The Morality of Laughter

11. The Battle of the Norms: Judgment Errors • Large Numbers Perverse Norms and Factual Errors • Uncertainty

The Battle of the Norms Let not us that are squires of the night’s body be called thieves of the day’s beauty: let us be Diana’s foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon; and let men say, we be men of good government, being governed as the sea is, by our noble and chaste mistress of the moon, under whose countenance we steal. 1 Henry IV We have sought to defend the normative thesis by showing how laughter signals a defective life plan or risible scholarship (chaps. 6–10). Through the sting of laughter, we are recalled from comic vice to the path of moderation and comic virtue. But if laughter is such an effective sanction, why do comic vices persist? Where is the failure in comic norms? Laughter can be modeled as a three-party game in which the parties bargain for inclusion in a two-party coalition (wit and listener) that excludes the third (the butt). No one party can dictate what is risible. Instead, the selection of butts is a matter of negotiation between wit and listener. The wit proposes a butt for laughter, and this offer may be accepted by the listener through a return of laughter or rejected through silence. In such a laughter exchange, individuals may be seen to trade off butts through implicit agreements about who is risible. These bargains determine what counts as a comic vice, since jokes must have a content to amuse. Laughter bargains lack an equilibrium solution when they are nothing more than status contests: the butt is degraded, and the wit and listener move up a notch (chap. 4). While each party has an incentive to join the winning coalition, every coalition is unstable since the butt can always offer an equal status gain to the listener by cracking his own joke 155 11 at the first joke-teller. Laughter then would signal an empty superiority , and the incentive to produce laughter would disappear. But if laughter does signal useful information about comic vices, as Bergson thought, the game will have a solution, in the sense that it will produce a single winning coalition and a single butt. The natural butt will never be able to deflect the laughter away from himself, and the process of coalition formation will promote value-maximizing (or ef‹cient) comic norms. Absent barriers to bargaining, the Coase theorem posits that all opportunities for gain will be exploited through private contracting.1 Since failing to do so would be like leaving money on the table, the parties will take up all bargain opportunities. And since we can imagine a social contract in which social norms are adopted, we might extend Ronald Coase’s insight about ef‹cient bargaining to norm formation. In that case, all ef‹cient norms would be created where the costs of norm formation are trivial. All our laughter would be benign, as the Normative thesis asserts, and we would laugh just as much as was necessary in order to police comic vices in an ef‹cient manner. The puzzle is then to explain why comic vices persist. Why do butts remain? And why do we still laugh? There would be no need for laughter signals if everyone knew just how to live. Yet satirists such as Menander never lack for targets, as Ben Jonson noted. “Whilst slaves be false, fathers hard, or bawds be whorish, / Whilst harlots ›atter, shall Menander ›ourish.” Moreover, comic norms might con›ict when different groups trade off gibes. None of this could happen if laughter proclaimed a one, true, universal, and optimal set of comic norms. The puzzle is answered when one recognizes that the Coase theorem does not predict that all bargain opportunities will be exploited. Instead, barriers to contracting will result in pro‹t opportunities being left on the table. Similarly, our extension of the Coase theorem to norm creation does not predict that all ef‹cient norms will be created, and directs our attention to the barriers to ef‹cient norm formation. Judgment Errors Because laughter is immediate and unre›ective, comic norms cannot exploit bargain gains as easily as private contracting might. In many cases, our laughter simply lacks the intelligence to pierce through a parathe morality of laughter 156 dox and understand deeper meanings. Consider Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, one of the most hilarious movies of the cold war, which it...