The Southern Journal of Philosophy

Volume 0, Issue 0
Month 2020

THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE FUNNY: AN ETHICS

OF HUMOR

John Morreall

Abstract: This article begins by reviewing the overwhelmingly negative assessment

of laughter and humor in Western philosophy and in Christianity, arguing that that
evaluation arises from a misclassification of amusement as a malicious emotion. It
then sketches a play theory of humor in which humor is an activity pursued for
pleasure which allows participants to violate linguistic and social norms, especially
rules about sincerity. Once we understand humor as a kind of play, familiar ethical
objections to jokes based on gender and race are seen to be mistaken, and a new
approach to the negative ethics of humor becomes possible. What is more, this play
theory also explains how humor is morally praiseworthy in many situations.

1.  THE TRADITIONAL REJECTION OF LAUGHTER

When I began thinking carefully about laughter forty years ago, I collected
everything available written about it by philosophers. Two things surprised
me: how little they had written, and how negatively most of them had viewed
laughter and humor. Plato was the first to analyze laughter and humor. He
classified what we now call amusement as an emotion—a “passion” in the
traditional usage—and linked that emotion to moral shortcomings. His two
main critiques were that in laughing we lose physical and psychological
self-control, and that we express malice toward those at whom we laugh.
Malice plus a loss of self-control produces aggression. In the ideal state envi-
sioned in The Republic, Plato said that the Guardians should avoid laughter,

John Morreall is Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at the College of William & Mary.
He has also taught at Northwestern University, Penn State, and the Rochester Institute of
Technology. His ten books include six on humor and laughter, most recently Comic Relief: A
Comprehensive Philosophy of Humor. Under the name Humorworks, he has done over 500 presen-
tations on the benefits of humor in North America, Europe, Japan, China, and South Africa.

The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Volume 0, Issue 0 (2020), 1–16.

ISSN 0038-4283, online ISSN 2041-6962. DOI: 10.1111/sjp.12390

1
2 JOHN MORREALL

“for ordinarily when one abandons himself to violent laughter, his condition
provokes a violent reaction.”1 Especially disturbing to Plato were the passages
in the Iliad and the Odyssey where Mount Olympus was said to “ring with the
laughter of the gods.” “If anyone represents men of worth as overpowered by
laughter,” he wrote, “we must not accept it, much less if gods.”2
In Philebus 48–50, Plato analyzed what makes people laugh. “Taken gen-
erally, the ridiculous is a certain kind of evil, specifically a vice. It is that
kind of vice which can be described by the opposite of the inscription at
Delphi . . . ‘Know thyself.’”3 The people we laugh at are those who misun-
derstand themselves, as by thinking that they are richer, better looking, or
wiser than they actually are. In laughing at them, Plato said, we are express-
ing a pleasurable form of malice.
The association of laughter with a loss of self-control was found in Greek
thought before and after Plato. The moral code of Protagoras had included
the warning “Be not possessed by irrepressible mirth.” In the first century
CE, Epictetus the Stoic advised, “Let not your laughter be loud, frequent, or
abundant.”4 The followers of both these thinkers said that they never laughed.
Early Christian leaders in the Eastern Roman Empire were influenced
by Platonic and Neoplatonic thought, and by Stoicism. Many of them
repeated Platonic and Stoic objections to laughter. John Chrysostom
strengthened Plato’s association of laughter with aggression in this slippery
slope argument:
Laughter often gives birth to foul discourse, and foul discourse to actions still more
foul. Often from words and laughter proceed railing and insult; and from railing
and insult, blows and wounds; and from blows and wounds, slaughter and murder.
If, then, you would take good counsel for yourself, avoid not merely foul words
and foul deeds, or blows and wounds and murders, but unseasonable laughter
itself.5

The other great influence on Christian thought was the Bible, of course,
and almost always when laughter occurs in the Bible, it expresses hostility.

