I know a lot of people who criticize the concept of punching up, a criticism most succinctly put as “whatever direction you’re punching in, you’re still punching people.” However, I think that “punching up” is actually a pretty reasonable guideline for ethics in comedy.
I’m going to assume, in this post, that we’ve all agreed that mean comedy can, in some circumstances, be ethical. I suspect the majority of my audience agrees with this, unless they object on principle to Scott’s blog post where he compared Amanda Marcotte to a Vogon. I’m also only going to talk about “punching up” as ethics for comedy– in my opinion, the concept is badly misapplied when you take it outside that area.
Reasoning With Vampires— a blog in which a woman copyedits Twilight– is pretty damn funny. Imagine that there was an identical blog, the same in every single post, except that instead of Twilight it was critiquing a twelve-year-old girl’s very first Twilight fanfic, which was solely read by her and her five closest friends. The first one seems to me to be fun, entertaining, good-spirited snark; the second seems cruel. Why?
Well, Stephanie Meyer is an adult, and the fanfiction writer is twelve. Stephanie Meyer’s book was professionally published, while the fanfiction writer posted it on Fanfiction.net. Stephanie Meyer has millions of readers and several movies adapted from her work, while the fanfiction writer has no readers she hasn’t personally met an the closest thing her story has to an adaptation is the time her best friend drew a picture of her OCs. Stephanie Meyer has written other books, while this is the first thing the fanfiction writer ever wrote. Basically: Stephanie Meyer has power; the fanfiction writer doesn’t.
That works for individuals, but not all jokes are about individuals. Can we have a concept of ‘punching up’ that applies to groups? I believe so.
Imagine a comedian who shows the audience pictures of drowning Syrian refugees and then makes fun of them for having such goofy expressions on their faces. (And not in a “ha ha isn’t it absurd to make fun of someone for having a goofy facial expression while they’re dying” way– the Syrians are the butt of the joke.) It seems to me that a lot of people would find that somewhere between cringeworthy and appalling. They’re literally dying! Why are you making fun of them?
On the other hand, if a comedian makes jokes about politicians having goofy facial expressions, no one would object.
Of course, there’s some problem putting “punching up” in practice. There are a lot of people who are like “I’m making fun of this misogynist by calling him a fat neckbearded loser who sits in his mom’s basement all day playing WOW! Punching up!” But that’s a problem with a lot of ethical rules. For instance, when we try to fairly represent people’s viewpoints, we’ll often wind up strawmanning people we disagree with and claiming the strawmen are a fair representation of others’ views. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to fairly represent other people’s viewpoints; it means that whenever you have an ethical rule, some people will try to break it and claim that they aren’t doing so.
It seems to me that mean comedy has to have some concept of “fair game”. Viciously mocking the powerful, particularly those of the powerful who have used their power to hurt other people, feels fair: they knew what they were signing up for when they became powerful, and at the end of the day they can comfort themselves with their gobs of money and social privilege; having a sharp joke or two directed your way is karma. But if you viciously mock someone who is weak, or if you look at someone going through a lot of suffering and then add insult to their injury, you’re not funny. You’re just a bully.
Thing of Things 
The issue you vaguely refer to fundamentally comes down to a belief that power is collectivized. I’m powerful because I belong to group R, therefore I’m fair game.
And more fundamentally – comedy doesn’t require you make somebody else feel like shit. Laughing with, versus laughing at. I think pretty much as a rule, if you’re trying to goad people into laughing at somebody, regardless of who it is, you’re being a bully. We can say that sometimes being a bully is acceptable, but I don’t think we get to pretend that in some situations it isn’t bullying at all.
LikeLiked by 4 people
I hope you’re not a fan of Slate Star Codex, because by your definition Scott is a horrible bully.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Is there supplemental material here I’m missing? Orphan said
Horribleness isn’t mentioned at all, and the entire statement is hedged under ‘pretty much’.
And if you think that what happens on Slate Star Codex is a central example of goading people into laughing at an outgroup I have, well, the entire internet to show you. That’s certainly not to say it never happens; we have the Vogon comment as clear proof by counterexample. But where is ‘horrible’ and this certainty coming from?
LikeLike
And the Voldemort comment, and the whole Arthur Chu incident, and… really, just go through the “Things I’ll Regret Writing” tag.
To be clear, I am not saying that this is a bad thing. My blog post is entirely in favor of mocking people, and Scott confines himself to people and groups who are fair game. I am just saying that if you adopt a completely anti-mocking point of view, then your opinion on Scott’s feminism blog posts needs to be “Scott Alexander is an appalling bully!”, not “ha ha he really got those SJWs good.”
