ESPF Colloquium: Jordan Mackenzie, Humourlessness as a moral vice

Humorlessness as a Moral Vice

We’re often quick to point fingers at people who fail to find humor in themselves. And our accusations have a moral tinge: we decry people for being sanctimonious buzzkills, and command them to ‘get over themselves’. But are these reactions justified? And what, if anything, justifies them? My aim in this paper is to answer these questions. I’ll argue that humorlessness involves making a morally unacceptable comedic exception for oneself in a way that is both self- and other-disrespecting. Nevertheless, it follows from my account that not all failures to find humor in oneself constitute instances of humorlessness: we aren’t making a morally unacceptable exception for ourselves when we laugh at jokes that genuinely call into question our equal moral standing. I’ll then explore what implication this account has for accusations of humorlessness in oppressive social contexts, and I’ll argue that one of the harms of oppression is that it makes having a sense of humor towards oneself morally risky