Can we find wisdom in wisecracks? What’s so infinite about a jest, anyway? Or, to be a little more dignified about this, what philosophical questions arise from humor? In his new book Wisecracks: On Humor and Morality in Everyday Life, the philosopher David Shoemaker argues that when we kid around with one another there are moral issues at stake that go beyond the risk that an off-color witticism will offend. In a book that manages to be densely argued and lighthearted at the same time, Shoemaker demonstrates that the philosophical questions wisecracks raise are largely about social morality, which is appropriate because wisecracks are intrinsically social things. How we crack wise together, you might say, is how we live together.
Shoemaker responds to a small philosophical literature on humor, most of which considers formal, stand-alone jokes. Philosophers of humor sometimes consider “the logical or semantic structure” of jokes, as Shoemaker puts it, and claim to discern our reasons for laughing at them. This is possible because jokes can be transcribed without too much semantic loss: They make sense when written down. By contrast, what Shoemaker calls “wisecracks” — casual jests, lighthearted banter, casual wordplay, and gentle teasing — make little sense when reproduced later on a page. You could think of a joke as a little script designed to yield a laugh, a brief performance you could give at a party, or on a stage. The audience’s response makes it communal, in a loose sense, but it’s not as deeply collaborative as cracking wise with friends. Wisecracks are more like improvisations, and they require the active participation of an interlocutor. They are “made, not told,” as Shoemaker points out on his very first page.
A sense of permission to tease can be crucial when it comes to wisecracking, Shoemaker reminds us. I was at a party talking about psychoanalysis with a near stranger, whom I had met just minutes before. I noted that I had been in treatment for 20 years. “Not working then, is it?” he asked, which was a gamble on my ability to sustain a light teasing and enjoy it. His gamble paid off: I laughed, and we became fast friends. The risk of cracking wise is less, of course, with someone you know well. Shoemaker begins Wisecracks by recounting how a friend of his remarked, upon learning that he was writing a book about humor, that this presumed he knew the first thing about it. We don’t learn much about their friendship, but the implication is that it must be founded on significant trust and mutual appreciation: We only allow our close friends to tell us we’re not funny and get away with it.
Wisecracks, then, allow us to navigate the complex feelings that arise in social situations while building and sustaining trust with one another. “This has the potential to hurt,” the wisecrack seems to say, “but it doesn’t need to.” Part of what makes Wisecracks an important contribution to the philosophical literature on humor is Shoemaker’s sensitive attention to the social and psychic benefits of wisecracking and his willingness to defend it despite the harms that it can cause.
Where’s the harm in wisecracking? Wisecracks, Shoemaker explains, can cause harm in a variety of ways. First, they can function like a private idiolect that excludes outsiders, as in the case of “inside jokes.” Second, they can exacerbate asymmetrical power relationships, as when a doctoral adviser belittles a graduate student, knowing they can’t respond in kind. Third, wisecracks can be deliberately hurtful insults — sometimes racist, sexist, or otherwise bigoted — disingenuously disguised as “just a joke.” Fourth, a climate of insulting wisecracks might not cause first-order harm — because both parties understand that no harm is intended — but can still have harmful effects for other members of a community. I grew up at a time when kids would call each other “frickin’ retahd” (Boston-area accent), and even if no one at the time was offended, the insult bespeaks, and entrenches, a standing prejudice against developmental difference. Fifth, wisecracks sometimes involve deliberate deception, though in the case of wisecracks the deception is usually temporary, and instantly dissipates with the magic words “just kidding.” I would add to Shoemaker’s list of harms a sixth one: A person who cracks wise when someone else is trying to be serious can seem to disregard the other person’s claims on their attention, and in a sense their moral personhood (those of us who pun compulsively are sometimes guilty of this).
Wisecracks allow us to navigate the complex feelings that arise in social situations while building and sustaining trust with one another.
In short, an awful lot can go wrong when we crack wise. Perhaps if we were angels our sense of morality would govern our sense of humor, but we’re no angels. Why defend wisecracks from a moral point of view at all, then?
The morality of wisecracks, Shoemaker might respond, has much less to do with their content than with their context. What might seem to me a straightforwardly offensive statement trading on ethnic or racial stereotypes — say of Jewish greed or of Black laziness — could, when told by the right person at the right time in the right way, become completely inoffensive, precisely because it makes the offensiveness of the stereotype into the pretext for humor. An old friend and I, both Jews, had a running gag in which we pretended to have mind-control powers that would cause the other to hand over his wallet. Was it funny? Well, it was funny to us. Similarly, Shoemaker’s friend only seems to insult him by saying that Shoemaker can’t possibly write a book about humor since he himself isn’t funny. They both know no real insult is intended. A bartender, asked where the bathroom is, might respond “Oh we never built one,” but it would be very weird for a customer to fail to understand the jest, which rests on the absurdity of a business built on socializing over drinks not having a toilet. Again, the content of the joke is less significant than the context, and the context in each of the above examples involves a shared understanding of what’s intended.
