Recorded live and in person at the Annual Research Forum of the Geneva Centre for Affective Sciences, Prof. David Shoemaker (Cornell University) talks about the nature and ethics of amusement, as well as how amusement can deflate anger and contribute towards living a good life.

Read more about Dave and his work:

https://sites.google.com/site/dshoemakr/home

https://philosophy.cornell.edu/david-shoemaker

https://philpeople.org/profiles/david-shoemaker

Find the interview transcript below:

The Philosophy of Emotion podcast

Matheson: We laugh at things we find funny and we often laugh at things that aren’t funny. Amusement is big business with many people making a living from being stand-up comedians, comedy writers and so on. It’s also a big part of our social lives. We joke around, we tease, we mock our friends and we often make light in harrowing circumstances. But what is amusement and when is it merited? And even if amusement is merited in response to something, should we always be amused,all things considered?

Matheson: Today we’re joined by Professor David Shoemaker. He is the Wynn and William Y. Hutchinson Professor of Ethics and Public Life at Cornell University. His research spans moral psychology, agency and responsibility, The Nature of Self, Personal Identity and Ethics, and the Philosophy and Moral Psychology of Humour. He’s the author of Responsibility from the Margins, published in 2015, and Wisecracks and The Architecture of Praise and Blame, both published in 2024. He’s here to shed light on the nature and ethics of amusement.

Matheson: Hello Dave.

Shoemaker: Hello Ben, thanks for having me.

Matheson: So let’s get into it then. So, first question. Emotions are often thought to have certain key features, including an appraisal, an action tendency, and a phenomenology. Can you start by telling us what you think about these with respect to amusement?

Shoemaker: Yeah, so just to fill in the gaps on what the view is about emotions generally. So take something like fear, and it’s got the three A’s, as you said. So there’s an affect, which is sweaty, heart-pounding, that kind of thing. And we’re all familiar with that. And then there’s an appraisal of something typically construed as dangerous or a threat. And then you’ve got an action tendency. And we like to think of action tendencies relative to the aim of the action tendency. So fear has multiple action tendencies. It could be the three Fs, so fight, flight, or freeze. But they have the aim of avoiding the danger. So your question is quite controversial because some theorists who talk about humor and amusement don’t think amusement is an emotion. And they do so because they don’t think that it has a clear or coherent action tendency. So the affect is, we’re all familiar with it, some people describe it as levity, it’s a feeling of being lifted in a way, or there’s a lot of enjoyment of positive feelings of pleasure. And the appraisal is just in response to something that you take to be funny. So what’s the action tendency? Well, you might want to say it’s to laugh, and clearly we do laugh sometimes at what’s funny, but there’s lots of times, say you’re alone, you’re watching a comic, and you’re judging that it’s funny throughout, but you’re not really laughing, and we laugh at things all the time that aren’t funny. It’s a kind of social grease. So just to kind of get along, we’ll laugh at the boss’s terrible jokes. That’s the typical response. So laughter doesn’t help us with respect to what the action tendency. I favor something that’s pro-social. So amusement is a lean-in emotion, and it’s the kind of thing that we want to share. So we’re in the middle of a group of people, and we’re having a great time. We’re going back and forth with the one-liners and teasing and mocking and so forth. And we’re leaning in, and we want to top each other or contribute to the game. And laughter also contributes to that pro-social thing. If you can’t think of the witty one-liner, then you’re at least laughing and you’re joining in in the kind of celebration. So I think we can make sense of it, we really must think of amusement as an emotion and that’s what you have to do totry to make sense of the action tendency.

Matheson: That’s very helpful. So on your view when we’re amused — when we laugh, for example — we appraise something as amusement worthy and so identify it correctly or incorrectly as being an instance of something funny. A notable feature of your view is that funniness is response-dependent. It is a response-dependent value because amusement worthiness is a response-dependent property. Can you say a bit more what it means for something to be response-dependent and whether there are competing views of response-dependent?

Shoemaker: Yeah, this is a tough and controversial issue these days. So I think here about response dependent most closely associated with values. Certain human values are best construed as response dependent. That simply means you can’t understand or articulate the nature of the value without some essential reference to to the responses that we’ve got. So I can’t make sense of what’s admirable, say, without making some kind of essential reference to our admiring responses and what that admiration consists in. Same thing with the disgusting, or the enviable. These are values, or in some cases disvalues, that we can’t describe independently of our responses of disgust So I’m very attracted to the response-dependent view here, and I think the case is very easily made for amusement, even though lots of theorists of amusement have not taken it that way.

