Making Fun of Your Friends Is Good for Them (And You)

Professional comedy, which most of us consume in modest doses, is not how humor infuses our day-to-day lives. Nor are proper jokes, with feed lines and punch lines, the primary vehicle for laughter. Instead, top billing goes to the wisecracks we share with family and friends—those spontaneously funny, though often mocking, remarks that leaven our daily chatter. When my English-professor wife is forced to spend her morning drafting an email to colleagues instead of working on an essay for a journal, I console her, dryly, that she can always submit her email to the Journal of Administrative Memos. Our queer teen jokes with us about the “BLT” community—an affectionate riff on the ever-growing acronym. And when I’m forced to admit my day job as a philosopher who writes about knowing how to live, I try to puncture the pretension with a postscript: “It’s important to work on the things you’re not good at.” Like I said: not proper jokes, but they were funny at the time.

David Shoemaker’s new book, Wisecracks, is not about comedians, or jokes. Instead, he aims to illuminate the ethics of “banter, teasing, mockery, prankery, taking the piss, leg-pulling, joshing, and quippery.” Shoemaker’s claim is bold: that morally questionable humor is not just ethically okay but positively good.

A few high-profile cases have shown the extreme side of such humor, among them Dave Chappelle on trans people and Jimmy Carr on Roma and the Holocaust. But Shoemaker turns attention away from public controversy to ordinary life, lowering the rhetorical temperature. Many of us make fun of family and friends, their flaws and foibles, in ways that involve mockery or stereotyping—wisecracks we wouldn’t venture in public. Context matters, which makes it hard to offer examples, because the context that makes a wisecrack fine between close friends is very different from the context of an article in The Atlantic. I trust that, like me, you know firsthand the kinds of conversations Shoemaker has in mind. In giving them their due, he sheds new light on the ethics of these everyday interactions.

Shoemaker spends a chapter each on deception, mockery, and stereotyping, arguing that there are moral reasons against all three but that those reasons are often outweighed by the arguments in favor.

“Probably the most familiar type [of put-on] involves getting someone who cares about you to believe that you’ve failed at something when you’ve actually succeeded,” Shoemaker writes—as when I return glumly from my third driving test only to reveal, to laughing relief, that I’ve finally passed. According to Shoemaker, “Pranks and put-ons … require real deception, and that deception is of an immoral sort”—a characterization that strikes me as being a little strong. Whatever trickery is involved when I tell you that the word gullible has been taken out of the dictionary, I doubt it warrants the “blaming anger” Shoemaker explores. Nor is it obvious that friendly mockery causes “embarrassment or humiliation”—reactions it may instead defuse. But as it gets more edgy, wisecracking does mean moral risk, leaving open the potential that people may be genuinely deceived, or hurt, or disrespected.

We need good reason to take such risks, because it’s not generally permissible to expose someone to lies or harm merely for one’s own pleasure. Struggling to see much upside for the victims of pranks in being pranked, Shoemaker comes down pretty hard: “Interpersonal pranks are the lowest form of humor not because they require deception (leg-pulling does that too), but because they often aim to cause intrinsically harmful psychological states.” One of his more extreme examples is the bucket of pig’s blood dumped on the head of the eponymous antihero in Stephen King’s Carrie.

But many wisecracks fare better—including those that mock or stereotype. As Shoemaker contends, wisecracking can at times be a source of profound solidarity. When friends make fun of us for what would otherwise be embarrassing mistakes, failures, or foibles, they destigmatize them. When we mock a stereotype that others use for harm, we forge a connection that turns prejudice into subversive pleasure. Shoemaker’s most challenging prescription is a plea for us to joke with close friends about their disabilities, even if the disabilities are not ones we share. To refuse to do so is not just to signal that the disability is too harmful or too shameful for laughter, but to exclude someone from the community of humor: “It’s to discriminate against them in a crucial arena of interpersonal life solely in virtue of some arbitrary impairment or deviation from a physical or psychological ‘norm’ … It’s to deprive them of opportunities for engagement and solidarity and bonding that remain open to others. And that’s immoral.”

This doesn’t mean it’s not a delicate enterprise, or that we can’t go wrong—but there’s a moral argument for mockery, in context. To return to professional comedy, which we initially set aside: I think of Jimmy Carr, performing at a cancer-hospice gig with other comics, noting with discomfort that his peers had been afraid to joke about death. Hastening to the mic for the last spot of the evening, Carr opened with “C’mon, we haven’t got much time … well, I have” and followed up by asking “Is anyone here from last year?” I believe him when he says that the tension in the room dissolved, for a moment, in laughter. The moral risk paid off.

Humor offers more than just solidarity. It helps us cope with “the vicissitudes, difficulties, and absurdities of life” by changing our emotional relationship with them, Shoemaker writes. This is perhaps its deepest value and the one that I most cherish. It’s also the most mysterious.

Shoemaker connects the consoling power of humor with a conception of absurdity proposed by the philosopher Thomas Nagel. Immersed in life, we believe that our work, our interests, our politics, and the people we care about really matter. But, according to Nagel, when we step back and reflect from a cosmic perspective, we find our knowledge of their value fragile or unfounded. We cannot prove they matter at all; life seems absurd. “Nagel thinks this absurdity isn’t some great tragedy,” Shoemaker writes, seemingly deadpan, “to be addressed only by suicide or Buddhism.” Instead, the recognition that (maybe) nothing matters comes as comic relief: “From the point of view of the universe, none of our stakes could be lower, which is what makes humans at the same time so vicious and yet so hilarious.”

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There’s something in this thought, but it feels like a rim shot to me. The joke does not quite land. What humor helps us confront, I think, is not the insignificance of our existence but the problem of human suffering. Shoemaker quotes Mark Twain: “The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.” He goes on to describe how first responders use humor to cope with trauma: “They distract and detach.” To join them, he writes, “we may need to take off our ‘emotional empathy lenses,’ and put on our ‘psychopath lenses’”—laughing at pain with “what Henri Bergson called ‘the momentary anaesthesia of the heart.’”

Such disengagement may be functional at times, but I don’t think it’s the only way that humor helps us cope with hardship. It doesn’t fit all of Shoemaker’s own examples. At one point, he writes about comedy revues performed by and for rape survivors: “As one person in the audience described the show, ‘I found it 100 per cent more funny than being raped.’” The point is surely not diversion or emotional numbing. It’s solidarity—and maybe something more.

When I think about the value of dark humor, I don’t think of distraction or detachment, or the possibility that nothing really matters, but of the alchemy by which the worst things we go through can be transmuted into laughter and therefore, momentarily, overcome. How can we take pleasure in what is terrible without cruelty or illusion, without pretending that it wasn’t so bad after all or that everything works out for the best? Intellectually, this puzzle may be insoluble. Emotionally, we seem to solve it, sometimes, when we joke about the unacceptable, turning the lead of suffering into the gold, or the fool’s gold, of humor.