Cracking wise, when everything goes well, brings pleasure — but the benefits of wisecracking, Shoemaker thinks, go beyond the hedonic. They include the social advantages of being funny (we make friends and find mates by kidding around), and the establishment of friendships and the deepening of group bonds. Sometimes a shared wisecrack about misfortune is exactly what you need when illness, unemployment, divorce, or accident visit themselves upon you. To crack wise together about tragedy can lead to a sense of intersubjective validation and welcome support, not to mention reinforcing in all participants the virtue of humility.
In one sense, empathy enables wisecracking and wisecracking enables empathy: a virtuous circle where feeling for each other allows us to make each other laugh, which in turn engenders more fellow feeling. Yet too much empathy — as Shoemaker emphasizes in one of his more surprising claims — can actually shut off the wisecracking impulse, because it can make us so anxious about the possibility of causing harm that we cannot even joke. A maximally empathetic world would then be a pretty humorless one.
Humorless, too, would be a world in which we adhere to Immanuel Kant’s view of lying and deception as an absolute wrong. When we lie, Kant thought, we wrong other people by tricking them into accepting a falsehood, which is a violation of their moral autonomy. Shoemaker’s view is that to apply Kant on lying to the world of quips, put-ons, pranks, and the like would be a category mistake. Consider Kant’s statement in “On a Supposed Right to Lie From Altruistic Motives”: “A lie always harms another; if not some particular man, still it harms mankind generally.” If you apply this principle to the world of truth-bending humor, you greatly limit your range of expression. While the Kantian “hardcore position” (as Shoemaker has it) does seem to have merits, in most cases of wisecracking, it simply doesn’t pertain, because everyone involved understands that no serious deception is intended: The truth is not actually obscured, only winked at from the sidelines. If I preface a story about a trip to Vietnam by saying “When I was in ‘Nam ...,” I don’t seem to pretend to have served in the war there, in part because I was born after that war ended. In a similar fashion artists can play with the truth, presenting audiences with narratives and images that seem realistic, even though the audience simultaneously understands that illusion is at work. In this sense, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief” applies to wisecracks as well.
Reading Shoemaker on wisecracks, I felt new clarity about a book to which I’ve often returned, always a little bothered by how unfunny I find it: Sigmund Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Freud’s book explains what it promises to explain, rooting joking in the redirection of a host of unconscious impulses, but also insisting on the value of the genre of the joke itself. A new joke, Freud explained, could be traded around “like news of the latest victory.” Freud’s phrasing is dramatic, and his analysis is convincing enough, but it’s never helped me to like the genre of “the joke” as much as I like puns, wordplay, quips, and general banter between friends. It comes back, I think, to Shoemaker’s distinction between the performative aspect of jokes and the collaborative nature of wisecracks. If stand-up comedy leaves me cold (and it does), perhaps it is because it is less founded on human sociability, than wisecracks, which are always rooted in an impulse towards friendship. Next to wisecracking, telling jokes seems lonely to me.
Too much empathy can shut off the wisecracking impulse. A maximally empathetic world would then be a pretty humorless one.
Not that wisecracks are free from psychological complexity, or for that matter from aggression and competition. Freud would remind us that our jests with friends can reflect subterranean hostility, lust, and envy, as well as anxieties and fears we may prefer not to recognize. The term “wisecrack” itself, I was curious to learn while researching for this review, is quite new, beginning with the verbal use of “cracking wise” in early 20th-century America. To “crack” could mean to boast, and while boasting may seem a little far from the contemporary English use of “wisecrack,” the exchange of wisecracks is indeed often competitive, with each friend trying to top the other’s lines. The “wise” in “wisecrack” carries the sense of “a wise guy” or even a “wiseacre,” someone who considers themselves clever but who uses their cleverness to provoke. The “guy” is worth remarking here: How much of cracking wise is rooted in the microdynamics of masculine aggression?
But it’s worth attending to the “wise” as well. The word might be taken as sarcastic: Moe from the Three Stooges’ famous line “Oh, a wise guy, eh?” implies that, while his interlocutor may believe himself wise (i.e., clever), Moe holds that he is not. Yet as I read Wisecracks, I considered the possibility that there is real wisdom in wit. I don’t mean the provocations of would-be philosophical gadflies, who are often just jerks (“edgelords” if you will, to use a commonplace term for a person, usually male, who says offensive or outrageous things to get a reaction). I mean the social wit we use to get along with one another, and to “get along” — to keep going — in our lives. While some analytic philosophers will labor to tell you exactly why jokes amuse us (Do we laugh because we are given reasons to laugh? Isn’t this thought itself laughable?), Wisecracks made me think that kidding around has deep purposes analogous to those of philosophy itself. At first this might seem dubious, insofar as wisecracking’s aversion to seriousness and disregard for truth appear prima facie antiphilosophical. But if we follow the French historian Pierre Hadot’s suggestion that philosophy is not a series of systems and precepts but a set of exercises and techniques for the maintenance and refinement of ourselves, then the parallel begins to look much more plausible. Cracking wise, like philosophy, might be what Hadot describes as a practice of living, a way of laughing in the face of the absurdities of existence, alone but especially together. Wouldn’t that be funny?