LikeLiked by 1 person
I don’t think that’s mocking when he compares to Voldemort. It’s more an attempt to describe how he feels about them.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I am not anti-bully; I think bullying has a useful social function, and I regard the belief that bullying is universally bad is a common social fallacy among intellectual types. (Indeed, the list of nerd social fallacies can to a significant extent be reduced down to “Bullying is wrong.”)
Bullying, at its root, is an attempt to enforce social norms on somebody; you bully people you regard as intolerant, because tolerance is an important social norm to you. We regard bullying as wrong pretty much precisely because we disagree with the social norms they are attempting to enforce, but this is a difference of values. When everybody agrees with the bully, almost nobody notices the bullying.
LikeLiked by 2 people
@Orphan – I would go a little farther than that. Bullying is mob justice; I generally agree that if it was only used righteously, it would be righteous, but it’s a crude instrument that works best when the righteous are locally powerful and use it with restraint.
Otherwise, you get an equilibrium where everyone is bullying everyone else, righteously and otherwise. If you could disarm bullying overall, I think it would be better.
LikeLike
An equilibrium is an equilibrium. Anything else is unstable.
LikeLike
But not every equilibriums is equal to every other equilibrium.
LikeLike
An equilibrium is when several forces neutralize each other; it’s not necessarily stable.
What is stable is a *rest state*, when one force has completely overcome the others.
LikeLike
Nash.
LikeLike
What you said is about what I thought.
I think I’ve heard a few different reasons people don’t like “punching up”:
– it’s equated with a fixed hierarchy of oppression; I interpreted “punching up/down” as meaning “relative to whoever has power in a particular situation, with an awareness that even if you’re marginalised, someone else might be marginalised too”, just like lots of other sorts of discrimination. But if you interpret it as “relative to a fixed hierarchy of who is ‘most oppressed’ and ‘least oppressed'” then it breaks down just like everything that ignores interactions between different oppressed groups
– they don’t like the violent language. It feels to me like, it _is_ violent, but justified when applied to someone sufficiently insulated from it. It’s really hard to have comedy that isn’t negative *at all*, and really hard to fight discrimination without being nasty to people doing it. But
I’d also add two other things. I think “funny” is a red herring. Often something can be incredibly harmful, but funny to the people doing it. It can even sometimes be funny to the victim. I think people often get into an argument about whether something is “funny”, when the real problem is, it might be funny to some people, but it’s harmful, so you shouldn’t do it whether it’s funny or not.
And also, when you’re asking whether something is “punching down”, you should look at the people it’s harming, not the people’s its aimed at. Even if your target is powerful, using slurs that harm a large class of marginalised people is not ok 😦
LikeLiked by 7 people
Indeed – something can still be really funny even if it’s evil as all hell. Which is why “that’s not funny” is a bad response to hurtful humor.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I think this is pretty much correct. I think it’s rare you can find anyone at all who genuinely believes the “don’t punch at all” thing. People’s real objections invariably seem to be based on what is of isn’t “up.”
And with respect to that… part of the problem is the social justice community’s inability to actually grasp it’s own norms and concepts, particularly intersectionality. You get a lot of “I’m punching up at the white men,” but power is local and multi variant, and what that usually looks like is someone with a microphone and a bunch of laughing sycophants mocking someone who lacks the means to respond.
Or worse, it involves attacking people who normally WOULD be “up” enough not to care, but who have chosen to make themselves emotionally vulnerable to the attack. I feel genuinely bad when I see people who have done their best to be as social justice-y as they can, only to run afoul of some new cultural shibboleth, and to suddenly receive the full white scum treatment. To a certain extent it’s like getting bitten by the vampire you invited into your house, but… it can’t be fun realizing that your community will never fully accept you, and you’ll always be one witch hunt away from Anpersand writing a blog post about how he doesn’t endorse the abuse you’ve received, but…
Of course pointing that out gets you the whole “ooh, did I hurt your fee fees?” thing, where the targets attempts at expressing that the punch really hurt is treated as justifying more punching.
Or worse, it invokes unironic self comparisons to MLK. I choke a little on my own bile every time someone acts like a jerk online and quotes Letter from a Birmingham Jail to justify it
I think most of this conversation is just reflexive of people’s reaction to cultural toxicity in the advocacy community. There’s this very human tendency to reason
1. I got hurt because of X
2. Therefore X violates the Kantian imperative
It isn’t legitimate and it isn’t right, but it seems to be all too common.
LikeLiked by 6 people
Posting in a comment because I can’t edit-
The transition “and worse” came out wrong. I added that paragraph after writing most if the rest of the comment, and by the time I wrote it I was thinking about organizational problems. I meant “worse” in terms of what is or is not likely to facilitate development of an effective advocacy movement for minority rights. In those terms I think that making it clear that identifying with the group is just exposing your belly to nasty people who will hurt you, hurt you for being hurt, and hurt you more for pulling back, is a very bad thing.
