Noel Carroll on Humour and Morality

Philosophy Bites

Nigel Warburton

Education, Philosophy, Society & Culture

4.6 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 6 July 2013

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Must humour be moral? What about jokes that rely on immoral attitudes? Can they be funny? Are humour and morality simply separate spheres. Noel Carroll explores the relationship between humour and morality in this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Philosophy Bites with me Nigel Warburton and me David Edmonds.
0:07.0	If you enjoy Philosophy Bites please support us.
0:10.0	We are currently unfunded and all donations would be gratefully received.
0:14.0	For details go to W.W. philosophy bites.com.
0:19.0	Can a racist, sexist, homophobic or other politically incorrect joke be funny?
0:24.4	Noel has built a serious academic reputation thinking about jokes.
0:28.7	Noel, welcome to Philosophy Bites.
0:31.0	Thank you.
0:31.7	Great to be here again. The topic we're going to focus on is
0:35.2	humor and morality. Why is this such an important issue now? Well, probably the topic of
0:41.9	humor and morality has been perennial because of the topics that
0:46.6	humor deals with, including sex, cleanliness, intelligence, but probably in the last quarter of the 20th century and now in the 21st century,
0:57.0	it's become even more pressing as issues of political correctness have come to the fore pressing both for those who are politically
1:05.9	correct and those who are not politically correct.
1:08.8	In terms of the latter, many of the leading comics of the day are comics whose topic itself is political correctness.
1:17.0	Well, one way out of this would be just to say, humor has nothing to do with morality.
1:21.0	They're completely separate spheres, it's completely immoral.
1:25.0	That certainly is a very well represented position.
1:28.0	I mean the idea is that what's said in humor stays in humor.
1:32.9	Humor is beyond good and evil.
1:35.2	And the immoralist has some reasons for thinking this.
1:38.2	For example, if we were to look at various
	...

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