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Can a racist, sexist, homophobic or other politically incorrect joke be funny?
Noel Carroll has built a serious academic reputation thinking about jokes.
Noel Carroll, welcome to philosophy bites.
Thank you.
Great to be here again.
The topic we're going to focus on is humour and morality.
Why is this such an important issue now?
Well, probably the topic of humor and morality has been perennial because of the topics that humor deals with, including sex, cleanliness, intelligence.
But probably in the last quarter of the 20th century and now in the 21st century, it's become even more pressing as issues of political correctness have come to the fore, pressing both for those who are politically correct and those who are not politically correct.
In terms of the latter, many of the leading comics of the day are comics whose topic itself is political correctness.
Well, one way out of this would be just to say humour has nothing to do with morality.
They're completely separate spheres.
It's completely amoral.
That certainly is a very well represented position.
I mean, the idea is that what's said in humor stays in humor.