But in context it looks like I’m saying that it’s worse to hurt privileged allies of social justice movements than to hurt intersectionally un privileged bystanders and opponents. I’m not willing to make that sort of comparison and didnt mean for my post to be read that way.
LikeLike
“you’ll always be one witch hunt away from Anpersand writing a blog post about how he doesn’t endorse the abuse you’ve received, but…”
Burn
LikeLike
“A member of a group I disagree with has principles that apply even to people he disagrees with. This is funny for some reason.”
LikeLiked by 1 person
While I’m inclined to agree with this, I feel like there’s a gap between “we approve/disapprove of this” and “this is right/wrong”.
*The* archetypal example of the Unacceptable Punching Down Joke is probably joking about disabled people, or (depending on your politics) black or gay people. But people didn’t feel uncomfortable making those jokes at all.
***
I feel like the issue here is to avoid dogpiles, rather than any inherent right/wrong thing?
Like, if someone is being constantly mocked for their appearance – whether because society thinks it’s a mock-worthy thing so people keep bringing it up, or because they’re being bullied by a few individuals – then it’s not OK to mock them for it, even if it might otherwise be something you’d laugh off. Not because the *person* is worse/better off; they might be poor or wealthy, gay or straight, and I don’t think it’d matter much (except maybe making them a little more emotionally vulnerable/paranoid.)
On the other hand, I think the idea of laughing at drowning refugees is a completely different phenomenon that’s not really related. They aren’t harmed by your laughter. The issue is that there’s something horrible and emotionally effective going on, so in order to laugh at it you have to be unaffected by whatever’s going on – either a psychopath or an Uncaring Person in some other way.
And then there’s the third meaning, of course, where it’s “this person is privileged along a single axis, so it’s OK to mock them! Intersectionality!” I … actually kind of think this is what the Stephanie Meyer example is, people can be pretty horrible about celebrities.
… wow, this turned out sounding way more critical than I intended. Like I said, I pretty much agree.
LikeLike
I think phrasing a joke as punching up or down implies that the legitimacy of the target depends on zer relative rather than absolute standing. This is contrary to my intuitions. Suppose one refugee mocked another. Would it be an acceptable defense to say “both of my parents died, while only one of yours did. Thus, I’m punching up.”. Similarly, is Bill Gates really barred from mocking Trump, since that is punching down? I don’t think so in either case. It seems to me the principle is more like celebrities, politicians and other public figures knew what they signed up for and are fair game, while private people are not.
LikeLiked by 1 person
But there are not-very-public figures who still end up on everyone’s Acceptable To Mock list. Notably, there was that guy involved in the repricing of the drug.
I think that the whole Punching In Directions debate is just people trying to justify their own arbitrary preferences. This class of people is Nice and includes My Friends, so they shouldn’t be fair game for mockery. This other class is Not Nice, and if I have a few friends who end up in this group, oh well, collateral damage.
What frustrates me is the divide. Some communities have the norm that cruelty and mockery of anyone, even their deepest and most despised ideological enemies, is to be avoided, and genuinely ask “Won’t somebody think of the outgroup?” Other communities embrace a complete free-for-all, in which everyone, including and most especially themselves. Everyone isn’t an asshole all the time, but everyone accepts that everyone else can be an asshole to anyone, at any time, and it’s never personal.
The Punching In Directions feels personal. It feels like a naked attempt to enshrine arbitrary divisions between People We Like and People We Don’t; I have encountered precisely zero (0) people who have actually let the relative amount of power and privilege the modern KKK has before deciding how respectfully to mock them.
LikeLiked by 5 people
The KKK is a self-selected group whose purpose and actions directly involve harming others (unlike the Syrian refugees or young authors of Twilight fanfic). I imagine that particular distinction overrides concerns of overall status up/down-ness.
Which is not to say that it’s now fair game to mock KKK members for traits that are not relevant to their wrongdoing, c.f. the misogynist example in Ozy’s post. (This indeed appears to be something a lot of people often have trouble with)
LikeLiked by 1 person
Mmm. Who do we let define purpose and harms, though? One group of people will say that the refugees are importing evil culture, and choosing to go to vulnerable countries over safe ones. Another group of people will say that the author’s fanfic perpetuates rape culture.
And while I haven’t been following the stats lately, I haven’t heard of any actual hate crimes out of the KKK in some time. Has there been? How many incidents? And if that level of incident-per-membership is our threshhold, what other groups are we now allowed to mock?