Matheson: Response-dependent theories of amusement suggest there’s also response-independent theories. Could you say a bit more about them and say why you should prefer response-dependence to response-independence about amusement?

Shoemaker: Yeah. So as I mentioned, there have been lots of theories over the years, and it stretches back to at least Hobbes and probably before Hobbes. Theories of, as Hobbes puts it, those grimacing faces called amusement. He says something like that. And he looked down on it because he had a theory of amusement that it has something to do with superiority. We are amused by people who fail. And we feel superior to them. And so, ha, ha, ha, ha. And that’s supposed to be a response independent theory. So response independent theories of amusement say that certain things are funny or the amusing, I should say, that’s the relevant value. Certain things are funny independently of our amused responses. And so they’ll point, they try to give these monistic theories. There’s one thing that makes things funny. And so Hobbes thought superiority makes things funny. And Freud and others have thought that the one thing that somehow makes things funny has something to do with It’s relief of tension that we’ve got. By far, the favorite theory that responds independent theory of the musing is an incongruity theory. And so this has come from many different quarters. And so the thought is, look… What makes the thing funny is just a kind of mismatch between our expectations and the reality in some way. Or there’s a pattern that we’re expecting and it’s upended. So these are all response-independent theories. What that applies is that something can be funny regardless of whether or not any of us find it funny.

Matheson: So we can all be mistaken.

Shoemaker: Yes, and we can all be thoroughly mistaken in both ways. So we find things that are funny that actually aren’t. And I just find these views to be wildly implausible, certainly taken as independent monistic views. And that’s because they’re just vulnerable to a ton of counterexamples. For Hobbes, there are lots of things that are funny that have nothing to do with superiority. A pun or a knock-knock joke, right? There are lots of things that are funny that have nothing to do with relief of tension, for crying out loud. I mean, we’re just going back and forth in our teasing and fun, mocking way, and there’s just nothing there. There was never any tension to be relieved in the first place. And when it comes to incongruity, there are tons of things that are incongruous that aren’t funny. I come home to find my family slaughtered. Incongruous, unexpected, but by God, it’s not funny. And so some people have shifted it. I’m not going to go into the weeds on this. And so I think that any attempt that you give, any attempt at a response independent theory of the funny is going to be rife with counterexamples. So what do you have? You have a bunch of different things that we find amusing. And you’re looking for some kind of unity to the group. And they’re trying to put it into the incongruity box or the superiority box or whatever. And I think because of the raft of counterexamples and because it’s such a weirdly disjunctive group of things that we find funny, that the more plausible explanation is that what makes these part of the rubric of the value of the funny is simply that these are the kinds of things that we humans find amusing.

Matheson: So, next question. So in your work you distinguish between different types of response dependent accounts and you defend a normative response dependent account. A problem that’s been cited for normative response dependent understanding of amusement is that it can seem hard to explain what makes an instance of amusement merited. What some people also call fitting, accurate or correct. So while the response-dependent theorists can appeal to some factor beyond funniness to explain this, like incongruity or one of the other factors you mentioned, the response-dependent theorists can appeal to this. So how do you think this problem can be solved?

