The Normativity of Humor

In this paper, I’d first like to explore the idea that the concept of humor is a distinctive kind of normative concept. In particular, I’ll argue, the concept of humor should be understood as involving a kind of violation of the norms that constitute other normative concepts. Because there are a variety of other normative concepts and a variety of norms associated with each, there are also a variety of categories of humor, as well as various salient subclasses of those categories. I’ll first survey several categories of humor—the categories that are to be understood as involving violations of practical, epistemic, and aesthetic norms—and then I will explore the consequences of the account of humor that that survey suggests. Next, I’ll argue that the key to distinguishing the humorous norm-violations from the non-humorous norm-violations is an understanding of the practical, epistemic, and aesthetic virtues that successful instances of humor manifest. The resulting picture is one on which the concept of humor is doubly normative; it results from the violations of (practical, epistemic, and aesthetic) norms, and succeeds when it manifests many of the same (practical, epistemic, and aesthetic) features that give rise to other kinds of normative successes. One important caveat: there are crucial differences between what Hartz and Hunt 1991 call “advertent” humor—roughly, humor that is deliberately produced by an agent—and “inadvertent” humor—roughly, humor that is not.1 Examples of the former include comedic essays and jokes; examples of the latter might include someone unintentionally slipping on a banana peel, a non-human animal making a funny gesture or noise, or a natural formation of rocks that happens to resemble Richard Nixon. My primary focus in this paper will be on advertent humor, though much of what I have to say will apply to inadvertent humor as well. I won’t defend a view here about whether one of these kinds of humor is more “fundamental” or