Again, I am almost certain that in most cases, these justifications are ex post facto. People are OK with mocking the KKK because they don’t like the KKK. They are no ok with mocking other groups because they like or are members of those groups. Deciding on why (other than ‘We don’t like them!’) is a matter of group cohesion, not reasoning.
LikeLike
This is only an issue if:
a) you think that there is an actually need to police comedy and
b) you have both the ability and authority to do so.
The fact that your conclusion is “feels fair” to you might indicate that one of the above premises doesn’t apply.
LikeLike
Saying “here are the ethics I think apply to comedy” does not imply that I have to police it. I spend a lot of time talking about sexual ethics, and this does not imply that I have the ability or the inclination to burst into people’s bedrooms and say “YOU ARE BEING INSUFFICIENTLY RECIPROCAL!”
LikeLiked by 5 people
That would be a really fun superhero concept.
LikeLiked by 2 people
“Saying “here are the ethics I think apply to comedy” does not imply that I have to police it.”
Correct, but it does imply that “ethics that apply to comedy” is a coherent concept. That seems rather unsubstantiated. Trying to figure out exactly what the boundaries of that idea would be is like trying to figure out which mass system to to use in weighing your invisible green unicorn herd (as they sleep furiously). I mean yeah, you can do it as a way of occupying your time but…
LikeLike
@ozy: The difference being of course that most comedy is explicitly aimed at a wide audience and most sex isn’t.
LikeLike
Policing comedy? No, but the problem with “mean comedy” is that most of it I’ve seen has been about being “mean” and not so much “comedy”, and criticism gets rebuffed with accusations of “you only say that because you’re one of those!” and the old reliable “where’s your sense of humour?” and the self-flattering “Yeah, well this is *art* and real art is *transgressive*”.
Horrible things can be funny, and you laugh and are appalled at yourself for laughing. That’s black comedy. Mean comedy is more about “Ha ha, aren’t I so great, I’m breaking taboos and being transgressive by saying this stuff! Only I’m saying it about an approved group that’s acceptable to mock” and it makes little difference whether this approved group is refugees or (for example) Moslems. It’s not really funny and the only evocation of laughter is “yes, we are all mocking the dummies on the other side”.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Argh, didn’t make myself clear in that last, about the acceptable targets of mockery. Whether it’s right-wing “comedy” about drowned refugees, or left-wing “comedy” about Repressive Misogynistic Muslims – I’ve had the recent unfortunate occasion of seeing a crapton of shitty cartoon jokes about Mohammed and Aisha (I was trying to source a half-remembered Persian-style miniature of her riding into battle) by people who I’m fairly sure didn’t give a flying fuck about paedophilia in general (the lurid, leering creepiness of the nudity and erections in the drawings showed that) but were using any stick to beat the dog, in this case “We’re going to mock Islam/Muslims by mocking Mohammed as a paedophile and we don’t care if that offends religious Muslims who are not all Mad Bombers or Misogynistic Rapists”, is what I meant by “it makes little difference”.
LikeLiked by 1 person
“Policing comedy? No, but the problem with “mean comedy” is ”
See? Literally calling a (idiosyncratic?) genre(?) a “problem” is (again literally) policing it.
LikeLike
Fisher,
(1) Saying there is a problem WITH something is not the same as saying something IS a problem. “I have a problem with my sink” is *not* saying “Sinks are problematic!”
(2) When I have a badge, uniform, and state-issued training certificate from The Comedy Police and I can kick in the comic’s door and drag them off down to the station for offences under The Misuses of Humour Act of 2026, then I consider that I will be policing mean comedy.
Saying “I don’t like mean comedy because it’s mean, not comedy” is me expressing an opinion in the same way as mean comics get to express their feelings about the subjects of their jokes.
LikeLike
The problem with “punching up” is that it just smuggles in all the assumptions it’s trying to justify. If Alice and Bob can agree consistently on what mockery is “punching up” and what isn’t, then it’s because they actually agree on every political question.
It never adds anything to claim “punching up”. Of course they think they’re punching up. Who self-identifies as a bully? Pretty much nobody, that’s who. Saying “punching up” adds no information.
Almost all meta-level reasoning in politics is self-serving obfuscation. There’s nowhere to stand that’s above subjectivity.
An ethical code against “punching down” isn’t an ethical code, because ethical codes bind your action and that does bind anything. If you thought a joke was punching down you wouldn’t think it was funny.
Here’s a better code:
mocking ideas is better than mocking people
mocking individuals is better than mocking groups
mocking self-selected groups is better than mocking non-self-selected groups
LikeLiked by 1 person
I can imagine someone saying “That joke is funny, but I won’t repeat it because it feels like punching down.” In fact, I don’t have to imagine it, because I’ve thought that exact thing myself. Seems like an ethical restraint to me.