1
 Plato, Republic, 388e, trans. Paul Shorey, inThe Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith
Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).
2
 Plato, Republic, 388e.
3
 Plato, Philebus 48-50, trans. R. Hackforth, in Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns,
ed., The Collected Dialogues of Plato (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).
4
 Epictetus, Enchiridion, 33, trans. Thomas W. Higginson (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill,
1955).
5
  John Chrysostom, On the Priesthood: Ascetic Treatises; Select Homilies and Letters; Homilies on
the Statues, vol. 9 of A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, ed.
Philip Shaff (New York: Christian Literature Co., 1889), 442.
 AN ETHICS OF HUMOR 3
According to Proverbs 26:18–19, “A man who deceives another and then
says, ‘It was only a joke,’ is like a madman shooting at random his deadly
darts and arrows.” The only way God is said to laugh is maliciously: Psalm
2:2–5 says, “The kings of the earth stand ready, and the rulers conspire
together against the Lord and his anointed king. . . . The Lord who sits
enthroned in heaven laughs them to scorn; then he rebukes them in anger,
he threatens them in his wrath.” After the prophet Elijah ridiculed the 450
priests of Baal for their god’s powerlessness, he had them all slain (1Kings
18:27). In the Bible, when laughter is directed at a prophet of God, it merits
the death penalty, as when a group of children mock Elisha for his baldness:
He went up from there to Bethel and, as he was on his way, some small boys
came out of the city and jeered at him, saying, “Get along with you, bald head,
get along.” He turned around and looked at them and he cursed them in the
name of the Lord, and two she-bears came out of a wood and mauled forty-two
of them. (2Kings 2:23)

The Christian institution that most emphasized self-control, the mon-

astery, was especially harsh about laughter. The oldest monastic rule, of
Pachom of Egypt, forbade joking. Ephraem of Syria, a contemporary of
Pachom, warned that:
Laughter is the beginning of the destruction of the soul, o monk. When you notice
something of that, know that you have arrived at the depth of the evil. Then do
not cease to pray God, that he might rescue you from this death.6

The foundation of Western monastic codes, the Rule of St. Benedict, said
that monks should “prefer moderation in speech and speak no foolish chat-
ter, nothing just to provoke laughter.” Step ten in Benedict’s Ladder of
Humility is restraining laughter; step eleven is a warning against joking.
The Protestant Reformation changed many things within Christianity,
but the rejection of laughter was not one of them. A tract by the Puritan
William Prynne vilified laughter and comedy as incompatible with the
sobriety of good Christians, who should not be “immoderately tickled with
mere lascivious vanities, or . . . lash out in excessive cachinnations in the
public view of dissolute, graceless persons.”7 When the Puritans came to
rule England under Oliver Cromwell, they outlawed comedy.
Plato’s understanding of laughter as malicious influenced philosophers
as well as religious thinkers. Thomas Hobbes, a contemporary of William

6
 Ephraem of Syria, in P. S. Frank, Angelikos Bios (Munster: Aschendorffsche:
Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1964), 145.
7
  William Prynne, Histrio-Mastix: The Players Scourge or Actors Tragaedie (London: 1633).
4 JOHN MORREALL

Prynne, described the emotion expressed in laughter as a rush of feeling

superior to other people.
Sudden glory, is the passion which makes those grimaces called laughter, and is
caused either by some sudden act of their own, that pleases them; or by the ap-
prehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof they
suddenly applaud themselves. And it is incident most to them, that are conscious
of the fewest abilities in themselves, who are forced to keep themselves in their
own favor by observing the imperfections of other men. And therefore much
laughter at the defects of others, is a sign of pusillanimity. For of great minds, one
of the proper works is, to help and free others from scorn, and to compare them-
selves only with the most able.8

Hobbes’s account of laughter is often cited as an example of the superi-

ority theory. A recent proponent is Roger Scruton, who analyzes humorous
amusement as an “attentive demolition” of a person or something related
to a person. “If people dislike being laughed at,” Scruton says, “it is surely
because laughter devalues its object in the subject’s eyes.”9
Most philosophers who discuss the ethics of humor go along with the
superiority theory, either explicitly or implicitly. Contemporary ethical writ-
ings on humor are mostly concerned with what Ronald de Sousa calls the
phthonic element—malicious beliefs and attitudes—in racist and sexist jokes.
A common kind of ethnic joke, for example, is a story in which a member
of some ethnic group does something showing stupidity, laziness, or other
fault. Most philosophers have simply assumed that these jokes express malice
toward that ethnic group. Telling a joke in which a black man is lazy, say,
is assumed to express the belief that black men, or black people in general,
are lazy, along with a negative attitude toward that laziness. Such beliefs
and attitudes are racist, the implicit argument goes, so such jokes are racist.
Before 1700, the superiority theory was the standard explanation of
laughter and humor, and it went unchallenged. That explains the prepon-
derance of negative assessments of laughter and humor by traditional phi-
losophers. As Plato and Hobbes said, such a malicious phenomenon is
inherently antisocial and harmful, so in the ideal state, “no writer of com-
edy . . . shall be permitted to hold any citizen up to laughter.”10

