Truly Funny: Humor, Irony, and Satire as Moral Criticism

Abstract

Comparatively speaking, philosophy has not been especially long-winded in attempting to answer questions about what is funny and why we should think so. There is the standard debate of many centuries’ standing between superiority and incongruity accounts of humor, which for the most part attempt to identify the intentional objects of our amusement.1 There is the more recent debate about humor and morality, about whether jokes themselves may be regarded as immoral or about whether it can in certain circumstances be wrong to laugh.2 There is even apparently some disagreement about whether amusement is an emotion proper or a different kind of psychological attitude altogether. While I have almost despite myself taken sides in some of the arguments listed above and can unabashedly voice a preference for incongruity accounts of humor, claim that it is at least on occasion possible for jokes to be immoral, and state that I regard amusement as an emotion, I do not believe that there is much that I can contribute to these discussions beyond what has already been said in print. I do believe, however, that philosophy has more to say about humor and amusement than the aforesaid discussions have ventured to suggest, and one of the subjects that should strike us as most promising is that which attempts to draw some connection between humor and moral criticism. In this paper I will focus on a variety of such examples but will finish by concentrating in particular on sarcasm, irony, and satire—the dictionary definitions of which seem inextricably entangled—in order to delineate in detail a particular kind of revelation of truth, one that is often but not inevitably tied to moral questions. In fact, superiority and incongruity theories of humor alike point to instances of humor in which amusement depends on the unexpected disclosure of some (often unflattering or morally problematic) truth as cases