LikeLiked by 1 person
That’s a good point. I think I went a little too far. Let me retreat a little bit:
As a purely private ethical rule, “don’t punch down” is useful. Sometimes people really do, in the privacy of their own conscience, decide that a joke which they find funny would be too bullyish and that it’s best not to repeat it. This is a good thing and we should all try to do it.
But even in private, most of the time the rule is moot because you really don’t think making fun of the way disabled people talk is funny. You really do think your political out-group is contemptible and worth of mockery, and powerful enough not to be “down”. In most cases your ethics are conveniently aligned with your humor because you’re a human and hypocrisy is what you were built for.
And it only gets worse in public. Debates about “punching down” aren’t detached meditations on the ethics of humor. They are high stakes pissing contests to determine who’s a Horrible Person Who Should be Shamed. Nobody can back down from that, nobody can be objective. The meta doesn’t matter. What matters is who’s side are you on.
In public the meta almost always reduces to the object.
LikeLike
I think some of the people in this post might self-identify as punching down (or at least not care about not doing so). Maybe also people who make fun of e.g. homeless people or refugees.
But agreed that the definitions of “up” and “down” are in fact the crux of the disagreement a lot of the time. And I like your replacement rules.
LikeLike
Ah, I think I do disagree with “ethical codes don’t bind punching down because you don’t restrain yourself on ethical grounds, you restrain yourself because you don’t think it’s funny”.
I don’t know if it’s punching down or punching up, but I have restrained myself from repeating a juicy gossipy anecdote about [Person Whose Expression of Their Views Drives Me Into Angry Frenzy] online, even when it made me laugh, and I *really* wanted to share it online in order to mock the person and make them look bad as it seemed to puncture their pretensions.
But I didn’t, because of ethical concerns derived from religious principles. I hated not doing this because I wanted to have others laugh at [Person etc.], but I recognised in myself that this was another instance where it was all about the mean and not the comedy; that even though I well believed the anecdote was true, or was likely to be true, or could be true according to the model of [Person etc] I had, I had no objective evidence to back that up, and that even if it were untrue I would still like it as mocking someone I disliked.
I’m not parading my superior virtue (the baser part of me is *still* sulking over this) but ethical concerns do bind people, at least at times 🙂
LikeLike
I agree with your intuitions. But they don’t seem to differentiate between a net power advantage and an advantage on some single axis of privilege.
A while ago there was a story where a teenager made a joke about ‘spending the night’ with Amy Shumer after being at her table at an awards show. Amy responded fairly critically to this post on twitter.
Amy’s position seemed to be that the teenager was punching down along a gender axis. But that’s pretty much the only axis on which random teenager is more privileged than a national level celebrity.
If we accept that teenager was punching down, the results seem to break intuition. The Twilight critic could claim that they’re oppressed on some axis that the fanfiction writer isn’t.
In contrast, if we look at net privilege then we can only determine if someone is “punching down” by taking a holistic look at the lives of everyone involved (in their life, or just a situation). This really limits the times when the critique can be applied.
LikeLiked by 5 people
By the usual definition of privilege Amy Schumer is less privileged than a random teenager. In practice “privilege” is mostly a lexicographical order. The “order” of the relevant axies is something like:
-Race
-Gender
-Sexual Orientation (bisexuality is a complication)
-Disability
-Cis/trans
-Class (this one is sometimes ignored entirely)
In the Case of “Amy vs the random teengage guy” here is how it works. Step one is we check the races. This results in a tie since both are white. Then we check the genders. Since Amy is female we can halt the process and conclude she is less privileged.
note: This is a description of how “privilege” is actually used in practice.
I will also note I am aware of the concept of “intersctionality” but I do not think it solves the problem. Mostly I think “intersectionality” is used to handwave away inconvenient facts (for example that black men suffer mroe violence than black women).
LikeLiked by 3 people
Intersectionality is best regarded as a failed attempt to get a bunch of different groups to stop engaging in the “I’m less privileged” argument by trying to get everybody to acknowledge that everybody else also has problems, rather than a useful-as-applied philosophic approach to the question of privilege.
(It fails because it fails to address the underlying question of why being “less privileged” is a thing people are fighting over in the first place.)
LikeLiked by 1 person
Interesting example.
IMHO, the kid’s joke was in poor taste. He tweeted “Spent the night with @amyschumer. Certainly not the first guy to write that” and Schumer objected to the many guys angle. (Although, to be fair, my impression was that for the first few years of her act, it was about 30% jokes about people she slept with, 30% shock comedy and racism, and 40% her sighing and saying “Oh, God” while prepping her next joke.
