We’ve got excellent reasons to engage in the wisecracking life, but we may also have serious moral qualms about doing so. My title points to a kind of pun: Wisecracks may both bridge cracks and crack bridges, bond people and divide them. Which one occurs depends crucially on what role, if any, empathy plays in the exchange.
David Shoemaker is a much-published philosopher and a Professor at the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University, and in our modern reality of social media piling-on and cancel culture, he was interested in investigating what role humour (specifically wisecracks) plays in human interaction and whether there is something objectively valuable about this kind of “put down” humour that could speak back to the “prigs” with their efforts to silence others with a blanket “There’s nothing funny about ______” attitude. Wisecracks is the result of that investigation, and as Shoemaker is a fan of wisecracking humour himself, he entertainingly balances scholarship with snark and assembles what I found to be a compelling argument in favour of this type of joking around. This is exactly the sort of thing I like to read about, and it was well done. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Wisecracks are ways of interacting with other people, but they are distinctive because what makes wisecracks aesthetically good — amusing — is often the very same thing that can make them morally bad. They tweak or ignore some of the norms that sustain our interpersonal lives, such as our expectations of trust and honesty, our desires for respect and equal worth, our concern to be viewed as the particular people we are (rather than as members of some group). These features make them very different, and far more interesting, than jokes.
As a philosopher, Shoemaker begins by defining terms: the difference between jokes and wisecracks, the surprisingly long list of elements (his “kitchen sink theory”) that can make a statement humorous, and the admittedly tautologically cute definition of amusing as that which a “properly developed, refined, and unobstructed human sense of humor would respond to with amusement” (each element of which is further explored). I found it interesting that Shoemaker found no philosophical scholarship on wisecracking in particular (although there has been research on written “jokes”, which Shoemaker contrarily argues have zero moral element; a position which piqued me), but as someone whose own family regularly roasts one another at the dinner table, I can certainly agree that this kind of humour — and especially wisecracks based on inside information and long memories — serves to raise the mood and reinforce bonds (as they say on Comedy Central: we only roast the ones we love). Along the way, Shoemaker addresses taboo topics (racism, sexism, disabilities, sexual assault), those without “properly developed” senses of humour (such as folks with autism or psychopaths), those with “obstructed” senses of humour (buffoons — they who mistakenly, and annoyingly, see humour in everything — and prigs, who refuse to look for humour behind a wisecrack based on misguided principles). And I found all of this to be fascinating and compelling.
What crucially matters in responding correctly to both the funniness and the moral status of a wisecrack are the wisecrackers intentions and motives, which amount to what the wisecracker means by it and what his or her attitudes are toward others affected or targeted by the wisecrack.
Ultimately, intentions are everything; the love behind the roast. There’s a passage in which Shoemaker compares a picture of Demi Lovato getting “slimed” at the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards and Stephen King’s Carrie having the bucket of pigs’ blood dumped on her head at Prom: a pan to the audience shows people laughing hysterically, but if you had to explain the difference in the two similar-looking scenes to a visitor from another planet (my own analogy), you’d harken to the pranksters’ intentions and desired effects and easily be able to explain that one was meant in fun and the other in cruelty. And when it comes to wisecracks, whether at the dinner table or on social media, the “morality” of any quip ought to be judged in these terms as well. Very interesting and timely stuff, well argued.
