Research

In my dissertation The Role and Rules of Ridicule I aim to give the first comprehensive philosophical account of ridicule, understood as a kind of social practice, and the ridiculous, understood as an aesthetic category. My work seeks to utilize insights from the historical Superiority Theory of Humor—a tradition which includes Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Descartes and Hobbes—as well as contemporary sources in aesthetics and the philosophy of humor such as John Morreall, Noel Carroll, Alan Roberts, Daniel Abrahams, and Shiela Lintott. The dissertation has three parts, each of which may stand alone as individual papers for publication, which together constitute a comprehensive and novel account of ridicule. My account also aims to unify and explain a variety of activities and artforms in which ridicule plays a central role such as: satire, political cartooning, caricature, observational comedy, insult comedy, self-deprecation, teasing, and more.

In Part One of the dissertation, I provide and defend a conceptual analysis of ridicule and its related notion the ridiculous (or ridiculousness). Drawing on new work on the Superiority Theory of Humor (Lintott 2016; Trivigno 2019; Destree 2019) and a conceptual taxonomy developed in the philosophy of humor (Morreall 1982; Roberts 2019; Abrahams 2020), I define ridicule as humor critically directed at the ridiculous. The ridiculous is, in turn, defined as that which is funny by virtue of its flaws. I argue that ridicule is essentially ostensive—it utilizes ostension, reference, and mimicry as a means of directing our attention to the ridiculous. The ridiculous is a class of objects that are funny, meaning they warrant our amusement, by virtue of being flawed. Finally, I argue for the somewhat counterintuitive view that all flaws are funny—even those that relate to gross incompetence, moral corruption, and tragedy.

In Part Two, I provide an account of the social function of ridicule, understood as a social practice. I begin by considering a variety of functions that ridicule serves: group discipline (Billig 2005), emotional regulation (Martin et. Al 2003), maintaining an egalitarian society (Stohr 2019), solidarity building (Lane-McKinley 2021), and helping us to cope with unbearable circumstances. I seek an account that unifies all of these disparate roles. Ultimately, drawing on the work of Roger Scruton (1982), I argue that ridicule is a tool for applying a certain kind of social status to something—a connotation of unseriousness—which allows it to play many roles.

In Part Three, I give an account of the evaluative rules that govern successful and unsuccessful ridicule, understood as a kind of aesthetic practice. Drawing from examples of ridiculing artforms such as satire, as well as philosophical accounts of satire (Smuts 2006; Declercq 2018, 2021), I argue that ridicule can fail aesthetically in two ways. First, it can fail by being a poor token of humor—it can be unclever, unwitty, hack, etc. Second, it can fail by virtue of attempting to criticize something as flawed that is not in fact flawed, either because the supposedly flawed attribute is not a flaw, or because the object of ridicule lacks the attribute altogether. As a result, an act of ridicule may live or die on the integrity of its philosophical criticism.

Abstract: Comic immoralism is the view that sometimes funny things are funny due to their having immoral properties of some sort. Immoralism has many proponents and detractors. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, I clarify the scope and content of comic immoralism as a general thesis in the philosophy of humor. I will argue that the debate about immoralism has unduly excluded certain categories of humor from inclusion, and that the language which immoralists sometimes use can be misleading. Second, I argue for my own version of immoralism, which I call ridicule immoralism. Ridicule immoralism holds that sometimes things are funny due to their being ridiculous, and that things are often ridiculous due to being morally flawed. It follows from this that a version of comic immoralism is true. 

Abstract: When they are first introduced to the ethical study of humor, students and colleagues alike sometimes react skeptically. They worry that doing ethics about humor is somehow antithetical to the nature of humor, or that it risks impinging on what makes humor valuable. In this paper, I attempt to explore and explain this intuition. I provide an account of humor’s contribution to the good life which helps to explain how and in what sense we might think humor is resistant to ethics. I argue that humor, understood as a sort of play, is resistant to the introduction of practical ethical restrictions, which I call ethical taboos. This is because one of humor’s central contributions to the good life is in relieving us of the burdens of our social, moral, and political obligations. In this way, humor’s value is liberatory. Ethical taboos are exactly the sort of thing we engage in humor to escape, and so they counteract our reasons for engaging in the activity in the first place. I conclude this paper by discussing what some implications might follow from my account on humor ethics more generally. I argue that there may be ways to both preserve the integrity of humorous play and take deal with ethical issues unique to humor.

Abstract: Political liberals have long disagreed about whether a state guided by principles of liberal political philosophy can permissibly choose to fund state arts programs such as the National Endowment for the Arts (Dworkin 1985; Carroll 1987; Black 1992; Feinberg 1994; Brighouse 1995). Historically, these debates have centered on the question as to whether or not the arts constitute a public good. In this paper, I argue that a historically informed assessment of state arts programs suggests a different sort of justification for state support for the arts. Rather than arguing that art constitutes a public good, historically, arts programs have been utilized to put forward pro-state messaging. I propose that we might thereby justify an arts program similar to those managed by the Depression-era Works Progress Administration for the state to project political ideals in artistic form. I consider whether this function constitutes propaganda and defend this proposal against the claim that it is unjustly manipulative.

Abstract: Philosophers of humor standardly assume that there is an essential connection between humor and amusement. Amusement is, in some way, regarded as essential to humor. However, anti-essentialist skeptics have recently called the ‘orthodox’ formulation of essentialism into question. Orthodox essentialists have argued that humorous acts are acts intended to amuse and that humor is nothing more than the practice of those acts. Anti-essentialists argue that much humor does not involve any intentions to amuse. These skeptics are motivated by a conception of humor as a robust and varied social practice. The aim of this paper is to show how we might defend a version of essentialism which accepts this conception of humor as a robust social practice. I argue that amusement is the emotional core of humor where humor is understood as an aesthetic practice in the sense described by aesthetic communitarians.

Abstract: Drawing on the work of Ted Cohen (1999) and Charles Taylor (1992) I argue that we have a moral obligation to appreciate art grounded in the duty to recognize others as persons qua person. I relate Ted Cohen's idea of an "Affective Community" and Taylor's 'dialogical' conception of identity and the duty of recognition in order to argue that art appreciation is one way for us to execute our duties to recognize others. When we join in an act of art appreciation, we engage in a practice of mutual recognition in which we have strong moral reasons to participate. The result is that we have a moral obligation to cultivate a variety of aesthetic virtues such as open mindedness and a tendency to engage with artworks. 

Abstract: There is something of an unspoken disagreement in the philosophy of humor between those who hold that funniness is a normative concept, such that to be funny is to warrant amusement, and those who hold that funniness is a descriptive concept, such that to be funny is to tend to produce amusement. In this paper, I aim to elucidate the unspoken intuitions behind both views and defend the claim that 'funny' is ultimately normative in a way which respects key insights from detractors.