Quantum Thermian dynamics

 

The question of whether a joke is funny or offensive continues to be topical. So let’s get personal, as people engaging in this topic seem to enjoy.

But first, I want to give an example of such a joke:

She: Do you want to come over tonight?

Stalin: I can’t. I’m sending people to the gulag.

She: But my parents are out.

Stalin: I know.

Now we all know what we’re talking about. Funny or offensive?

My previous discussion mentioned the unexpected as a main feature of humour. It is the subversion of expectations that makes this joke funny to some people. I am one such person.

However, jokes like this infuriate plenty of other people. They have a sense of humour failure (from my perspective) and say that it is offensive. Enjoying such jokes is racist, sexist, bigoted and so on, depending on the joke.

For enjoying the above joke, I must be… what, communist? Just a fan of mass murder? Maybe this joke was a bad example after all. Owen Jones denounced Jimmy Carr’s audience, suggesting that they had deep-seated prejudice:

‘Why did so many express public amusement at the enslavement, torture and gassing of a group of people? Because in the UK, Gypsies, Roma and Travellers are a minority that [it] is acceptable, permissible and indeed fashionable to stigmatise and hate’.

Mr Jones, and thousands of others, have not understood that the laughter comes not from hatred: from malice towards the subject matter, but from the joke: the way the comedian has created an unexpected, absurd conclusion to discussion of a subject (and all the other things I listed).

Thousands of other people, including myself and Jimmy Carr’s audience, know ourselves not to be extreme bigots. We seem to be unable to persuade the other segment of the population, but just for the moment assume, with me, that most of us are not. We might have some unconscious bias; some small leanings towards our in-group; but we’re not outright bigots enough to laugh with the sort of malicious glee that Owen Jones believes exists.

 

He believes that we have some sort of circuit missing in our brains: some version of psychopathy that makes us inferior beings, unable to comprehend the awfulness that enlightened men such as him see in us.

I, in turn, and many who become radicalised to the right wing by attitudes like his, struggle to see how he can not comprehend the humour in the joke. It appears to me as though he has some sort of humour circuit missing.

 

Which of us has the glaring gap in our minds? It’s a question that genuinely haunted me when these sorts of outrage-fests first started occurring. I try to be a good person; I believe that I have a coherent and good set of principles; it appears to me that I have a better grip of morality than most. If I have a blind spot, I would like to find out more about it: have it explained by someone who can see it.

At the same time, I’m not going to accept their arbitrary assertion. It needs to make sense; to be coherent, and to refer back to things that I know exist. A new rule, entirely separate from any other part of social interaction, rather than an extension of a principle I already follow or an application of insight I can grasp, is more like God than reason, and I don’t have the capacity for blind faith. You need my intellectual assent. It must be explained, not dictated or enforced by social pressure.

 

Aside: I spent half my lifetime learning no social cues at all. All the normal indicators of how someone was feeling meant nothing to me. I suspect that I was hardly well-primed to follow and learn them in the first place, but the bullies ensured that I learned nothing. Expressions of interest? These were means to get me to disclose information I could be bullied for. Signs of friendship? Attempts at manipulation. If there is a standard way of growing friendships and trust, I still don’t know it. Perhaps this background has left me with some other social blind spot such as the one under discussion? To the contrary, I think it has made me acutely sensitive to social boundaries: I needed to have principled rules about what people should be allowed to get away with, and what was definitely malicious. But people are weird. Perhaps my boundaries are vastly different.

I have had to deal with uncertainty all my life: does someone mean it? Are they merely following some strange social protocol or being outright deceptive? What is a friendly welcome and what is the welcome of a friend? I juggle superimposed possible states of reality in every relationship I have ever had with another person. Some other people, it seems, have the privilege of certainty; their beliefs and relationships have always turned out to be good. And so they assume that their understanding of others is always right; they lack the privilege-check that is built into people like me. Often, in relationships, this privilege is self-fulfilling, just as other forms of confidence are. And here the confidence that other people are bigots might just also be self-fulfilling.

