Dangerous Jokes: How Racism and Sexism Weaponize Humor

Claire Horisk’s Dangerous Jokes: How Racism and Sexism Weaponize Humor takes an ambitious approach to finding a solution to an all-too-familiar problem: what to say to the person at the party who, after making a sexist, racist, or otherwise phobic quip, employs the seemingly impenetrable defense of “It was just a joke.” Weapons from the arsenal such as “Well, it wasn’t funny” or “That’s offensive” are rarely satisfying or corrective. In fact, such ripostes leave the challenger vulnerable to the splendid counterattack “Why not?”—a signal that the challenger’s and joker’s ideological differences are irreconcilable. Further remarks will fall on deaf ears. So, the joker reigns victorious, unmussed by the skirmish, and the challenger, now a “killjoy” or “prude,” slinks away with newfound aversion to house parties.Dangerous Jokes draws on linguistics, social psychology, legal studies, and the philosophy of language in an effort to show why some derogatory jokes are not funny. For Horisk, “derogatory jokes” represent a broad category of remarks with humorous intent that discredit or devalue someone’s way of being. Horisk is concerned in particular with “belittling jokes,” or derogatory jokes that she defines as rejoinders or scripted quips that cause harm by diminishing a person’s status in their social milieu. In fact, she argues that belittling jokes cause more harm than avowedly racist, sexist, or other phobic statements. For Horisk, such humor disguises harmful beliefs, permitting them to persist in office, classroom, or home settings where they may have been otherwise stamped out if expressed plainly.Horisk dedicates the first two-thirds of the book to identifying the exact modes of harm caused by certain varieties of jokes. After she introduces examples of harmful jokes in chapter 1, she goes on in chapters 2, 3, and 4 to explore what she dubs the “popular wisdom” of joking culture. She introduces the terms “harmless fun,” “wrong joker,” and “wrong audience” to identify typical attitudes toward derogatory jokes, arguing that conventional wisdom is that jokes are harmless except when the jokers are not members of the group they disparage or when members of the group belittled by the joke are not in the audience. In chapters 5 through 7, Horisk outlines what she thinks is “the best explanation” of how telling derogatory jokes causes harm, though she concedes her account is “not conclusive” (59). She imports the notion of generalized implicature from pragmatics and dual-process theories of cognition to debunk the ideas of harmless fun, wrong jokers, and wrong audiences. In the book’s final third, Horisk turns her attention to the audience. Chapters 8 through 11 explain that listening to (as opposed to merely hearing) derogatory jokes creates an ethical responsibility to address their harms and that to fail to do so is to accept complicity in causing them. Chapter 12 and the postscript offer practical advice on how audiences might attempt to challenge belittling jokes.Dangerous Jokes strives to think through the ways derogatory jokes are dangerous and to delineate the limits of that danger. The trouble with belittling jokes, Horisk explains, is that the remark itself may not explicitly express a harmful idea in the way that a direct statement would. Horisk argues instead that the language “conveys” meaning through generalized implicature (63). Horisk points out that, in conversation, listeners take what people say to be “true enough” in order to make sense of the rest of what they’re saying. Doing so introduces premises into shared conversational spaces. When they tell belittling jokes, jokers imply that harmful attitudes are reasonable enough as first premises, thereby insinuating harm into the common space. Of course, participants may reject such ideas, but Horisk points to social psychological evidence indicating that belittling jokes told to people who already hold the relevant biases tend to validate those people and encourage them to act on those biases. This insight is relevant in everyday spaces, as the initial telling of a racist or sexist joke may bring other bad jokers out of the woodwork and create a hostile environment that causes pain and social disadvantage.This modest account of joking’s possible harm is explanatory. However, Horisk neglects at times to justify or give good reasons for her claims. For example, the terminology of “conveyance” suggests that racist and sexist ideas are transplanted from jokers into those who hear such jokes (regardless of the joker’s or listener’s moral status), but Horisk does not supply evidence for this proposition. Similarly, while she is right that telling a joke about oneself or a social group to which one belongs can exacerbate prejudicial harms, it does not follow that jokers inevitably cause harm or couldn’t convey jokes in more just ways.Horisk’s refusal to quote offensive jokes doesn’t help her case. Given that she quotes J. L. Austin extensively in the penultimate chapter, it’s surprising that she neither addresses the circumstantial specifics of speech acts (e.g., the speakers, the listeners, the specific words uttered) nor speaks to their possible conventional and nonconventional effects. By discussing jokes without examining each as “a total speech act in a total speech situation,” Horisk renders them nearly transcendent moral objects. Ultimately, situatedness matters. For instance, the workplace racist joke Horisk does cite in chapter 1 is, we learn in chapter 3, told within an intimidating environment by a joke teller who has a gun. This detail influences how we understand the telling’s harmfulness and what possibilities we might devise for addressing it.The overreach about the danger of jokes is most egregious in Horisk’s uptake of Daniel Kahneman’s dual-process theory of cognition. Horisk treats Kahneman’s notions of automatic sense-making and conscious ratiocination as if they can be accessed at will, which allows her to frame malevolent joke tellers as seducing people into relying on biased, automatic “thinking” instead of a “more conscious” and “deliberative” activity (78). But neither mechanism in this dual-process theory is volitional on Kahneman’s account. Horisk overstates the theory and stretches the evidence when she suggests that by introducing a false and harmful idea into the common ground of a social group via a joke, malevolent jokers amuse and thereby seduce people into uncritical thinking, implanting harmful ideas for social proliferation. Furthermore, it’s often a reflexive tendency that gives people the intuition that a belittling joke is wrong to tell and post hoc deliberation that meticulously rationalizes offensive stereotypes is real knowledge.The book’s best insights derive from its non-transcendent framing of how distinct participants experience social “common grounds.” Horisk clarifies that we have many common grounds across which we are positioned as either vulnerable to harmful ideas or responsible for speaking up against them. For people who already self-reflect when they catch themselves laughing at derogatory material, this book is unlikely to offer many theoretical or practical insights. And people who believe that joking is exempt from moral scrutiny probably won’t read Horisk’s uncompromising study and see their moral error. But for people who are genuinely curious about the moral questions and want to know how a person could be simultaneously harmful and ignorant of that harm, Horisk’s study reveals that we occupy a shared world and are often blind to the competing moralities of its many common grounds.