8
  Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, in his Works, ed. W. Molesworth (London: Bohn, 1839), see
vol. 3, ch. 11.
9
  Roger Scruton, “Laughter,” in The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor, ed. John Morreall
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), 168.
10
 Plato, Laws 11: 935e, trans. A. E. Taylor,in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith
Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).
 AN ETHICS OF HUMOR 5
Fortunately, the superiority theory started getting challenged a century
after Hobbes. Francis Hutcheson argued that feelings of superiority are
neither necessary nor sufficient for laughter. We can laugh at an odd met-
aphor or at clever wordplay, for example, without comparing ourselves to
anyone.Consider the shortest poem in the English language, Ogden Nash’s
“Fleas”:
Adam
Had’em.

Nor is feeling superior sufficient for laughter. Hutcheson wrote that if a rich
man is riding through London in a coach and sees ragged beggars, his
awareness of how much better off he is would be unlikely to induce laugh-
ter. In situations like this, “we are in greater danger of weeping than
laughing.”11
Not long after Hutcheson criticized Hobbes’s superiority theory,
Immanuel Kant offered a new analysis of laughter that did not even men-
tion superiority or self-assessment.
In everything that is to excite a lively convulsive laugh there must be something
absurd (in which the understanding, therefore, can find no satisfaction). Laughter
is an affection arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation
into nothing. This transformation, which is certainly not enjoyable to the under-
standing, yet indirectly gives it very active enjoyment for a moment.12

According to Kant, this indirect enjoyment in humor is a physical plea-

sure arising from the “changing free play of sensations” that accompanies
the play of thought, that is, the buildup of an expectation followed by its
sudden dissipation. As an example of this play of thought, Kant told a
story: “The heir of a rich relative wished to arrange for an imposing
funeral, but he lamented that he could not properly succeed; ‘for’ (said he)
‘the more money I give my mourners to look sad, the more cheerful they
look!’”13 Kant clarified the idea of the play of thought in humor by com-
paring it to the play of tone in music and the play of fortune in games of
chance.14

11
 Francis Hutcheson, “Reflections Upon Laughter,” in The Philosophy of Laughter and
Humor, ed. John Morreall (Albany: State University of New York, 1987), 29.
12
 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, in The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor, ed. John
Morreall (Albany: State University of New York, 1987), 47.
13
  Kant, in The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor, 48.
14
  Kant, in The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor, 46.
6 JOHN MORREALL

2.  A PLAY THEORY OF HUMOR

Kant’s analysis of joking is often classified as an early form of the incon-

gruity theory of laughter and humor. But it can also be counted as an early
version of a play theory of laughter and humor. While classifying humor
as a kind of play should be an obvious first move, very few philosophers
have made it. The first was Aristotle. In the Nicomachean Ethics he had these
comments on humor in conversation.
Since life includes relaxation as well as activity, and in relaxation there is leisure
and amusement, there seems to be here too the possibility of good taste in our
social relations, and propriety in what we say and how we say it. . . . People who
carry humor to excess are considered vulgar buffoons. They try to be funny at all
costs, and their aim is more to raise a laugh than to speak with propriety and to
avoid giving pain to the butt of their jokes. But those who cannot say anything
funny themselves, and are offended by those who do, are thought to be boorish
and dour. Those who joke in a tactful way are called witty (eutrapelos—literally,
turning well), which implies a quick versatility in their wits. For such sallies are
thought to be movements of one’s character, and, like bodies, characters are
judged by their movements.15

Aristotle’s idea of humor as playful relaxation went unnoticed for sixteen

centuries until Thomas Aquinas used it in his Summa Theologiae to discuss
three issues: “Whether there can be virtue in actions done in play,” “The
sin of playing too much,” and “The sin of playing too little.”16 Following
Aristotle, Aquinas said that humor and other play provide necessary
relaxation.
As bodily tiredness is eased by resting the body, so psychological tiredness is eased
by resting the soul. As we have explained in discussing the feelings, pleasure is rest
for the soul. And therefore the remedy for weariness of soul lies in slackening the
tension of mental study and taking some pleasure. . . . Those words and deeds in
which nothing is sought beyond the soul’s pleasure are called playful or humorous,
and it is necessary to make use of them at times for solace of soul.17