 

So who has the blind spot? I can cogently argue why these jokes are jokes; how in my mind, and the culture I am familiar with, they are harmless and amusing. I think it takes some imagination to follow the comedian’s mirage; to play along with him pretending to be nasty, to hold this alternative worldview in mind and realise that he hadn’t discarded that character yet. I think that people who don’t get the joke are like the Thermians from Galaxy Quest (amongst many examples in fiction of people who do not understand fiction). They are naïve and clueless, oblivious to a whole world of imagination that enriches the world of those who play in it. They are unable to cope with the delicate balance of uncertainties and expectations that characterises joyful use of language; instead they insist on collapsing these gleaming mirages into the ashen wasteland of pure literality, with even nuance forbidden.

Aside: The Thermians are a literary device. By ripping away people’s facades they also expose lies and manipulation, and their naivete is lovable and charming. The important point here is that where they jump to conclusions their conclusions are wrong, and almost calamitous. The Thermians, and their fictional parallels, are lovable when they are not in control or getting angry. Like children, they can be well-meaning, charming and principled, but in need of education. Owen Jones is probably not a bad man. This does not make him right.

Another aside: Many years ago, an ex-girlfriend told me she never liked me anyway. I cut off ties with this person who apparently had never been my friend, and a couple of weeks later some friends explained to me that she hadn’t meant it: they thought the sentence actually meant the precise opposite. What mattered was not the words, but the emotional content of the message. Some sort of ‘I want to hurt you’ message, which seems almost worse, to my mind. So the rest of the world can insist in some contexts that the words do not matter; it is the methylation of the verbal DNA that matters; other information that is the real message. How can some people not see this applies to a comedy performance? It is a time when the wordplay matters; a time to set aside meaningfulness.

We celebrate clever diplomacy, such as Sir Humphrey’s in Yes, Minister, where words are tools and the message is frequently entirely different from the overt meaning. We enjoy spy films, in which coded exchanges tell the participants something entirely different from what an eavesdropper would hear. We enjoy acting and singing, in which performers play roles to tell a story or entertain.

Yet some people cannot understand that jokes fall in the same category. The words are not the point. They are eavesdroppers on the code of the comic performance.

 

 

That’s how things seem to me. I know that my summary might seem condescending and rude. The Owen Jones brigade obviously thinks of me and my kind as horrific bigots, which is frankly far more offensive than a little condescension.

How can we resolve this impasse?

To start with, I hope that by explaining my utter bemusement at their outlandish interpretation of my amusement I have shown that there are alternatives to their one conclusion (that I am a bigot). Since they can’t see into my mind and know, as I do, that I am not, I can’t expect them to take my word for it, but I have shown that they have no right to assume that I am a bigot: they have overlooked at least one other possibility.

Secondly, I hope that they can show a bit of the sensitivity, empathy and respect for other cultures that most people regard as a good thing. Many people find these jokes funny without a hint of bigotry. They understand the jokes very differently. Why should the bigotry-brigade control our harmless enjoyment based on their own personal fears and attitudes? That is deeply illiberal. I wonder if they protest too much... Are they using this topic purely to show adherence to an in-group doctrine, rather than displaying the freedom of thought that should characterise a fully-fledged human? Are they just bigoted against my group of joke-lovers, kicking down on us to make themselves feel good?

If I, and many others, find funny jokes merely funny; but some people find them funny and also have their bigotry reinforced; then there is a discussion to be had about whether the humour that I enjoy should be restricted in order not to encourage bigotry. But if these jokes also undermine some people’s bigotry (the people who see their positions exposed as absurd and being laughed at), should we build society only for the humourless? If ‘my’ group of people finds these jokes funny and finds that they undermine bigotry in those of us who have some; but the bigotry-brigade finds the jokes detestable and liable to create bigotry in those of them who are susceptible, for whom should society be built? Should my [sub]culture be censored out of existence because of the sensitivity of a different one?

 

These are all big ‘ifs’. Genuine sociological study might confirm if any of them are true. Rational debate could lead us to thoughtful answers. We have neither.

Labelling great masses of the population as deeply evil for something they know to be harmless is a way to radicalise them against you and all the worthy policies you support. More and more YouTube is desperate to show me ‘feminist gets burned’, ‘Nigel Farage spouting rubbish’, ‘the problems with woke’ and similar videos. I have never watched one, but my passing interest in computer games, action film clips and film reviews is enough to have these demonic hands grasping at me.

