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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 4, 2024

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Yeah, I think this is what I meant by making humor subject to "political analysis": not hand-wringing that rape jokes mean you're a rapist, but acknowledging that a group's perception of what's funny vs. unfunny could indicate something important about their underlying sentiments and desires, and that it's fair to investigate those sentiments by close-reading the jokes.

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.

That's really interesting: when I asked the question I was thinking about a certain type of dumb and self-serious but also very athletic "jughead"-style guy that seems both common in sporty contexts and reasonably socially successful. Having known those folks in their administrative and bureaucratic afterlives, they seem too rigid, touchy and literal-minded to ever have been great at verbal sparring

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.