Following Aristotle, Aquinas saw the person with a good sense of humor
as a mean between two extremes, the vulgar buffoon and the sourpussed
boor. The person who jokes about anything and everything, tastelessly
hurting people’s feelings, spouting obscenities, and neglecting their moral

15
 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 4, 8, trans. David Ross, inThe Basic Works of Aristotle, ed.
Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941).
16
 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, vol. 44: Well-Tempered Passions (2a2ae, Q. 168),
trans. Thomas Gilby (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972), 211–27.
17
 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 2a2ae, Q. 168, article 2, 217.
 AN ETHICS OF HUMOR 7
responsibilities, is sinful, he says. But so is the person who refuses to play-
fully laugh at all:
Anything conflicting with reason in human action is vicious. It is against reason
for a man to be burdensome to others, by never showing himself agreeable to
others or being a kill-joy or wet blanket on their enjoyment. And so Seneca says,
“Bear yourself with wit, lest you be regarded as sour or despised as dull.” Now
those who lack playfulness are sinful, those who never say anything to make you
smile, or are grumpy with those who do.18

Using Aristotle’s word, Aquinas calls the moral ideal “a eutrapelos, a pleasant
person with a happy cast of mind who gives his words and deeds a cheerful
turn.”19
In these short comments on laughter and play, Aristotle and Aquinas
opened a way to seeing laughter and humor in a positive light, as linked to
the virtue they called eutrapelia. Their classifying laughter and humor as play
also provided an entrée into a new way of explaining what is wrong with
morally objectionable humor. In the rest of this article, I will go into detail
about the kind of play that humor is, and then use those details to sketch a
new ethics of humor.20
As a form of play, humor is pursued for pleasure. We call that pleasure
amusement. What makes amusement different from other kinds of pleasure,
such as eating tasty food, enjoying music, and experiencing positive emo-
tions, is the relation of the person to the source of the pleasure. With the
food, the music, and positive emotions, we are attracted to something—the
taste, the melodies, the person, etc. But things that amuse us need not
attract us. Many are funny for their unattractiveness—an ugly dog’s face, a
loud fart, mismatched socks. Since ancient Greece, stock comic characters
have included gluttons, drunkards, misers, windbags, and other people we
would not associate with in real life. Aristotle made this point in the Poetics
when he said that the ridiculous is “a species of the ugly.”21
Even when the funny thing is not unattractive, moreover, what we are
enjoying is not that thing per se, but, as the incongruity theory of humor
would say, something incongruous about it. Someone asks you, “What’s
green and stays out all winter?” You say you don’t know. “Paddy
O’Furniture,” they say. If you laugh, what you are enjoying is the

18
 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 2a2ae, Q. 168, article 2, 225–27.
19
 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 2a2ae, Q. 168, Article 2, 217.
20
 I present a fuller version of this ethics in chapters 5 and 6 of my Comic Relief:
A Comprehensive Philosophy of Humor (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).
21
 Aristotle, Poetics, 5, 1449a, trans. Ingram Bywater, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed.
Richard McKeon (New York: Random House 1941).
8 JOHN MORREALL

incongruity of conflating a bogus Irish name with a noun phrase for out-
door tables and chairs. The pleasure here, I have argued elsewhere,22 is in
a cognitive shift—a rapid change in our thoughts.
In enjoying incongruity like this, we are related to amusing things in a
way that is quite different from our relation to objects of standard emo-
tions.23 In amusement we are practically and epistemically disengaged from
the object, while in emotions we are practically and epistemically engaged
with the object.
Emotions evolved in the lower mammals as ways of overcoming danger
and seizing opportunities for food and mates, both of which kept the animal
and the species going. Disgust got them to reject noxious substances. Fear
motivated and energized them to escape predators. Anger motivated and
energized them to overcome enemies. Sadness got them to withdraw from
activity after an injury or a loss, and thus protect themselves from further
damage. Sexual love prompted them to reproduce, while parental love got
them to raise their offspring.
If amusement were an emotion, as many philosophers have thought, we
would expect it to be a practical response to dangers and opportunities, and
thus it would not be playful. Play, as Aquinas noted, is nonpractical activity
pursued for pleasure. We play when we are unencumbered by urgent needs
and responsibilities, which is why young children play more than adults.
But amusement is not a practical response to dangers and opportunities. It
does not motivate and energize us to act. In laughing we lose muscle con-
trol and our breathing is interfered with. The harder we laugh, the less we
are able to do anything at all. At the extreme, we fall on the floor and wet
our pants. Wallace Chafe has even argued that the biological function of
amusement is to incapacitate us.24
Amusement is not only nonpractical, but nonepistemic. Emotions are
based on beliefs about their intentional objects. In fear we believe that
something is a threat, in anger we believe that someone or something will
or has hurt someone, etc. If we discover that our beliefs about the object
of our emotion are false, the emotion dissipates, or it becomes irrational
as in paranoia. If a rumor that your best friend was just murdered made
you weep, but then you learned that the victim was merely someone with
the same name as your friend, you would not continue to grieve. But