I didn't necessarily choose this book entirely by chance: The week before (the evening of Friday, March 29th), I went to a comedy evening with Ken and Lolo, Dan and Rudy, Beth, Dave, and my lovely neurodivergent daughter, Mallory. A note on Mal: At 25 and with a history of devastating heartbreaks, Mal has adopted a kind of scruffy, thrift-store-don't-care, no makeup, androgynous, self-cut-mullet, tattoos-and-piercings look that makes her happy, looks slightly like self-harm (as in, "I don't like myself enough to present myself better") to me, and definitely sets her apart as an antisocietal oddball to those who don't know her. Her diagnosis as "on the spectrum" makes a lot of sense to Mallory (it at least may explain why she has such trouble making a solid romantic attachment when she has such a loving heart), but I want to stress that she has a functioning sense of humour, joins happily in family roasting, and has often stated the she is the "funny one" in her friend group. On to the comedy night:
It was a small venue charity event and Dave and I had bought a table, which radiated out at an angle from the stage, with Mallory sitting at the far end facing the stage. (And I also want to acknowledge that I have been to many comedy nights and understand that everyone in the audience is a potential target for the comedians; there were three young guys sitting in chairs stageside, and they were roasted - brutally and hilariously - by each of the comedians.) The first comedian was pretty funny (Mallory was in a good mood, drinking beer and wisecracking with me and her dad), and we were all "unobstructed" in our senses of humour as the second comedian made his hitch-gaited way to the stage: a young guy with profound physical effects of Cerebral Palsy. He made a couple of self-deprecating, and very funny, remarks, and then looked at Mallory, stopped himself mid-sentence, and said, "Oh my God, would you look at this guy. You look twelve with the tats of a twenty-four-year-old." For whatever reason, Mallory replied, "Yeah, and I've got a rattail, too." The comedian's jaw dropped open and he said, "A rattail? You see, this is why I love doing standup. Every night I see someone who makes me feel better about my own life." Huge laughs from the audience. I chanced a look over to Mallory and she was shrugging as though to shake off a weak barb, but a pendulum had swung; she had less fun for the rest of the evening, and that affected my own enjoyment. Naturally, as a mother, I always feel protective of my kids, but this "wisecrack" really bothered me, and it wasn't until I thought about it later that I realised why: I didn't think that this was off-the-cuff; I had the sense that this comedian begins every set looking for some oddball in the audience to make this quip about, and as I thought about they who are visably oddballish in public - those others who might not like themselves enough to attempt conformity to societal beauty standards, the neurodivergent and otherwise - I came to the surprising conclusion that even the disabled are capable of "punching down" and there's just something wrong about scanning the audience for the person who makes you "feel better" about your own life. (And I also want to add: When I recounted this story to Mallory's sister, Kennedy laughed, hard, and said, "I know Mal probably didn't like it, but that's an objectively funny joke." Objectively was Kennedy's word, and that's why a philosophical examination of the morality of wisecracks felt like such a timely read.)
I appreciated that Shoemaker makes a distinction between "wisecracks" and prewritten"jokes", because it was that distinction (and my conclusion that this was a regular part of the comedian's routine) that so rankled me: the comic wasn't winkingly building a rapport with Mallory in particular (as was obviously felt when the comedians roasted the young guys in the front row); he was singling Mal out as an outsider to the in-group audience, as with laughing at oddball Carrie. dripping with pigs' blood. And ultimately, Shoemaker's conclusion shored me up: there was no love or empathy behind the quip, and I feel for every mother's oddball who must serve as the butt of any comedian's routine. (And I will allow that perhaps sometimes he lures some straight white able-bodied man into saying something stupid and he can use his line without punching down at all.)
A final note on the comedy night: Despite the fact that Dave and Dan were literally banging their beer cans on the table in hilarity (Ken felt weak and went to the car after the first comedian), the rest of us, the women at the table, found the whole thing to be a bit of a sausagefest. The comic with Cerebral Palsy did have a lot of funny material on living with his condition (and Shoemaker approves of the morality of such "crip humour"; disabled comedians can certainly point out "that their particular 'flaw' is just one among many mockable flaws that humans can have"), but some of us didn't appreciate jokes about being able to use CP's imperfect motor control as an "excuse" for purposefully ejaculating on a woman's face, or his suggestion for putting a wig on the stump of a one-legged woman for the "best threesome ever; it's the best because you only need to talk to one chick in the morning". If there had been even one female comedian to balance out the testosterone, I would have had more fun. At least it was all for charity.
