The Ethics of Offensive Comedy: Punching Down and the Duties of Comedians

Abstract During comedians’ performances, most of the usual norms around what we should and shouldn't say are, rightly, suspended. Yet there are still some offensive jokes that ought not be told. To mark such jokes out, some comedy nights and venues have adopted an ethic of ‘don't punch down’, ruling out jokes that target the disadvantaged, vulnerable, and oppressed. This article argues that such an ethic threatens to misdirect our attention. I begin by getting clear about the distinctive sense in which some offensive jokes can punch. Rather than focusing on what discriminatory attitudes the joke reports, or conjectures about the true beliefs of the comedians who make the joke and the audiences who laugh, I draw our attention instead to what a joke does . In particular, the crucial question is whether, and how, an offensive joke contributes towards undermining anti-discriminatory norms, or towards reinforcing unjust hierarchies and damaging stereotypes. In order to track the offensive jokes that punch in this sense, I propose two revisions to the ethic of don't punch down. First, that ethic overemphasises the relative position of the comedian as compared to the joked-about party and the direct target of a joke. Instead, our focus should be on what a joke of this kind does, in the context in which it is told. Second, I argue that the joke's audience is a crucial, and often determining, factor in our ethical assessments.