22
 Morreall, Comic Relief, 49–64.
23
  See Morreall, Comic Relief, ch. 2.
24
  Wallace Chafe, The Importance of Not Being Earnest: The Feeling behind Laughter and Humor
(Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007).
 AN ETHICS OF HUMOR 9
amusement is not based on beliefs as emotions are. Thousands of things
that make us laugh are obviously purely fictional, such as narrative jokes.
And even with humorous things we take to be real, no belief that they are
real is required. If a funny story in the newspaper turns out to be false,
we don’t stop laughing; if a funny picture on the internet turns out to be
Photoshopped, it’s still funny.
Emotions depend on desires as well as beliefs. The objects of our emo-
tions matter to us; we care about them, positively or negatively. If we learn
that Mary Smith had just died, but do not care at all about Mary Smith,
we will not feel sad. But, again, amusement is different. With countless jokes
and cartoons, we laugh about a situation that we don’t care about at all,
such as an obviously fictional story in a joke.
To wrap up this contrast of amusement with standard emotions, consider
the following:
A horse walks into a bar and the bartender says, “Why the long face?”

Laughing at this sentence does not require any beliefs or desires about the
horse or the bartender, nor does it motivate us to do anything at all. It is
simply a matter of enjoying the way the question “Why the long face?” is
being used literally rather than to ask why someone is sad. In the language
of the incongruity theory of humor, what makes us laugh here is the incon-
gruity of “Why the long face?” being used in an odd way. Amusement, I
conclude, is not an emotion but a phenomenon of a higher order. As Kant
said of joking, humor is playing with thoughts.
Because we are only playing with the objects of our amusement, the rules
that govern serious communication can be broken with abandon in humor-
ous communication. As long as the results are enjoyable, we allow each
other to use homonyms interchangeably, say the opposite of what we think,
feign attitudes we don’t have, etc. In fact, the violation of rules of serious
communication is often the incongruity in humor. Consider three rules of
conversation discussed by Paul Grice:25
1. Avoid ambiguity.
2. Do not say what you believe to be false.
3. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
First, most jokes require ambiguity in a word or phrase and achieve their
effect by switching interpretations at the punch line. Consider the sentence,

25
  H. Paul Grice, “Logic and Conversation,” in Syntax and Semantics, vol. 3, ed. Peter Cole
and Jerry Morgan (New York: Academic Press, 1975), 41–58.
10 JOHN MORREALL

“I love cats—they taste a lot like chicken.” Or, “It matters not whether you
win or lose. What matters is whether I win or lose.” Avoiding ambiguity
would be the death of jokes.
Secondly, much humor is based on saying what everyone knows to
be false. Countless joking stories obviously never happened, such as the
horse walking into the bar. In conversation, too, we get laughs by making
obviously insincere claims, as in sarcasm, exaggeration, understatement,
and pure fantasy. With a straight face and even tone, comedian Steven
Wright says, “I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about
everything.”
Thirdly, even when humor is not based on obvious falsehoods, it may be
outlandish speculation for which the speaker lacks any evidence. Suppose
that your colleagues at the office are looking for Rob and Laura. Someone
might quip, “I’ll bet they’re in the mail room making hot monkey love on
top of the copy machines.”