2) You’re right that individually, the kid was “Down” from Schumer. I guess the counter-argument would be that on a societal axis, he’s “Up” – that because the joke is that it’s funny that Schumer has spent the night with a number of guys, and because it’s a joke told by a man about a woman, it’s damaging the Struggle.
LikeLike
I think the subject matter of the joke is relevant.
Since the joke is considered to be sexist (I don’t really want to discuss whether it is or not), I think gender is in fact the relevant axis of privilege, so it is “punching down” in the relevant way.
That said, I don’t like sexist jokes about men either, regardless of relative group privilege. But I think this is mostly because any joke that’s about how men really are hurts men who don’t conform to male gender roles. So such jokes have collateral “downward” damage even if the actual target of the joke is someone relatively privileged.
I guess I also would have a problem with a celebrity making fun of a random teenager even if the joke was about an axis of privilege along which the random teenager is more privileged. I guess I’d just rather err on the side of avoiding any kind of “punching” which may be construed as “down”. Maybe. I’m not sure if I can describe my intuitions in a consistent way.
LikeLike
Thanks for the topic, Ozy – it’s very interesting.
I don’t personally think that “up” and “down” are helpful in this context.
1) If we’re just limiting ourselves to mean-spirited comedy, I agree that some people are less appropriate for it than others, but unless you define “up” solely to mean “against an acceptable target for mean spirited comedy”, I don’t think it’s a good fit.
1.1) After reading a mean piece flaying the 11 year old fanfic writer, I don’t think I’d feel much better if I learned that the critic was a disabled ten year old from a broken home. I might excuse it a little more because she’s ten and doesn’t necessarily have full maturity, but I wouldn’t think “Oh, I didn’t realize she was punching *UP*. Carry on, then!”
1.2) Continuing with our intuitions about comedy, people who attend a famous insult comic’s performance and sit at a front table are not necessarily “up” relative to the comic; Rickles and Lampinelli are rich and famous, and I don’t know anything about the guests. They might well be homeless individuals who are big fans, and entered and won a radio contest, but as long as they attended the show voluntarily and in a well-informed manner, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to insult them. Similarly, the recruits in a boot camp movie take a lot of grief from their instructors. They’re “down” from the instructors, but they’re free to leave and there’s a point to the belittlement.
1.3) Generally, my intuition is basically that it’s the characteristics of the subject that determine whether mean comedy is appropriate, much more than the characteristics of the speaker. Garry Trudeau is up as to almost all his subjects, but that doesn’t invalidate his criticism, which stand or fall on their merits.
2) I think “punching up” and “punching down” are pretty dangerous concepts to thoughtful conduct. Once you’ve decided that you’re “down” from your subject, I don’t think that should give you an ethical license to do damage, nor should being “up” prevent actual social commentary. It’s a much better rule to ask “am I doing damage, and if so, why?”
LikeLiked by 4 people
Another thing that complicates the question of punching up/down and and relative power is the audience.if you’re making a joke at the expense of someone more powerful than you, well, are they really more powerful than you if you have a large audience? And also that while you may be punching up at an individual, they could still be a member of a social class that is less powerful and by implication, the joke is still punching down at other members of the group.
I say this because I was particularly struck by the ‘nobody is bothered by jokes mocking politicians’. When Julia Gillard was Prime Minister of Australia there were a lot of mocking jokes about her that were extremely sexist. In one sense, there’s no comedian in the country more powerful than the person who literally rules the country. In another sense, though, sexist jokes about a woman ruler are undermining all women who are in the same sphere, or hope to get there.
(Note: new commenter, not a rationalist, probably unfamiliar with a lot of the commenting norms here.)
LikeLiked by 2 people
I assume “nobody is bothered by jokes mocking politicians” primarily refers to jokes that only mock individual politicians rather than groups they belong to. A sexist joke about a politician definitely mocks their gender in addition to the individual, so it is in fact punching a lot of people in addition to them.
LikeLike
they knew what they were signing up for when they became powerful
That seems like a point where we should be extremely careful about saying that we’re only talking about personal power. No one signs up for the social groups they get at birth, and to a significant extent not even for some of the future developments in life. There might be some justifications to why it’s more OK to make fun of white people than of black people, but “you’ve signed up for it yourself” doesn’t apply here. Seems obvious, but there also seems to be some potential for equivocation here.
I suspect the majority of my audience agrees with this, unless they object on principle to Scott’s blog post where he compared Amanda Marcotte to a Vogon.
On the other hand, if a comedian makes jokes about politicians having goofy facial expressions, no one would object.
I don’t think either of these is good. Maybe not absolutely terrible, but not good either. Which isn’t to say that I can’t enjoy such comedy, but I also can enjoy buying new outfits despite it being ethically indefensible to buy them when I could donate to charity instead.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The problem is that people can be members of many groups.
