Zoe Walker

What makes a joke immoral? And how does this affect its funniness? In this paper, I employ work on perspectives to offer novel answers to both questions. In answer to the first, I argue that a joke can be immoral by virtue of the perspective it offers on its subject matter, when this perspective underplays morally significant features of what is represented in a manner that plays an active role in sustaining some current injustice. In answer to the second, I argue that understanding the role of perspectives in the appreciation of humour reveals that morality per se has no bearing on either the perceived or actual funniness of a joke. Rather, funniness is a matter of whether the perspective invited by the joke bears the right kind of relationship to the (ideal) hearer’s default perspective.

In this paper, I discuss two roles for the concept of joking in political speech. First, I discuss how claiming to have been joking can provide speakers with a powerful form of deniability. I argue that the aesthetic dimension of jokes makes such a denial especially well placed to undermine both a hearer's evidence for an utterance having been sincere, and, separately, their belief that it was sincere—I call the latter ‘aesthetic gaslighting’. Second, I discuss the use of jokes to influence hearers’ thinking and behaviour under the radar. I show that not only does the fact that an utterance was a joke fail to prevent it from influencing hearers, but in some cases, the fact that it was a joke actually makes it more influential than a sincere utterance would have been.

What does it say about you if you enjoy sexist humour? One answer to this question holds that finding sexist humour funny reveals that you have sexist beliefs, whilst another holds that it reveals nothing deeper about you at all. I argue that neither of these answers are correct, as neither can capture the feeling of unwilling complicity we often get from enjoying sexist jokes. Rather, we should navigate between these two positions by understanding the sense of humour as a kind of sensibility or taste, analogous to Anne Eaton’s account of erotic taste. This allows for a fleshing out of the purely belief-centred understanding of the sense of humour, adding emotional, perceptual and motivational aspects to it. Finally, I propose that one’s sense of humour is shaped the representations one engages with, which suggests a possible avenue for habituating it in a more egalitarian direction.