I worry not about Jimmy Carr’s jokes radicalising people, but the harsh, thoughtless, humourless witch-hunts that drive young men into the willing arms of the extremists who prey on the resentment the witch-hunts cause.

 

So next time you want to denounce someone, pause for a moment. Maybe it’s better to err on the side of caution. Assume that you have had a sense of humour failure, and move on. Have faith in me, rather than demanding that I abandon my own world to have faith in yours

This outrage is just a meta-joke? You're kidding, right?

 

This time I am writing about a storm in a teacup. Jimmy Carr, a famous comedian, made a joke that has been shared more widely and has caused considerable outrage. The offending line which has been taken out of his show was about the deaths of some lesser-known victims of the holocaust being one of its upsides.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-60261876

Funnily enough, I listened to a thoughtful interview of Frankie Boyle by Louis Theroux yesterday, also on the BBC, which would have explained to this journalist what the other side of this one-sided report should be.

Lots of people struggle to pin down what makes something funny, and it’s clear that it varies between people. One key element is the punchline (/payoff) being unexpected. There must be a surprise: the double meaning of a pun, for example.

In Mr Carr’s routine, he probably spent some time building up a persona; taking the opposite point of view from usual as he mentioned various subjects, startling the audience as they failed to anticipate the approach a less reasonable person would have to each subject… and, happily, making them feel better about themselves for not being that bad!

This conceit is based on the idea of ‘pretending’, and the ludicrosity is of the opinions is partly what makes them funny: they are so wacky as to be funny. Many comedians have used comic extremes to make people laugh; Monty Python, for example, had many sketches which were just plain silly without any wordplay. The phrase ‘comic extremes’ exists for a reason: this is not a novel type of humour.

Similarly, pretending to be something you are not is a well-known concept. We have whole jobs, such as ‘actor’, ‘actress’ and ‘prime minister’ in which this is a primary skill.

So Carr has hardly done something utterly unknown by making extreme statements about important issues. We have a prime minister who says things as wacky every single day. Recently he claimed not to know whether he had been at his own birthday party.

The key to the joke is that the statement has to be ludicrous. Wackiness is not wacky if it’s just unpleasant. For example, if I were to say that we shouldn’t let darkies into the country to an audience that didn’t know me, it wouldn’t be funny: this is, shockingly enough, an opinion that is widespread in the country. In 40 years it will be a joke: a punchline a comedian uses while pretending to be a bigot. In some social circles it could be a joke right now, except that so many people lose their sense of humour, turning into solemn, earnest American-style killjoys.

A core part of British culture has been the willingness to indulge in humour in any context; that a good joke is always worthwhile. This has been documented many times, such as by Kate Fox in Watching the English. It is fundamentally un-British to suffer a sense of humour failure: this is a personal failing. The British had, until recently, the ability to enjoy jokes independently of the seriousness of the subject. Some, such as Jimmy Carr’s audience, are still a little British. Others, such as the online trouble-makers who posted short extracts of his performance online, have clearly lost touch with my culture.

A wacky joke is often, in fact, a little dig at people with similar, if lesser, beliefs. Jimmy Carr does not need to learn about the fate of Roma people, as advocated by the Auschwitz Memorial, one of many stupid commentators that should be sent to a concentration camp for their criminally obtuse statements about this comedy performance. If he didn’t know about their fate, he couldn’t have mentioned it in his joke!

There is a method of making a point sometimes called the ‘argumentum ad absurdum’, which involves taking a principle and applying it a different context to produce an absurd result. This thereby demonstrates that the principle is flawed. A great many people utterly fail to understand this line of argument; often I find that people both assume that you agree with their principle and that your position involves the wacky outcome, when in fact the whole point is to demonstrate that their position is the wacky one.