There are some people who insist that mocking kanye west, charlie sheen or britney spears for their public meltdowns despite their millions of dollars is “punching down” because it’s implicitly mocking people with substance abuse problems or (possible) mental health issues.
Is a white middle class person mocking videos of a mob of poverty stricken Nigerians murdering an albino punching down? The white middle class person probably has more wealth than the entire crowd combined but on that day in that place the mob has all the power.
Is a millionaire black comic mocking poor sourtherners living in a trailer punching down because of economics? Or up because of race?
Going on gut instinct alone doesn’t seem to be a reliable metric since the thought of a group of people at the bottom of the punching hierarchy mocking Mr Rodgers stomach cancer also feels wrong.
If someone hates you and wants to paint your actions as “punching down” then they’ll always be able to find some group that some of your targets are technically a part of and paint your words as an attack on that group.
If you mock former president George Bush for the stupid things he says and for being unintelligent then are you implicitly punching down against people with learning disabilities and speech problems?
A surprisingly large portion of the worlds bullies are good at convincing themselves that they’re always punching up.
As some people use it the whole concept appears to be little more than a way of saying “I’m allowed to hit you but you’re not allowed to hit back”.
Is there a right of punchback? If you mock Trumps hair and he notices is he allowed publicly mock your face?
LikeLiked by 4 people
I made this point in another comment, but I think it matters both what the general power dynamic is and what the joke is about. I would classify a joke as “punching down” if either the general power dynamic is hugely imbalanced in favor of the one making the joke OR the joke itself is along an axis where the one being mocked is less fortunate/privileged.
Mocking a celebrity for a public meltdown: punching down, because what you’re making fun of is mental illness and/or substance abuse.
A rich westerner mocking poor Nigerians who are murdering an albino: also punching down, because the general power dynamic is in favor of the rich westerner.
So I would classify all of your examples as “punching down” because they all meet one of those criteria, and I think just one is enough.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Right, then the problem becomes that basically everything can be treated as punching down.
Even if you confine yourself to mocking trumps face
then there’s going to be some group of poor sods who due to medical reasons or otherwise, have faces stuck in similar shapes and thus consider your comments “punching down”
LikeLiked by 3 people
I hate to be that guy, but it’s Stephenie Meyer, with no a’s. (Yeah, I know it’s weird.)
LikeLiked by 1 person
Many of the groups that fall in the punching down category are more like Twilight than the fanfiction. Meyer is often looked at with dislike and contempt, but is still a widely published author. Similarly, Islam is often disliked, but is still a major world religion.
LikeLiked by 1 person
It seems so bizarre to me how Islam is treated by so many on the left. Islam is like a giant turbo-charged version of everything the left accuses Christianity of. Punching down against women, sexual minorities, other religions, atheists. All the stuff that energizes the social justice case against Christianity. But it’s the right that’s highly critical of Islam, and the response from the left is often to switch the axis from gender/religion/sexual orientation to race/country and say “hey stop punching islam. that’s punching down. that’s racist and imperialist”.
It doesn’t strike me as particularly principled on either side. The right suddenly becomes concerned about gender equality and oppression of gays as soon as strange, frightening foreigners are involved, and the left suddenly forgets to get pissed off about the worst patriarchal tyranny on earth because they’d rather call their domestic adversaries “racist”.
LikeLiked by 4 people
As someone on the left who doesn’t like sexism or homophobia and also doesn’t like blanket condemnations of Islam (or Christianity for that matter), I think my stance is mostly principled: when someone actively uses their religion in an oppressive way, I dislike it and I will state my disagreement. But there are lots of Christians and Muslims who practice their religion in non-oppressive or anti-oppressive ways, or for whom religion is in some ways oppressive but in some ways helpful and liberating. I think blanket statements about Christianity or Islam – or worse, Christians or Muslims – are overly broad, alienating, and insufficiently accurate.
It’s also true that I won’t get into arguments with Christians or Muslims about what their faith entails or whether it is a good faith or not; this is because I don’t have nearly enough information about either religion to make any kind of good argument. I will absolutely argue with them about individual issues if applicable. And if it turns out an individual Christian or Muslim in fact supports gender equality and gay rights (which is frequent in my experience – to be sure this is because I’ve spent much of my life in liberal bubbles, but still), then it sure is good I didn’t use their religion to inaccurately insult them!
LikeLiked by 3 people
The “I don’t object to your religion, just to when you use it in offensive ways” position is fine. As an old school “it was noble to defend the Nazis right to march in Skokie” liberal, I can get behind it.
