Policing laughter, becoming less human

Since everything is individuated by matter and is placed in its genus or species through its form, the accidents that follow from the matter are accidents of the individual, and by these accidents individuals of the same species differ one from another. But the accidents that follow from the form are properly passions of the genus or species, and so they are found in all things participating in the nature of the genus or species, as risibility in man follows from the form, for laughter comes from a certain kind of understanding in the soul of man.

              -St. Thomas Aquinas from On Being and Essence

“…as risibility in man follows from the form, for laughter comes from a certain kind of understanding in the soul of man.” To put it crudely, the medieval scholastics viewed a sense of humor as an essential feature of being human. This sounds odd to us, likely because a few Monty Python sketches and a dearth of historical literacy has led many of us to picture the Middle Ages as a miserable, tedious, dirty and squalid time of endless oppression. Not so! Such an age could never have given rise to so many men with the leisure to sit around and wonder about what makes man what he is.

What is laughter?

Our ideas about risibility have altered considerably. When faced with the question, “Why do people laugh?” a great many of us would turn to a neurologist for a mechanical explanation. In a form of scientism, we train ourselves to perceive human experience as a basket of neurological quirks bred into being over some mysterious path of evolution. Risibility appears through this lens to be a complex phenomenon of synapses firing. The obvious short answer to the question, “Why do people laugh?” Because something is funny!

Thought control and the end of the joke

These days, however, certain things are not allowed to be funny any more. There is nothing quite like a book club of moderately progressive white women discussing The Hate U Give to convince you that the post-modern regime of anti-racism is some pretty serious thought control. The women sit in anguished silence, struggling in vain to find something acceptable to utter aloud. They appear desperate to find a phrase that adequately expresses their wrongness (by virtue of the melanin content in their skin) while also not stepping on a verbal land-mine and falling into yet deeper error. When certain ideas are off limits, we steer so far from them that it is a struggle to put any aspect of reality into words.

If this is the choppy water in which we swim, it’s hard to feel free to laugh. What tacit approval are you transmitting with an involuntary guffaw at an ever-slightly-so off-color joke? (no pun intended) There is no denying that jokes can be ugly, vicious, crass, and distasteful. The way to discourage these, however, is not to ban them but to let adolescents try to land a few duds and learn from experience how to moderate their humor. Of course, all of this is assuming the young person in question is being fed something other than a steady diet of the vulgar and tawdry. Why then are we so concerned with policing laughter?

The connection to dignity

Part of the trouble is a misconception of human dignity. Pay attention to the way people speak about the dignity of the human person and you will frequently find it spoken of as something that is taken away from the oppressed. This is to get it all backwards. Human dignity is inherent; no one can take it away. The person put even in the most degraded position by the sins of another has not lost his dignity. Losing the ability to speak and eat, dress oneself and move about freely does not subtract from dignity.

While no one can take human dignity away, there is a sense in which through sinful action we can diminish our own human dignity. In the situation of the oppressor and the oppressed, it is not the person held in bondage who has lost dignity but the person with power who has so abused it. The oppressor has made himself, in a sense, less human.

With our humor, we seem to feel a need to protect people’s human dignity. A joke told in poor taste is seen as harm to some person. But the dignity of that person is inviolable. “Sticks and stone will break my bones…”

On the other hand, allowing people to laugh because they find something funny is necessary for the full expression of what it means to be human. The thought police are on a mission to prevent certain utterances and ban jokes to protect human dignity. Through this ill-fated project, we may be becoming less human.