Davis, Mark. Forum: Qualitative Social Research De Sousa, Ronald. When is it wrong to laugh? In John Morreall ed. Edwards, Kim R. Humor creation ability and mental health: Are funny people more psychologically healthy? Ellis, Emma Gray. Is it OK to make coronavirus memes and jokes? Erskine, Chris. Ford, Thomas E. Social consequences of disparagement humor: A prejudiced norm theory.
Personality and Social Psychology Review 8. Disparagement humor and prejudice: Contemporary theory and research.
Humor Personality, humor styles and happiness: Happy people have positive humor styles. Fraser, Heather. Doing narrative research: Analysing personal stories line by line. Qualitative Social Work 3. Gajanan, Mahita. PloS One Gerlach, Neil Allen. From outbreak to pandemic narrative: Reading newspaper coverage of the Ebola epidemic. Canadian Journal of Communication Goldberg, Barbara.
Gordon, Sherri. Journal of Medical Internet Research Michelle Driedger. Measles, Mickey, and the media: Anti-vaxxers and health risk narratives during the Disneyland outbreak. Greengross, Gil. Is it okay to laugh during a pandemic? Hileman, Ami. Understanding how different types of humor impact our resilience in a pandemic.
Holshue, Michelle L. Pallansch, William C. Weldon, Holly M. Biggs, Timothy M. First case of novel coronavirus in the United States. The New England Journal of Medicine Hu, Yang. Research in Social Stratification and Mobility Jensen, Erin. Is it OK to laugh at coronavirus jokes and memes? Taking a joke seriously: When does humor affect responses to the slurring of people with intellectual disabilities?
Kole, William J. Krawczyk, K. Chelkowski, S. Mishra, D. Xifara, B. Gibert, D. Laydon, S. Flaxman, T. Mellan, V. Does the coronavirus pandemic level the gender inequality curve?
Kuipers, Giselinde. The Journal of American Culture Good humor, bad taste: A sociology of the joke. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Will novel virus go pandemic or be contained? Science Laws, Joseph. Lazarus, Richard S. Stress, appraisal, and coping. New York: Spring Publishing Company. Leazenby, Lauren. International Journal of Communication Malone, Michael R. Martin, Rod A. Humor, laughter, and physical health: Methodological issues and research findings. Psychological Bulletin Humor and health.
In Victor Raskin ed. McGhee, Paul. Humor: The lighter path to resilience and health. Bloomington: AuthorHouse. McTague, Tom.
Yes, make coronavirus jokes. Playing at apocalypse: Reading Plague Inc. The Internet abounds with corona jokes. But why are we laughing at something gravely serious? Morreall, John. Comic relief: A comprehensive philosophy of humor. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Mulkay, Michael. On humor: Its nature and its place in modern society. Cambridge: Basil Blackwell Inc.
Neben, Tillman. A model of defensive information avoidance in information systems use. In Thirty sixth international conference on information systems. Oring, Elliott. Jokes and their relations. Engaging humor. Papousek, Ilona. Humor and well-being: A little less is quite enough. Peifer, Jason T. Can we be funny? The social responsibility of political humor.
Pew Research Center. Evidence from China. Raskin, Victor. Semantic mechanisms of humor. Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Company. Reissman, Catherine Kohler. Narrative analysis. Oxford Academic. Google Scholar.
Select Format Select format. Permissions Icon Permissions. Article PDF first page preview. Issue Section:. You do not currently have access to this article. Download all slides. Sign in Don't already have an Oxford Academic account? Follow this author. New articles by this author. New citations to this author. New articles related to this author's research. Email address for updates. My profile My library Metrics Alerts. Sign in. Get my own profile Cited by View all All Since Citations h-index 30 19 iindex 45 Co-authors andrea scarantino Georgia State University Verified email at gsu.
Again, there is an element of truth to this view. Telling jokes about some groups is more likely to cause harm than telling jokes about others. But this does not mean that telling jokes about historically disadvantaged groups always wrongfully harms, or that telling jokes about historically advantaged groups never wrongfully harms.
Possibly the most common mistake made in thinking about the ethics of humour is to treat offence either as a decisive moral consideration or, at the very least, as a very strong moral consideration. It is often thought that because a piece of humour offends somebody it is therefore wrong or is at least presumptively so. Variants on this view claim that offence must either reach a certain level of intensity, or be sufficiently widespread, or must result from a violation of particular sensibilities — usually religious ones — in order to be judged wrong.
When this view is stated bluntly, as I have just stated it, it sounds untenable. It might be wondered, therefore, whether anybody really makes the mistake of thinking it true.
Because the argument is rarely stated explicitly it is hard to prove , at least without probing people, whether they are in fact espousing such a view. However, it does seem reasonable to attribute the view to those who, in criticizing an instance of humour, refer to its offensiveness and say nothing more There are many examples of this What tends to happen is that people express their outrage at a piece of humour or people note that others are outraged about it and they infer that the humour must be wrong.
Alternatively, it is noted how many people are outraged or how intensely outraged people are, and it is assumed that there must be a good reason why so many people are upset or why people are so upset. However, in the absence of a justification for the outrage, it is the outrage itself that is doing the work of purportedly justifying the claim that humour is wrong. In other words, it is one thing to say that humour is wrong for such and such reasons, and people are outraged because it is the sort or wrong that elicits justified offence.