Shoemaker: Yeah, so I’m glad you noted this. The view that I prefer is the normative response dependent theory. That differs from something like a dispositional response dependent theory. And so that makes sense of something like colors. Redness has to make essential reference to human responses. We see the thing as red. And that’s just to say that redness involves properties that are disposed to have us seeing this red. So that’s a very kind of descriptive causal mechanism kind of view. And I think that that, as applied to the amusement, is just mistaken, I think we correct each other all the time: You’re wrong! You’re missing the joke here when you fail to be amused by it. Or if I’m amused by something that is just remarkably stupid, and you say to me, no, no, there’s nothing funny in that, okay? So I think that we have to think of the amusing as something that merits it. And so that’s how you put it, and that’s the view, and you’re exactly right. Okay, so now you’ve shifted away from… The beauty of the response to independent view is that we can point to these properties, incongruity, superiority, and so forth, and… What the normative response dependent theory says is, well, what makes it funny is just that it merits amusement. So that’s the normative part, the meriting part. Now, what makes something merit, amusement. Well, one of the, I think, features, and you might think it’s a bug of my view, but I think one of the nice features of the view is it says it’s impossible for us to have an adequate, exhaustive, comprehensive, first-order theory of the funny. All I can do are point to some properties that in some circumstances we find amusing. Uh, so sometimes incongruity is funny and sometimes it’s not when I come home to the murdered family. And so. What we say is, is that when there are instances in which there are, there is incongruity, it’s funny also because of maybe these other properties and it just happens to be that we’re built in a way such that we respond with amusement to these, this, this conglomeration of properties. Now… oh, I’ve lost my train of thought. So we’re looking at ways of resisting the worry here. And so what we have to do is say, to make the view not a dispositional view, we have to say that, well, it’s not just whatever tends to amuse people. That’s the dispositional view. Instead, it has to be whatever would amuse people, were they in a proper context? And were their senses of humor properly developed, refined, and — what’s crucial — unobstructed? So I have to be in the right position. I have to be in the right mood. And I have to have a well-developed sense of humor. I like the comparison here to a sommelier. So think here of the value being the tasty wine or something, or the delicious in that case. Well… It can’t just be that the delicious is whatever people respond to saying it’s delicious or respond to a certain kind of amusement. Well, we rely on people who have discriminating tastes. And so they’ve got a well-developed and refined sense of taste. They are able to discriminate things quite finely. And they haven’t just eaten the Jolly Rancher or sour candy before they sip the wine. So the same has got to be true for senses of humor. And so those senses of humor that are well-developed, refined, et cetera, are the ones that were they to respond to this set of properties with amusement, that’s the kind of thing that makes it funny. And when I say that obscuring factors are really important here, there are lots of things that prevent us from seeing the funny properties that we would ordinarily or otherwise see if we who weren’t ideologically biased. So there’s political humor that people, if it comes from people on the right, people on the left say, that’s just not funny. And you could take the exact same structure of a kind of joke and have it now targeting people on the right. And now the lefties say, oh, that’s hilarious. And so there’s a bias there. And it’s preventing them from seeing the funny when it’s their own people who are being laughed at. And then of course the biggest obstruction I think is a moral obstruction that sometimes people have moral commitments that prevent them from seeing things that are otherwise funny and That was a long-winded answer.

Matheson: That was excellent, and segues into my next question. So we’ve got these people who have these well-honed, unobstructed humour sensibilities. So I understand how you understand that in the abstract and the theoretic, but how do we go around identifying that in real life? Because you can imagine a circumstance where there’s two film critics. They’ve both made discriminating choices and so on and so forth, but then they disagree. So it might be, okay, it sounds like we have to say that this one has got a more refined or less obstructed humour sensibility or sense of humour than the other. Is there a way to settle this dispute or can we just say that they’re both right?

Shoemaker: Well, that’s the tough case for this view. Though, of course, I don’t think it’s that tough. But first, in terms of identifying good senses of humour, I think that it really behooves us to take a look at childhood development. I mean, children develop a better and better sense of humor, we think. They start off often with knock-knock jokes, and they get the rhythm, but they don’t get what the knock-knock joke is supposed to do. And very often just complete non-sequiturs that kids will say that they think are hilarious, and they’re wrong. But what we’re trying to do is teach them how to figure out what content to put in here and kind of play on words that’s typically expected. So we see that development happen with kids. We also see at the other end of life, sometimes the sense of humor worsens. And so that tells you something normative is going on here. We think there are better and worse senses of humor. And so it pays us to take a look at the kind of capacities that children are developing. Of course, their cognitive capacities, they’re learning how to better comprehend things. They have epistemic capacities that are getting better. They’re able to understand things. They’ll be able to know what factors are being pointed to. And then most importantly, I think, is they’re developing a kind of empathy. That they’re able to learn, oh, there are lines here. Especially when it comes to friends that you don’t cross. Now, the hard problem that you present is the one of radical disagreement. And I think that those cases, they exist. So I have a kind of universalist ideal here about things that are funny, but I don’t want to deny that there can be people who are perfectly well-developed, refined, and unobstructed senses of humor that just disagree. And I’m okay with that. But I think, so the point of what I’m trying to do is to say those cases are going to be actually fairly rare because there are tons of obstructing factors that we have to peel away first. And, okay, once you do that, you’re going to gravitate towards a kind of agreement, but you may not get all the way there.

