Humor and Morality

Catalog description

This course will be about the surprising and complicated ways that morality and humor bear on one another. The focus will be on interpersonal humor (banter, teasing, mockery, leg-pulling, etc.) that raises serious moral questions, as it may well involve deception, cruelty, or stereotyping. Humor can hurt, exclude, and divide. Considering its occasional immorality, should we continue to engage in it? This is, surprisingly, a new area of exploration. We will explore literature that can help us to start thinking about the topic on our own, literature that is at least in the general vicinity (what literature on humor there is is just about jokes). It comes from a variety of disciplines, including aesthetics, psychology, metaethics, linguistics, emotion theory, and normative ethics.