ABSTRACT
“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” This remark, usually misattributed to Voltaire, has come over the past century to summarize the classic liberal attitude toward free speech. A vivid practical example of this attitude, discussed in my earlier essay, “Political Correctness,” involved a Black woman protecting the life of one of the men attacking her. When Stanley Fish commented on this essay, he dismissed it as a “feel good” case.
In later years, I have been concerned with the role of humor (on campus and elsewhere)—what comedians say and the question of how an audience is supposed to receive it—the loss of a sense of humor, of the ability to “take a joke” and to “laugh at ourselves.” This partly involves the question of whether some topics are “just not funny,” but it also touches on the question of the propriety of getting someone to laugh—laughter and complicity. Someone may accuse: “You made me laugh.” The fact that I laugh, when I don’t want to, may be painful to me. Larger issue: Making me desire what I don’t want to want or accept what I don’t choose to accept. Example: meta-rape.
Nothing is more humorless than youth in the (presumed) possession of moral truth. Having not yet learned from bitter experience the tenuousness of language and the complexity of judgment, youth is attracted to extreme simplicity and to novelty. As though only stupidity and cowardice had hitherto kept (hu)mankind from attaining utopia. On the other hand, we know that lazy, greedy acquiescence in the status quo can be, and often has been, defended by such hand waving. Isn’t there bad laughter? Hearing only what I want to hear—doesn’t that lead to “feed” and to “echo chambers”? Forcing me to feel what I don’t want to feel, to think thought I may not want to think—isn’t that what education does?
