laugh at matters.…”

The Year's Work in American Humor Studies, 2015

“…In short, humor helps initiate us into and maintain us within a form of life. 188 Wow. Meaning that wit and humor have obligations to be didactic, to teach and moderate and regulate, and that humor's powers for rebellion, (including of course rebellion against prescriptive moralizing like this) are to be stifled as part of "initiation" into citizenship?…”