But I can also recognize that a whole lot of other people around me have committed themselves to world views that are wholly inconsistent with that position. If you’re spending your time dressing down entire social groups for “toxic masculinity” or “rape culture” or “objectification,” and explicitly connecting objectionable outcomes to the way they putatively think about the world, then calling out Islam is on the table.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Oh, there’s also another reason why I don’t think it makes sense to me to object to Islam-as-a-whole on the basis of sexism or homophobia, even though I am a bisexual woman. (This applies to other religions too.)
As a non-Muslim in a non-Muslim society, I am not really in practice subject to sexism or homophobia that stems from Islamic worldviews. Much like, as Ozy wrote in a previous post, the primary targets of nerd-sexism-against-women are nerd women, the primary targets (at least, the ones who feel it the most) of Islamic-sexism-against-women are Muslim women.* This means that if I were to object to Islam on the grounds of sexism, I’d be doing so basically in defense of Muslim women.
But my impression is that Muslim women generally don’t want the kind of “defense” that involves utterly condemning their religion, because it basically insults them as well. So denouncing Islam-as-a-whole for sexism is not only ineffective at the presumed goal of helping Muslim women, it in fact hurts Muslim women as collateral damage a lot of the time.
*Perhaps the exception is non-Muslim women in Muslim families and communities, who may well feel that Islam is to blame for any sexism they endure in those families and communities. In which case they should certainly feel free to express that, though I would still argue that it’s more accurate to say that a particular form of Islam is causing their troubles.
@Patrick
I think “toxic masculinity” and “rape culture” and “objectification” are all useful concepts. I think they absolutely can be used in a way that’s compatible with not overly broadly condemning whole groups or belief systems.
LikeLike
How?
LikeLike
I actually don’t quite understand your confusion – to me these concepts are in no way inherently only applicable to broad swaths of society.
For instance, I can observe a conversation in which someone displays a toxic view of masculinity, or in which someone says something objectifying. (Think of stereotypes of frat bros talking to each other about women.) Both of these things can exist on an individual level.
“Rape culture” is more group-based because it has the word “culture” in it. I don’t think I would agree that the U.S. as a whole has a rape culture, but I think there are pockets of society in which the term would apply – again, some frats might have this sort of culture, or on the other hand, a particularly conservative religious community might have a different sort of rape culture. But also an individual might display an attitude that matches the kind of thing people talk about when they say “rape culture”, in which case I might draw on the concept by saying something like “rape culture mindset”.
I wouldn’t say that frats in general, or Christians in general, or conservatives in general have rape culture, though, because all those groups are really diverse.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I don’t think the power difference is the reason this seems cruel.
Suppose Meyer decides to take up a new art form, like sculpting. She still has age, fame, and wealth on her side, but her first sculptures are every bit as crappy as the 12-year-old’s fanfic. Is it now fun, entertaining, good-spirited snark to mock her for being bad at sculpting? I don’t think so; I think it’s nearly as cruel as mocking the fanfic.
I think the reason it’s cruel is that those crappy works shouldn’t be taken seriously and weren’t meant to be. A novice’s work generally shouldn’t be judged by the same standard as an expert’s. She’s doing her best, but there’s no way her works can be as good as an experienced artist’s yet, and everyone knows it; making that comparison explicit is just going to humiliate her.
On the other hand, if she submits it to a contest or exhibition and expects to be judged by the same standards as established sculpters, then she’s asking for bad reviews, and she ought to get them. People who insist on being taken seriously deserve some empathy if they really don’t know what they’re getting into, but they also deserve to get a taste of what being taken seriously means.
A lot of “punching down” situations follow that pattern, I think.
Making fun of kids pretending to be animals and cartoon characters is cruel. Playing pretend is a harmless, fun thing kids do. If they come up with silly backstories that don’t quite make sense, well, they’re doing their best, and anyway the point is to entertain themselves, not convince you; they aren’t asking to be taken seriously.
But if they do ask to be taken seriously — if, say, they start pestering the school nurse about their wings itching, or they form an online movement to promote trans-species rights and lob accusations of bigotry at anyone who disagrees — then they deserve to be treated the same as anyone else who put forth the same claims, even if that means they get mocked for it. They knew what they were signing up for.
This idea, that it’s OK to hurt people who you perceive as able to take it, seems kind of awful. You don’t know whether they value their “gobs of money and social privilege” more or less than the harm you’re dealing them, and perhaps more importantly, you don’t know how much harm other people have already dealt them using the same logic.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Pingback: Aprillia, aprillia! | Nuoren naisen rintasyöpä.
Pingback: Lo scatto del velocista. Ecco perché voglio essere come Jesse Owens. – Silvia Ghiara
Pingback: Lo scatto del velocista. Ecco perché voglio essere come Jesse Owens.