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I'm, tempted to quote EB White's line that “analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog, few people are interested, and the frog dies of it". That said - I do understand this kind of analysis, and it's what a lot of my academic colleagues in the humanities spend their time doing. Over my time in academia, I've seen any number of articles, books, and editorials that lean into these strategies and I've come to have little patience for them. It can be a fun and an interesting exercise, but I'm less convinced that it helps us access truths in any meaningful way, at least most of the time. It's a kind of "social psychoanalysis" that just like regular psychoanalysis, is largely immune to falsification (Freudianism was one of the ur-examples that motivated Popper). You're into BDSM? Probably because you were spanked as a kid. Oh, you weren't spanked as a kid? Well, maybe that's why you're into BDSM. In the same way, you can imagine someone saying that the reason jokes about mothers are part of this humour is precisely because the mother-son relationship has such deep individual psychodynamic roots, and therefore it's funny to outrage people with it, in contrast to father-daughter relationships which come into being later in life and are parsed through a thoroughly adult lens. All of which is to say, sure, we can play with this analysis, but it will just tell us what we wanted to believe all along.
I can't guarantee that I'm zeroing in on the same archetype here, but if I am, then I'd say that these guys are very good at playing these male games, perhaps surprisingly so. They're also just very good at sequestering them in the right contexts. They're definitely the people whose female friends would be most surprised to hear them talking that way, though.
I had a long thing about my concerns with Popper (although I'm certainly no fan of Freud, either)-- but rather than getting too deeply into it, I'd just strongly question that claim that it's always a basically speculative and time-wasting project to try to model someone's motivations from a combination of their words and actions. Developing and refining theories of mind seems to me like a kind of metis that humans are inherently excellent at based on our nature as a social species-- certainly better at, on average, than we are at understanding the laws of physics, for instance. The processes of observation and analysis aren't always very legible, so they might not stand strict Popperian scrutiny-- but it's also not accurate to say that there's no opportunity to gather more data, discard false hypotheses and refine models accordingly.
In this instance, for example, I suggested that perhaps men like mom-rape jokes but hate daughter-rape jokes because, on some level, they like the idea of moms being taken down a peg. You countered that au contraire, perhaps men's love for their moms is so deeply embedded that it's more easily outraged versus fatherly love of a daughter, hence those jokes are funnier. Human minds are enough of a black box that we may never fully resolve it, but is it really true that we can literally never get any closer to the truth, and thus that we should never ask the question at all? It seems to me that we could try to get a bit closer by asking whether we know of any men who didn't grow up with their moms, or men who hate their daughters, and explore how they react to humor. Or by asking whether men are on the whole more respectful, deferential and attentive to their moms in other contexts, versus their daughters. Or by asking whether your or my interpretation better models how aggressive humor works in other contexts: for instance, do men more greatly enjoy rape jokes about their political outgroup, or their political ingroup? About a disliked boss, or a beloved boss?
It's certainly possible for this kind of inquiry to be done poorly, and it definitely gets dramatically worse the more you fund university professorships to do it at industrial scale (as does empirical science itself, for that matter). But just refusing to countenance it at all seems just oddly incurious, unless it's part of some strategic boundary that women shouldn't be allowed to think about male sexuality. As a man, are you not interested in why some jokes are hilarious while others are painful? Do you not feel that on some level, you respond differently to some classes of people versus others, and are the causal mechanisms underlying those feelings not intriguing to try to model?
(And I should add, by the way, @doglatine , that I deeply appreciate how open-minded, thoughtful and respectful this whole exchange was; it's been a real pleasure to get into these questions in such an honest way. Thank you!)
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