3.  THE NEGATIVE ETHICS OF HUMOR

This account of humor as play in which we suspend practical concern,

epistemic concern, and ordinary rules of communication has important
implications for the ethics of humor. Let’s begin with the ways humor can
be morally objectionable. In this area, philosophers over the last several
decades have concentrated on racist and sexist jokes. Even if everything
they wrote were reasonable, such jokes are but a small part of humor.
Worse, most of what they have written has not been reasonable, because
it has treated joke-telling as if it were serious communication rather than
play. They have analyzed what’s wrong with racist and sexist joke-telling as
if it were bound by Grice’s rules: 2) do not say what you believe to be false;
and 3) do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence. The problem
is that jokes are not serious assertions, and they often work by playfully
breaking these two rules of serious conversation.
Jokes based on race and gender are typically based on negative stereo-
types, as members of certain groups say or do something showing stupidity,
laziness, promiscuity, or other shortcomings. Most philosophers have treated
these jokes as if they implied claims that the stereotypes are accurate repre-
sentations of the groups. Telling a “dumb blonde” joke, that is, implies the
claim that blonde women, or women in general, are stupid. Telling a joke
about a lazy black man implies the claim that black men, or black people
in general, are lazy. Such claims are sexist or racist, the implicit argument
goes, so telling these jokes is sexist or racist. Merrie Bergmann’s article
 AN ETHICS OF HUMOR 11
“How Many Feminists Does It Take to Make a Joke? Sexist Humor and
What’s Wrong with It” is an example of the position that sexist jokes
express sexist beliefs. “Sexist humor does not just incidentally incorporate
sexist beliefs,” she writes, “it depends upon those beliefs for the fun.”26
Similarly, in his article “Racist Acts and Racist Humor,” Michael Philips
holds that racist jokes express racist beliefs. He counts even the passé genre
of Polish jokes as racist because they express the belief that Polish people
are stupid.27 “Racist jokes are often funny,” Philips writes. “And part of this
has to do with their racism. Many Polish jokes, for example, may easily be
converted into moron jokes but are not at all funny when delivered as
such.”28
Fortunately, the naiveté of conflating stereotypes in jokes with stereotypes
in sexist and racist assertions has been counterbalanced by the nuanced
study of ethnic jokes by anthropologists like Christie Davies who show that
such jokes need not be racist. After studying hundreds of Polish jokes and
other “stupid” jokes around the world, Davies concluded that people tell
them not about some group they consider stupid or feel malice toward, but
about a familiar group who live at the margins of their culture.29 “Stupid”
jokes became popular early in the Industrial Revolution, according to
Davies, as people were anxious about keeping up with technical knowledge
and skills. In the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, Americans playfully
expressed their concerns about science education in the US in Polish jokes.
By midcentury, people of Polish descent had been thoroughly assimilated
into American society and were not thought of as stupid. “Poles” simply
provided a name tag for jokes about stupidity, much as dumb blonde jokes
do now.
A good example is the joke about the Polish astronaut announcing that
he will fly a rocket to the sun. When a reporter asks how he will cope with
the sun’s intense heat, he says, “Don’t worry, I’ll go at night.”
In the analyses of Philips and Bergmann, only people who believe that
Poles are stupid would enjoy this joke. But because joking is a play mode,
that is not the case. The first time I heard this joke-type was in Amsterdam,
where it was told about a Frisian astronaut. I didn’t know who the Frisians

26
  Merrie Bergmann, “How Many Feminists Does It Take to Make a Joke? Sexist Humor
and What’s Wrong with It,” Hypatia 1 (1986), 63–82.
27
 Michael Philips, “Racist Acts and Racist Humor,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 14
(1984): 75–96.
28
  Philips, “Racist Acts and Racist Humor,” 75.
29
  Christie Davies, Ethnic Humor around the World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1996).
12 JOHN MORREALL

are, and so did not believe them to be stupid, but I was amused. When I
later learned that Frisia is in the northeast of the Netherlands, I still found
the joke funny, but didn’t start believing that Frisians are stupid. What
made me laugh was the preposterous fantasy of an astronaut who didn’t
know the most basic features of the solar system. I was not believing this
fantasy, just entertaining it, and I certainly did not generalize the astro-
naut’s stupidity to all Frisians.
Dumb blonde jokes work in a similar way. No beliefs about blondes are
required, just the ability to entertain the idea of a person being extraordi-
narily stupid.
Why couldn’t the blonde dial 911?
She couldn’t find the eleven.

