LOL: Making “Just” Jokes

In high school, one of our drama teachers defied us to think of counter-examples to this statement: “Every joke is about someone’s physical or emotional pain.”

Slapstick, of course, is about watching other people get hurt. Reversal of expectations is often about the tacit stupidity of those not quick enough to follow the sudden shift. Observational humour can be about delegitimizing others’ threatening or inconvenient behaviour or about presenting one’s own painful shortcomings and absurdities to the audience.

Now,  I don’t know that I’d argue that pain is universal in humour. But what is universal is humour’s capability to exclude.

A joke divides the world into two sets of people: people who “get” it, who have the same assumptions and similar experience to the person telling the joke, who find what it talks about emotionally safe enough to be funny —  US — and people who don’t get it, who don’t find it funny, who can’t laugh at what it talks about. THEM.

Sometimes, exclusion is harmless, particularly when the group being excluded is already powerful in other ways so that exclusion doesn’t threaten its sense of legitimacy. For instance, when adults don’t laugh at silly puns that drive children to hysterics, no one is too worried that exclusion from the group might damage the adults’ social and professional lives. If children are US, adults don’t mind being THEM.

However, when a powerful group uses humour to exclude a less powerful group, intentionally or unintentionally, it can cause lasting emotional or social harm, and that’s when, “It was just a joke” doesn’t cut it.

See, defending comedy that offended or hurt someone with “It was just a joke” is like saying one of two equally unhelpful things.

First, and charitably, “It was just a joke” can mean “I don’t actually believe what I said.” If you think about it, this is kind of insulting to the upset individual: it implies that he or she is somehow the only person in the group who didn’t understand that the joke wasn’t supposed to be a statement of fact. Like, oops, you should pay better attention to social conventions and/or my non-verbal cues if you think I mean something so vile.

The second problem with this use of “It was just a joke” is that it’s sometimes not entirely true. Sometimes, it turns into “I know I shouldn’t actually believe what I said.” And, hey, that’s normal — there are lots of things that I personally find funny that hurt other people. I like snark; I like sarcasm. Sometimes I think put-downs and mean insults are hilarious even though I know they upset their targets. My point is, it’s OK to find wrong things — cruel things, painful things, discriminatory things — funny. Everyone has unethical impulses, and accepting those feelings as real is the first step to behaving in a decent way. What’s not OK is to persist in making or supporting hurtful humour despite knowing it causes harm.

This doesn’t mean I’m somehow “censoring” my sense of humour. Maybe I laugh automatically at someone getting beaned in the face with a baseball, but once I realize they’re crying, I focus on their pain and injury and stop laughing. Likewise, just because my first instinct is to laugh at words or ideas that hurt other people psychologically or socially doesn’t mean that I’m somehow betraying “me” to stop when I see their pain. Besides, who’s the one who decides to change that thing’s label to “not funny”? Still me. My choices are who I am just as much as my instincts.

That’s why I have even more trouble accepting the legitimacy of the second, often implicit meaning of “It was just a joke”: “I have the correct feelings about this subject, and yours are invalid. Preserving my momentary laughter matters more than respecting your pain.”

Instead of acknowledging the other person’s feelings as legitimate, even if the person making the joke disagrees with them, this use of “It was just a joke” puts the focus on the intent of the offender, not the effect it actually had on the offendee. Frankly, if you accidentally punch me in the face while doing tai chi, it doesn’t hurt any less than if you whallop me deliberately in a bar fight.

Apologists for jokes that hurt people*, whether Daniel Tosh’s poorly considered response to an alleged heckler, Penny Arcade’s “dickwolves” comics, or the deliberately offensive humour of games like Cards Against Humanity and shows like South Park, often miss this point. They argue based on the assumption that so long as the person telling the joke doesn’t actually believe in the parts of the joke that hurt the listener, or so long as those parts are said in a spirit of “fun” that shows no one is supposed to take them seriously, it’s the hurt person’s fault for being hurt.

And, hey, I get it. Making jokes is hard, and it’s putting a bit of yourself on the line. When a blow doesn’t hurt you, it’s hard to remember that the same hit, with the same momentum might still hurt someone else who just happens to be different from you. Or to use another analogy: peanuts don’t bother me at all, and sometimes it’s difficult not to get frustrated when someone else’s allergies make planning a party that much more complicated.

But in the end, I want everyone to be able to come to my party. Checking ingredient labels is a small price to pay for the mutual respect of another human being. Checking what ideas and hidden assumptions, what privileges go into a joke is trivial compared to including existing and potential friends.

Instead of telling “just jokes,” I want to work on telling jokes that are just.

* I don’t claim offensive comedy is wrong under any circumstances by any comedian, or even that all these examples are indefensible. Nor do I claim that you are a bad person if they make you laugh. I use them as real-life examples from across the political spectrum, regardless of my own feelings on each.