Offensive Humour and Censorship

An essay on the ethical terrain of offensive comedy and political censorship.

Humour, by nature of its transgressive indecency, is sometimes used to enhance coercive authority, as opposed to subverting it. The necessity of regulatory censorship in comedic settings is the theme this essay aims to tackle in depth. The fact that comedy has a direct experiential impact on the lived experience of oppressed peoples in minority communities around the globe that makes this issue so poignant. The position of this paper is to assert that regulation and restriction of comedic thought is a moral duty upon the collective majority of a population in any given territory. This will be argued in the form of a hypothetical syllogism and an analysis of its philosophical and political implications. The common objections against this argument will then be laid out and addressed systematically. The first topic addressed will be a concise historical investigation into the nature of taboo humour.

Comedy is always bound to historical contingency and different societies have different notions of what it means for something to be considered funny or not. However, despite changing tastes across different contexts, comedy is universally tied to the subversion of socially constructed normativity in ways that are absurd or ironic. A prominent example from the early modern era is that of the 19th century American minstrel show. An art form now rightfully dismissed in the modern era that was once a mainstay of popular entertainment throughout the country. Performance art where white people portray their alleged racial inferiors might seem strange, but the comedic and malicious nature of the spectacle allowed this practice to perpetuate the dominant contemporary social narrative of white supremacy. Its repugnance to modern sensibilities should be seen as evidence of progress, not relativism.

The central argument of this paper can be summarised thus: Offensive humour perpetuates harmful stereotypes against oppressed peoples. Harmful stereotypes against oppressed peoples are dehumanising and immoral. It is necessary to censor things that are dehumanising and immoral. Therefore, we ought to regulate offensive humour. Here the qualifier offensive denotes humour as potentially allied with oppressive assymmetrical power dynamics, though not inherently so. The oppressed peoples here include racial, sexual and gender based minorities within class based societies. Dehumanisation and immorality are treated as synonymous, and therefore, the prescription to censorship becomes morally binding. Lastly, regulatation implies the allowance of non-dehumanising comedy that subverts, rather than perpetuates systemic power inequalities.

An objection one might raise to this particular line of reasoning might be to appeal to historical contingency and the cultural subjectivity of what is commonly considered a good comedic joke. A reply to this objection is to highlight that what is under consideration here is not the aesthetic value of comedy in itself, but the objectively discernible nature of the power relations implicit in the jokes. The kind of censorship advocated here says nothing about whether a joke is funny or not, but is principally concerned with its ethical application. Another potential objection might be to appeal to the risks of totalitarian censorship against individual autonomy. A rebuttal is to appeal to the Popperian paradox of tolerance. A hyper tolerant society which chooses to remain uncritical of authoritarian thought will itself succumb to authoritarianism by nature of its moral impotence. Thus, the necessity of reflexive critical engagement with all forms of media is further stated.

The purpose of this paper was to outline sufficient evidence in favour of social regulation of the commonly accepted topics for comedic material. By appealing to the dehumanising and oppressive elements of certain kinds of humour and arguing for their inherent immorality, the central thesis of regulatory censorship is upheld. Whilst addressing issues related to historical contingency and totalitarian censorship by appealing to a familiar and disturbing example of humour in bad taste, a moral imperative has been firmly established with sufficient evidence. The practice of enacting censorship in cases of offensive humour must therefore be necessary to maintain consistent moral agency in the world. The reader should consider this conclusion wisely when they ponder the nature of what's funny and what isn't. Their status as a moral agent is at stake.