Lukas Myers

Philosophers of humour standardly assume that there is an essential connection between humour and amusement. Amusement is, in some way, regarded as essential to humour. However, anti-essentialist sceptics have recently called the ‘orthodox’ formulation of essentialism into question. Orthodox essentialists have argued that humorous acts are acts intended to amuse and that humour is nothing more than the practice of those acts. Anti-essentialists argue that much humour does not involve any intentions to amuse. These sceptics are motivated by a conception of humour as a robust and varied social practice. The aim of this paper is to show how we might defend a version of essentialism that accepts this conception of humour as a robust social practice. I argue that amusement is the emotional core of humour where humour is understood as an aesthetic practice in the sense described by aesthetic communitarians.

When they are first introduced to the ethical study of humor, students and colleagues alike sometimes react skeptically. They worry that doing ethics about humor is somehow antithetical to the nature of humor, or that it risks impinging on what makes humor valuable. In this paper, I attempt to explore and explain this intuition. I provide an account of humor’s contribution to the good life which helps to explain how and in what sense we might think humor is resistant to ethics. I argue that humor, understood as a sort of play, is resistant to the introduction of practical ethical restrictions, which I call ethical taboos. This is because one of humor’s central contributions to the good life is in relieving us of the burdens of our social, moral, and political obligations. In this way, humor’s value is liberatory. Ethical taboos are exactly the sort of thing we engage in humor to escape, and so they counteract our reasons for engaging in the activity in the first place. I conclude this paper by discussing what some implications might follow from my account on humor ethics more generally. I argue that there may be ways to both preserve the integrity of humorous play and take deal with ethical issues unique to humor.

Comic immoralism is the view that sometimes funny things are funny due to their having immoral properties of some sort. Immoralism has many proponents and detractors. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, I clarify the scope and content of comic immoralism as a general thesis in the philosophy of humor. I will argue that the debate about immoralism has unduly excluded certain categories of humor from inclusion, and that the language which immoralists sometimes use can be misleading. Second, I argue for my own version of immoralism, which I call ridicule immoralism. Ridicule immoralism holds that sometimes things are funny due to their being ridiculous, and that things are often ridiculous due to being morally flawed. It follows from this that a version of comic immoralism is true.