Matheson: So far we’ve talked about the nature of amusement. I just wanted to turn now a little bit to the ethics of amusement. So just because something is funny, it doesn’t mean that we ought to laugh at it. Can you say a bit more about how you understand the ethics of amusement? For instance, should we never laugh at jokes that are cruel, hurtful or otherwise immoral?

Shoemaker: So again, just focusing on amusement, not laughter necessarily. And the answer is the boring but true answer that it depends. So I defend some morally troublesome or thought to be morally troublesome bits of humor. I think the key to doing so, I’ve already laid out, that I think the incongruity and the superiority and all the other monistic things response, independent views, each latch onto a kind of humor that get that right, that that’s the right answer, that in certain cases of many jokes, say, that it’s incongruity that’s doing the key work here, as long as you have a pretty flexible notion of what incongruity is. And there are other cases where we see somebody, you know, slip and pull, the classic banana peel, that’s superiority that’s going on there. So what I want to suggest is that we just put all of these properties and a lot more into the kitchen sink. And so it’s a mix of these properties that makes things funny. So just put them all on the sink and sometimes superiority, sometimes a combination with incongruity. But there’s also other things like intention, our relationship, our history, as I say, when we’re going back and forth, cultural touchstones. I’m just saying something that you recognize comes from this thing here, and maybe we both shared that as well. All sorts of social things. Those properties go in the kitchen sink as well. And among those properties are going to be meanness, sometimes stereotyping sometimes, and out and out lying sometimes. So when I’m pulling your leg, I’ve taken you down the garden path, and I’ve gotten you to believe something that is false. I’ve lied to you. And the funny is, in that case, you were discovering, hey, wait a minute. That didn’t really happen. And so the funny there is that I successfully deceived you, which we ordinarily take to be immoral. If I make fun of you, I’m drawing public attention. I’m highlighting a failure of yours for public ridicule or laughter. There’s meanness to that. And in that case, it’s the meanness that makes the thing funny. So what I want to stress is that there are reasons to be amused. And they come from that kitchen sink pile of properties combined in a certain sort of way that we’ll never be able to articulate in a first order theory. And there are reasons for moral upset. There are what I think of as blamey reasons. Lying is a blamey reason. Stereotyping or exploiting stereotypes, especially of race and gender. And a kind of meanness or cruelty that is associated with mockery. Those are things that give you a reason as well to be morally upset. Sometimes they both go into the mix. So mockery, what makes the thing funny is the meanness, but that’s also a reason for the person who’s mocked to be morally upset. And so the question is, okay, how do these reasons weigh against each other? And sometimes the funny reasons went out. And so the best all things considered reaction is amusement. And sometimes when it’s seriously cruel. Even though there may be some funny in it, the cruelty just far outweighs it. So the proper answer is to be angry, to morally blame somebody. So the key to the model is just to see that we’ve got these competing kinds of reasons and they contribute to each other in really interesting ways. And so that’s why the answer of whether or not we should never or always respond to these cruel cruel or mean things with amusement is the boring it depends and it depends the way in which depends what those specific properties are and how they weigh against the reasons for amusement.

Matheson I’m a big fan of that kind of approach because I think it’s very hard and I think it applies elsewhere. It’s very hard to give a one-size-fits-all approach you have to look at each case and see how it weighs and it could be i think it even could be that you could have there was one day where the same joke would have been funny for you but the next day it may not be funny anymore for other reasons the other person’s not sensitive to and you might be upset or offended then but you weren’t the other day.

Matheson: Another aspect of your view is that amusement is psychologically and normatively incompatible with anger. I wonder if you could say a bit say a bit more about that

