Episode 146, The Philosophy of Comedy (Part III - Further Analysis and Discussion)
The Panpsycast Philosophy Podcast
Jack Symes | Andrew Horton, Oliver Marley, and Rose de Castellane
4.8 • 612 Ratings
🗓️ 7 September 2025
⏱️ 59 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 2021, Netflix released His Dark Material, a Christmas stand-up special by Irish–British comedian Jimmy Carr. The show sparked international outrage. Toward the end of the set, Carr delivered what he called a 'career ender' – a joke about the Holocaust, in which he described the Nazis' murder of thousands of 'Gypsies' as a 'positive'.
The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, the Auschwitz Memorial, and the UK government condemned the joke as 'appalling', 'abhorrent', and 'racist'; Carr, critics said, was trading on the 'last acceptable form of racism'.
Comedy touches every part of our lives. We tell jokes at the pub, around the dinner table, and by the office coffee machine. We all know someone who makes us laugh – and someone who seems to take things too far. But is there a line when it comes to humour? And if there is, who gets to draw it? Should we suspend our moral judgements when the lights go down and the curtain goes up? Or do jokes, like most speech acts, carry moral weight?
To answer these questions, we need to understand the nature of comedy itself – what exactly it is we're responding to when we laugh. Humour might be a release of nervous tension, a playful disruption of expectations, or – more troublingly, if it applies to Carr's joke – a means of asserting social superiority. No doubt, comedy has the power to shape our culture and perceptions. But, as we'll find out, it also tells us something about who we are, who we ought to be, and the things we value most.
Links
Abrahams, Daniel – Winning Over the Audience: Trust and Humor in Stand‐Up Comedy (paper)
Anderson, Luvell – Roasting Ethics (paper)
Bergson, Henri – Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (book)
Carroll, Noël – Ethics and Comic Amusement (paper)
Carroll, Noël – Humour: A Very Short Introduction (book)
Carroll, Noël – I'm Only Kidding: On Racist and Ethnic Jokes (paper)
Carroll, Noël – Cruelty and Humour (paper)
Critchley, Simon – On Humour (book)
Deen, Phillip – What Could It Mean to Say That Today's Stand‐Up Audiences Are Too Sensitive? (paper)
Gimbel, Steven (ed.) – The Philosophy of Comedy (book)
Hick, Darren Hudson – Why Can't You Take a Joke? The Several Moral Dimensions of Pilfering a Ha‐Ha (paper)
Morreall, John – Comic Relief: A Comprehensive Philosophy of Humor (book)
Morreall, John – Philosophy of Laughter and Humor (book)
Morreall, John – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Philosophy of Humor (article)
Smuts, Aaron – Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Comedy (article)
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Pan |
| 0:02.0 | Psygast |
| 0:04.0 | Part 3 |
| 0:20.0 | Further analysis and discussion. |
| 0:23.5 | So in our first installment, we looked at the nature of comedy. |
| 0:27.2 | What's the objects of comic amusement? |
| 0:30.2 | And the second installment, we looked at the ethics and morality of comedy and of humor. |
| 0:34.6 | We kicked off this full series with Lucy introducing this topic, telling us to go and read all this stuff about comedy because she had an awful night at a stand-up comedy event. And you teased us at the start, Lucy, and you said, you'll tell us later on. We're later on now, so what happened to you? What happened? I've asked that question at times. I'm also sorry that you felt uncomfortable there. Sorry, I shouldn't have been so. No, no, no, no, no. It's fine. I can joke about it now. Enough time has passed. So picture this. I was on a second date. Ooh. And I went to a comedy show, not something that I would usually choose to do. I like watching comedy. I watch comedy at home. |
| 1:12.2 | I find things funny sometimes. Where was the comedy club that you went to? We went to Blackstock |
| 1:18.1 | Market in Liverpool, which is relatively new venue. Oh, have you been there, John? Yeah. |
| 1:22.8 | And they do the... Did you show for a stand-up special there and make the audience film a couple? |
| 1:27.5 | Yeah, I was about |
| 1:28.7 | to say |
| 1:28.9 | were you |
| 1:29.1 | the dead |
| 1:29.6 | it's the one that you don't he was the date and a something order yeah yeah it's really good though anyway so it was a novel experience for me I've never been on a date before. No, I'm kidding. It was my first time at a stand-up |
| 1:45.7 | comedy gig, and there were three comedians lined up. I won't tell you their names. And the first |
| 1:51.8 | one, I really enjoyed. It was a lot of wordplay. It was a very unassuming man, middle-aged, |
| 1:58.2 | looked like if I said to you, very boring office man who comes across a bit |
| 2:03.9 | weird, whatever you imagine in your head, that's what he looks like. And all of his jokes were |
| 2:09.1 | very punny and I enjoyed that very much. And then we had a second act who wasn't terrible, |
| 2:14.6 | but I can't remember much of it, so that's not the best sign. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Jack Symes | Andrew Horton, Oliver Marley, and Rose de Castellane, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Jack Symes | Andrew Horton, Oliver Marley, and Rose de Castellane and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.