But if jokes based on stereotypes are a way of playing with those stereo-
types and not assertions that they are true, are there no reasonable moral
objections to such jokes? Are not some jokes sexist and racist? To answer
these questions, we have to consider the ethics of playing with stereotypes.
The joke-teller puts ideas into listeners’ heads to produce an enjoyable cog-
nitive shift, not to communicate beliefs. Nonetheless, having your listeners
entertain stereotypes for fun can cause harm in at least two ways.
One is that it can reduce your listeners’ ability to feel compassion for
stereotyped groups that are marginalized and oppressed, such as racial
minorities. Amusement is a practically and epistemically disengaged state of
pleasure in which I am not motivated to take action to correct problems.
If, then, I make a habit of telling and listening to jokes about marginalized,
oppressed groups, I can associate those groups with my own amusement in
a way that keeps me from taking their problems seriously. Audiences who
enjoyed the running gags on the Amos and Andy radio show in early radio,
and then on the television version in the 1950s, for example, could become
desensitized to the issues raised by the civil rights movement in the 1960s.
An extreme example of such possible desensitization was the cover of the
July 1974 National Lampoon magazine, the “Dessert Issue.” In 1972 during
a famine in Bangladesh, George Harrison had organized a “Concert for
Bangladesh” and had sold the record album to benefit the famine victims.
On the cover of that album was a starving child sitting on the ground
with a begging bowl. The cover of National Lampoon’s “Dessert Issue” had a
nearly identical picture—only of a chocolate sculpture of a starving child,
with a large chunk bitten out of the head. Here the humor was outright
cruel.
 AN ETHICS OF HUMOR 13
The second major danger in playing with stereotypes is that it puts prej-
udicial ideas into people’s heads without being evaluated. The standard
punchline in jokes based on race and gender associates an exaggerated degree
of a negative trait such as stupidity or laziness with a group of people. With
that exaggeration, no one would believe that the target group is actually that
stupid or lazy. But that exaggeration also converts morally objectionable
ideas into palatable ones, indeed enjoyable ones. Someone who said as a
serious assertion, “women are stupid” or “Black people are lazy” would
probably be challenged immediately. But if instead they tell jokes about
women doing something stupider than any real woman would ever do, and
Black people being more lazy than any Black person would ever be, then
their listeners may simply enjoy the incongruity in those exaggerations,
letting those stereotypes into their minds under their moral radar and asso-
ciating those stereotypes with the pleasure of amusement. That keeps those
stereotypes in circulation, which keeps sexist and racist ideas going.
While joke-telling is a form of play, then, it can still be harmful and so
morally objectionable. So, “I was only joking” is far from an all-purpose
defense. From these observations we can suggest a principle applicable to
humor and play generally:
Don’t play with something which you should take seriously.

Like play in general, humor is a luxury to be enjoyed when action is not

called for. In humans as in other animals, seriousness is the default mode
of consciousness because life is full of danger and suffering, and we often
have to act to avoid the danger and reduce the suffering. It is morally
objectionable, then, to laugh about someone’s problems when you should
be concerned about them, or to “laugh off” moral criticisms of our own
actions—drunk driving, say—instead of taking them to heart.

4.  THE POSITIVE ETHICS OF HUMOR

Having suggested a general principle for when humor is morally objection-

able, let me turn to comments about when humor is morally praiseworthy.
Only a few philosophers, among them Aristotle and Aquinas, have said
anything about this topic. As with the negative ethics of humor, the key
here is the emotional disengagement in humor. Not feeling emotions can
be harmful, as we have seen, but often it is beneficial. Emotions evolved
in mammals as ways of avoiding danger and seizing opportunities for such
things as eating and mating. And so in early humans, the fight-or-flight
emotions of fear and anger were beneficial most of the time in getting them
14 JOHN MORREALL