Shoemaker: Yeah, so it’s related to what I was just talking about, but in a different way. So I think there’s a boring fact here that it feels like amusement and anger are just psychologically incompatible. But what I’m interested in are the cases in which you’re angry. And we’re having a quarrel. And I can somehow say something that will amuse you in a way that it dissolves the quarrel. And so I’m really interested in the relation between the two. I can’t be simultaneously angrily blaming you and be amused at the very same time at the very same events from the very same perspective. But what I think is going on is that if we’re able to make fun of the situation we’re in somehow and to see that in the long run it really doesn’t matter, this little stupid dispute we’re having, then we can kind of see the absurdity and being so invested in it. And I think that anger and amusement of a certain sort involve viewing the same events at the same time but from different perspectives. And what I find fascinating is that anger responds to things that we take to matter. So it really matters to me how you think of me. And if it turns out you’ve been disregarding me, you’ve just said whatever, I’m going to get angry at that because there’s something that really matters to me and you’re disrespecting it. I think all other emotions respond to what we take to matter. Fear responds to danger.It matters that I respond with fear because I want to preserve my bodily integrity. Disgust.All these things are taken to respond to the things that matter to us. What’s fascinating about amusement sometimes is that it’s a response to things that don’t matter. So that when you trip and fall, and I find that funny, it’s only in virtue of the fact that I see you’re okay. And it turns out that as I’m about to be amused, there’s blood spurting everywhere, or maybe you’ve got a couple broken limbs. Okay, that sucks the funny right out of it. Because now it matters. So that’s why I think we can shift perspectives in our life. And here I think about the work of Thomas Nagel, where we have this capacity as humans. It’s a distinctive capacity, and it’s the cause of all sorts of trouble for us. But we can be really engaged in the things that we think matter. Those are the things that give us reasons to get out of bed in the morning and pursue our projects. But we can also reflect on these things from a distance and think about their place in all of eternity. And they just. It’s like a sand hill that’s going to be driven over by a tractor blown away in the wind or something. Really, none of this is going to matter in the end, most likely. And we can find the comedy in that. We can say, look at all these earnestly strived… They’re like ants carrying stones that are three times their body weight, and it’s all going to be destroyed in a few days. And it’s just so comical because it’s possible that none of this is really going to matter. And so I think that kind of absurdist humor… It’s a response to the possibility that it’s all for naught and that the human condition is one big moron joke. And so that’s funny. But you can’t see it from that perspective in which the things really, really matter because that’s the perspective in which I see things. I’m angry for your failing to respect what matters. Now, the trick here in having a quarrel with somebody where you’re trying to get them from anger to amusement is you could really screw up very, very easily. So it can’t be a joke. It can’t be, you know, the duck priest and a rabbi walk into a bar. That’s not going to end the quarrel. It’s going to make me madder. So it’s got to be something that’s going to resonate with me, but also get me to back off a little bit from this thing that matters to see it.

Matheson: Ah, you’re right. An example I can think of in my own life it happened a few years ago when I first met my wife we had some argument and then I went to different rooms and I dressed up as Santa Claus and I went back into the room and I went to go oh I’m sorry I kissed her and she was so she turned around and she was so amused because obviously she wasn’t expecting me to be dressed up with like a red suit and a beard… it just didn’t matter anymore whatever we were arguing for. That’s right it was completely I kind of did the opposite of falling over and seeing the person’s hurt it did the opposite like He took the thing that matters and sucked the importance out of it and then gone. Like a balloon flying off into the distance.

Shoemaker: I think it’s a terribly important skill that we don’t take sufficiently seriously to try to develop.

Matheson: I don’t know if there’s any more final points you want to make. Any work you want to highlight or anything like that before we finish?

Shoemaker: So one thing I’ve been thinking about is along these lines, it’s trying to find more funny in our lives. And so maybe I’ll just finish, this is a bad way to finish perhaps, by taking a slam at the contemporary state of moral philosophy, which seems that young people are making their bones by finding more and more and different immoralities behind every cranny. And the idea there is to get us righteously angry. And that’s the aim. It’s to say this stuff matters. And it’s very valuable, these sorts of discoveries. Very often we’re hearing voices that we hadn’t heard before. We, I mean, you know, that hadn’t been made, circulated publicly or globally. So all that’s important. But I want to say at the same time, we’re finding all these new things that matter so much and should make us angry. We can also view these as well from that kind of removed perspective and see some funny. And so I think because of the incredible values that finding funny has in our lives. I mean, it’s enjoyable to be around people who are like this. It helps you cope with the traumas and difficulties of life, if you can see it from a funny angle. First responders, they’re always making these unbelievably ghoulish and morbid jokes. And what it does is it manages their emotions. It contributes to emotional regulation. It dampens their distress. But it better enables them to focus cognitively on their jobs. So there’s moral benefit there as well. So I think there are all these prudential and moral benefits to finding more funny in our lives. And so I’d like to see a balance maybe in between finding so many more immoralities and trying to find some more funny as well.

Matheson: Yeah, I think it can also help people who have ideological or political differences find something, common unity, and something which is beyond the political differences.

Shoemaker: That’s absolutely right. Yeah.

Matheson: Thanks for joining us today.

Shoemaker: I appreciate it. It was a lot of fun.

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