Comedians who make extreme statements are often subtly, or not-so-subtly, indulging in this form of argument. A sort of ‘preaching to the choir’ that makes the audience happy with themselves for not being that silly, just as politicians will [mis]characterise their opponents in speeches to the party faithful, showing how the enemy believes silly things. When Carr makes a statement such as ‘the holocaust had an upside because it got rid of gypsies’, it is a sharp dig at people who are anti-gypsy, which is still a well-known attitude (as the various campaign groups whose quotations make up most of the BBC ‘journalism’ are well aware). He is implicitly noting that disliking a group of people has gone to crazy places in the past. If we tolerate that, what next?

This is why comedians such as Jimmy Carr and Frankie Boyle often mention subjects such as paedophilia, racism and, as here, the holocaust. These are established evils: it should be where they are on safest ground, as supporting such things is genuinely ludicrous in today’s society, although of course there will always be crazies in any free-thinking society.

Should these subjects be off-limits for jokes? Are they so sensitive that mentioning them, even as implicitly wacky, or an argumentum ad absurdum, is unacceptable? For some people, perhaps, they don’t feel wacky. But someone operating from the approach that this opinion is ludicrous should surely be welcome support for campaigners trying to counter such opinions? If we return to Carr’s audience, they clearly accepted his humour. So he must have warmed up, or judged, his crowd correctly, as you would expect from a skilled performer. Focussing on him might make it easy to indulge in outrage, but he is merely the comedian making the audience laugh. It is the audience of hundreds, or more, against whom more of the outrage should be focussed. But when you realise that that many people from the general population found it reasonable, in context, it’s hard to maintain that self-righteous glow of misunderstanding. Taking an aspect of a performance out of context is guaranteed to give you odd conclusions.

For example, one of the best songs of all time has the phrase ‘I just killed a man’, and yet people of taste the world over take great pleasure in Bohemian Rhapsody. Is it right of them to delight in murder? Charlie Chaplin, in the film ‘The Great Dictator’ dressed up as Adolf Hitler. One picture must indicate that he was a fascist idolising his hero. And yet the message his film sends is firmly anti-fascist: it is a send-up.

Next, since I do not know Jimmy Carr, I might be wrong in all these arguments. It might be that he is not a clever comedian (despite his evident success in that profession). Maybe he is, in fact, a vile bigot. It doesn’t matter that I cannot prove that he is whiter than white. His current detractors cannot prove that he wants the population to be whiter than white. I think that my arguments are stronger; everything points firmly towards him being a comedian and not a bigot. But public condemnation and lynch-mobbery should operate not on the possibility, but the overwhelming probability that he is an awful person. Or perhaps with even more certainty than that. We should give people enough rope to hang themselves: give them the benefit of the doubt. Too often, all across society, we condemn people for one word or phrase and yet forgive others for ruining lives and prosperity.

There is a bit of Bayesian probability involved here. Where you have lots of evidence that someone is a bigot, an apparently bigoted statement reinforces that conclusion. Where you do not, such an outlandish conclusion needs equally strong evidence. The assumption nowadays seems to be that if someone is capable of twisting your statements into a nasty conclusion then it is your fault and the nastiness in their imagination must have you as its source. I confidently suggest that its source is much closer to its home.

Finally, how many truly bigoted statements would truly be a worthy rival for the write off to fraud of £5bn of public money because of the government’s incompetence? Is a story like this worth so much twitter and news time?

 In summary then:

1.       Extreme jokes rely on the knowledge that the opinions are absurd to be funny. They cannot be both jokes and genuine beliefs.

2.       Extreme jokes and statements frequently emphasise the absurdity of an opinion, rather than genuinely advocating it.

3.       People for whom these things are not absurd are welcome to avoid these comedy nights, or develop enough social awareness to know when everyone else thinks they are absurd.

4.       Someone malicious can usually find a way of taking a piece of anything out of context and making it seem bad. We should be more interested in the trouble-stirrers who created this news story.

5.       Such fury cannot be merited by one small statement. The chance of the hearer having misunderstood is always too great. A little more humility is appropriate.

6.       There are far more important things to worry about. Anyone with a need to indulge in some self-righteous fury need not go unsatisfied.

 

I I leave you with the thought that crossing the road just to get to the other side is an outrage. There is a real risk of danger to traffic; at the very least a possibility that travellers will be delayed because of the chicken's pointless whim. This creature has risked its own life for no good purpose and we should not celebrate such an action. It is not funny.