to escape or overcome predators and enemies. Today, however, we have

evolved far past early homo sapiens: fighting and fleeing are no longer the
standard way we deal with problems. Instead, we typically think about pos-
sible solutions and talk about them with each other. In such thinking and
discussion, the rush of epinephrine (adrenaline) and norepinephrine (nor-
adrenaline) in fear and anger; the increased muscle tension, blood pressure,
and heartbeat caused by those hormones; and the motivation to escape or
attack are usually harmful rather than helpful.
When was the last time that you felt stage fright before giving a talk and
that improved your performance? How often have you been arguing with
someone and the physiological changes of rage, along with the motivation
to attack, helped resolve the issue at hand? In these and many other situ-
ations, disengaging emotionally is often just what we need to think clearly
and succeed at what we are doing.
Humor is well-known for its ability to block negative emotions and help
us act rationally. Consider the fear and anxiety people often experience
before major surgery. In a seminar I led for a group of nurses, one of them
recalled the first surgery she attended. The patient had advanced cancer
and was about to have part of his penis removed. The nurse had carefully
arranged all the equipment, and, waiting for the surgeon, looked up at the
clock. “It won’t be long now,” she said nervously. “You got that right,” the
man said with a grin.
The benefits of humor in reducing anger are even more obvious. Several
police departments have trained their officers in using humor to deal with
family fights. One program in Troy, New York, involved sending two offi-
cers—one in regular uniform and the other in a Daffy Duck costume. In San
Francisco, police officer Adelle Roberts put her humor training to good use
as she drove up to a house where a family fight raged. As she approached
the front door, there was loud shouting as a television set crashed through
the window. She had to pound on the door to be heard. A voice bellowed,
“Who is it?” Roberts answered in a loud voice, “TV repair!” The couple
stopped fighting and came to the door. Their dispute was not over, of
course, but in pausing to laugh, they had started to resolve it. If instead of
“TV repair,” Roberts had shouted, “The Police. Come out with your hands
up,” the couple may have gotten angrier and turned their violence on her.
In fear, anger, and other emotions, my attention is focused narrowly on
here/now/me, and so I can act in a way that is immoral because it does
not respect the needs, desires, and rights of other people, or even of my
future self. In road rage, for example, I may endanger or even end another
driver’s life, or my own. When I view any situation with a sense of humor,
 AN ETHICS OF HUMOR 15
by contrast, I transcend the narrow here/now/me perspective to see things
more objectively. In the words of the old Candid Camera jingle, I see myself
“as other people do.”
As someone subject to road rage, I have worked out a technique for
staying calm on the highway. If someone passes me only to then go slower
than I am going, for instance, I say out loud this line from the late George
Carlin: “Did you ever notice on the highway that everyone going slower
than you is a moron and everyone going faster than you is a maniac?”
That is usually enough for me to block road rage and behave rationally
and morally.
As Robert C. Roberts has argued, the self-transcendence found in such
self-directed humor is “basic to the very concept of a moral virtue.”30 The
person who cannot rise above immediate self-concern is either infantile or
sociopathic, lacking the moral point of view. With almost any problem
where we begin to respond with here/now/me emotions, the virtuous thing
to do will be to overcome them to think and act rationally.
As humor becomes part of our worldview, we are more accepting of
others’ shortcomings and more aware of our own. That helps us be more
patient, gracious, and humble. Indeed, as Erasmus argued in his classic In
Praise of Folly, without humor it is hard to see how we could all get along.31
Besides moral virtues, psychologists have shown that a good sense of
humor is correlated with intellectual virtues such as open-mindedness, tol-
erance for diversity, resilience, critical thinking, and creative thinking.32 In
seeking out incongruity and playing with thoughts and conversational rules,
we increase our tolerance for and taste for novelty and diversity. In the
work of Alice Isen and Avner Ziv, for example, subjects who watched a
funny video before taking a test of creative problem-solving came up with
more solutions, and more diverse solutions, than control groups. Subjects
who were asked to produce humor—as by thinking up captions for cartoon
drawings—before doing the creativity test did even better than those who
had simply experienced humor.33

30
  Robert C. Roberts, “Humor and the Virtues,” Inquiry 31 (1988): 127.
31
 Desiderius Erasmus, In Praise of Folly, trans. Hoyt Hopewell Hudson (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1941).
32
 See Rod Martin, The Psychology of Humor: An Integrative Approach (Burlington, MA:
Elsevier, 2007), chaps. 4, 9.
33
 Alice Isen, “Some Perspectives on Positive Feelings and Emotions: Positive Affect
Facilitates Thinking and Problem Solving,” in Feelings and Emotions: The Amsterdam Symposium,
ed. Anthony Manstead, et al. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 263–81; Avner
Ziv, “Using Humor to Develop Creative Thinking,” Journal of Children in Contemporary Society
20 (1988): 99–116.
16 JOHN MORREALL

For society in general, as Erasmus said, humor seems indispensable. Not

does it serve as social lubricant, but it binds us to one another. In the words
of Brian Boyd,
Laughter, by signaling our pleasure in cognitive play, invites and encourages us to
prepare playful surprises for one another. Playing socially with our expectations
reinforces our sense of solidarity, our recognition of the huge body of expectations
we share; it trains us to cope with and even seek out the unexpected that sur-
rounds and can extend these expectations.34

34
 Brian Boyd, “Laughter and Literature: A Play Theory of Humor,” Philosophy and
Literature 28 (2004): 16.