Given my contention that the reflex to laugh is involuntary,* the question with which I ended my previous post--"is it okay (ethically) to laugh at violent humor?"--is really two questions:
1. Is it morally blameworthy to laugh at a violent (or sexist, &c.) joke?
2. Should we be laughing at such jokes?
I'll answer the first question here and the second in a subsequent post.
*I don't really think this is debatable, as any laughter that we would consider authentic must, to some extent at least, be a product of an unwilled reflex to laugh. I am not discounting that this reflex could be socially conditioned (for the most part, I think it is).
The first question is easier to answer on the small scale, but more difficult to answer on a larger one. To the extent that our laughter is involuntary, it seems difficult to blame an individual because she or he is inclined to laugh at such humor. Certainly the openness with which an individual expresses her or his laughter will color our attitude toward its ethics. In American culture, we typically feel compelled to express shame or guilt when laughing at something that might be considered transgressive.*
*Following a production of The Producers, my mother-in-law, for example, expressed guilt at laughing at "Springtime for Hitler."
At this point the conclusion seems to be that involuntary laughter at a violent joke is not morally blameworthy, but an individual's attitude toward her or his own laughter is. Implicit in this stance is, of course, that our reflex to laugh is to some degree conditioned by our culture or upbringing.* The deep-seated nature of our laughing response would suggest that we may not want to be around people who laugh at violent jokes, because this response reflects something significant about their character. But it hardly seems reasonable to blame an individual for an involuntary response.
*This is not to say that we cannot condition ourselves to laugh. Initially, I found the skewed logic of Jewish humor (as described by Ted Cohen in Jokes) mystifying, but after repeated exposure I now count these types of jokes among my favorites. I'm trying to warm up to British humor in the same way (but failing so far).
So who do we blame? If we want to uphold the notion that laughing at violent jokes is morally blameworthy--a position I will destabilize a bit in a subsequent post--then the moral blame must be cast on the culture or group of individuals who produced the laughing response. In effect, it is the fault of a national (or regional or familial) culture if individuals produced by that culture find themselves inclined to laugh at violent jokes. As the fact that Americans are significantly more inclined than citizens of other nations to laugh at violent humor is the foundational premise of this blog, the ethical blame for the creation of laughter at violence rests, in this case, with American culture (or its various subcultures).
Of course, a culture is a difficult entity to hold to a moral standard. This is not only true because it is so large, but also because it is difficult to attribute intent--typically at the foundation of moral judgment--to something so amorphous as culture. While American culture may produce individuals inclined to laugh at violent humor, it is difficult to say that it does so willfully. This is not to say that this is an acceptable fact about about American culture or a reality we shouldn't be working to change, I am simply suggesting that casting moral blame on a culture is a rationally problematic and, from a pragmatic standpoint, decidedly unhelpful means of producing social change.
Throughout this post, I have been working from the assumption that laughing at violent humor is bad, that it is something we should seek to eliminate form our culture. My guilt over laughing at the shovel joke in the previous post suggests that it is an impulse I would like to eliminate from myself. I think this assumption needs to examined more thoroughly. I will address this question more thoroughly in my next post.