It is another thing to say that the humour is wrong because people are outraged by it. All versions of the view that humour is wrong because it causes offence are problematic.
If the view were correct then it would grant a moral veto to the hypersensitive Benatar Those easily offended or outraged would be able to render instances of humour immoral. That, in turn, would imply that there is no difference between warranted and unwarranted outrage — or at least that the distinction is irrelevant to our assessment of the ethics of humour. If would assume that people always have a moral right not be offended. It would also ignore the fact that humour that offends some people can bring more important benefits to others.
Finally, offence arguments can be two-edged swords that produce judgments that if not contradictory are certainly in tension with one another. Although offence is not a very weighty moral consideration against telling a joke, this does not mean that it is irrelevant. That consideration will regularly be overridden but there are times when it will not be outweighed by other considerations. The clearest scenario is where the offence is gratuitous — where the offending humour produces no benefit to redeem it.
It would be wrong, for example, to tell crude jokes to prudes if all that this achieved was the mortification of the prudes. How can we judge prospectively when we may tell a joke and when we may not? How can we judge retrospectively whether some humour that has been disseminated should instead have been withheld?
It should be obvious that no formula can be provided. If, as I have suggested, the non-contextual criticisms of humour are defective, we cannot even say that some kinds of jokes should never be told.
Instead any judgment will need to take into account the specifics of a given joke in a given context. Drawing on the earlier discussion, a few general guidelines can be provided. We obviously need to ask, in a specific context, whether the humour expresses some defect in those purveying or appreciating the humour.
We also need to consider the effects of telling a joke. The harms and benefits will be influenced by facts about the humourist, the audience and the butt of the joke, but not in the crude ways that are often assumed. However, these are not the only determinants of the quality and quantity of the harms and benefits.
The location and the timing, for example, can also be relevant. And some jokes may be acceptably told in one place but not in another. Consider here the difference between telling a profanity-laden, deeply disgusting joke in a bar and telling it in a church or a cemetery. We need to weigh up the harms against the benefits.
This does not mean that our determination must be a utilitarian one or, if it is a utilitarian one, that it must be a simplistic utilitarian calculation. For example, if a joke will offend, we should ask whether the offence is deserved or not, and whether it is warranted or unwarranted.
If it is deserved or unwarranted, it should be discounted in our weighing up of the harms and benefits. If it is undeserved or warranted it should weigh more heavily. Considering and weighing all these factors will enable us to make more nuanced judgments about humour than are typically made. It is possible to think intelligently and carefully about the ethics of humour. This does not mean that in some cases there will not be scope for reasonable disagreement.
For example, it will sometimes be unclear what the consequences of a joke will be, how important it is to tell it, or how warranted the resultant offence will be. In such uncertainties humour ethics is no different from the ethics of other practices. Humour is often about serious subjects and the ethics of humour is, of course, no laughing matter.
It deserves our serious consideration. It is possible, however, to take humour too seriously. In conclusion, consider one deeply ironic example. The advertisement was greeted with outrage by protesters who claimed that it made light of the blind. The Advertising Standards Association of South Africa ruled that the advertisement was offensive to the blind but not to the guide dogs and that it had to be withdrawn Sapa Yet those objecting to the advertisement completely ignored this very serious moral problem and took the most important moral issues to be the reputation of guide dogs and the sensibilities of the blind That distortion is indicative of how unreliable popular views about the ethics of humour can be.
Taking humour ethics seriously involves not taking it more seriously than it should be taken. Detleve J. Humour includes not only jokes but also comedy, cartoons, satire, quips, puns, comic impersonations and so forth. I do not propose to provide a definition of humour. Defending one definition over rivals would be a massive undertaking, well beyond the scope of this essay. Even stipulating a definition would be ill advised and make little or no difference to what I have to say.
A definition covering all reasonable senses would either have to be so general as to cover all senses or it would have to be a disjunction of all reasonable meanings. One such bizarre case would be somebody opening up a mathematics textbook, seeing an equation and laughing, where there are no contextual considerations that would explain why the equation met the relevant aesthetic conditions.
I am not denying that the word can be used in this way. It is just that I am not using it that way here. I shall not stipulate what the aesthetic conditions are for something to count as humour. That too would take me beyond the scope of the current paper and would unnecessarily tie my analysis to a particular view. My analysis of humour ethics is compatible with a wide range of views about what the relevant conditions are. Berrett Some philosophers also have what I take to be overly restrictive views on the ethics of humour, and I shall make reference to them too, but my interest is not limited to what philosophers say about humour ethics.
I seek to address views that are held much more widely. I am referring to views that are held widely in some or other part of the world in our own times.
I am mentioning rather than using or telling jokes. This last distinction is not the distinction between consequentialist and deontological assessments of humour.
This is because a deontological assessment can cut across these two kinds of faults. Criticizing a joke because of some inherent feature of it does appear to be a deontological assessment. The type-token distinction is a technical philosophical one.
Those unfamiliar with it may, without cost, ignore the reference to a token. Claudia Mills also seems to endorse this view
0コメント