The Yeoh Tiong Lay Centre for Politics, Philosophy and Law is delighted to host Professor David Shoemaker for the second lecture in the 2024/25 Lecture Series in Practical Agency.

Title

Finding Funny

Abstract

We’re all familiar with advertent humor, things that people say or do that deliberately aim to be funny (e.g., telling jokes, making wisecracks, engaging in pratfalls, etc.). But there’s plenty of inadvertent humor we’ve experienced as well (e.g., a dog sounding like a human, a fir tree that looks as if it’s giving us the finger). In this paper, I aim to explicate how and why to find the funny in inadvertent events like these. After beginning with a few important distinctions and then articulating the nature of the reasons in play, I’ll start my investigation in earnest with advertent humor, which reveals a familiar model for how to understand and find certain kinds of deliberative efforts funny, even when morally offensive. I’ll then apply a similar model to inadvertent humor, a kind of humor that is actually available all around us, were we to choose to seek it out. The “how,” in cases of advertent and inadvertent humor, will be somewhat similar, appealing to a kind of empathy (albeit with one key twist), but the “why” is very different in each case, being most fascinating and important for inadvertent humor, which, if one can find it, generates significant—and underappreciated—prudential and moral value.

Author Bio

David Shoemaker is the Wyn and William Y. Hutchinson Professor of Ethics and Public Life in the Sage School of Philosophy, Cornell University. He is the author of the monographs Responsibility from the Margins (OUP 2015), Wisecracks: Humor and Morality in Everyday Life (U. Chicago, 2024), and The Architecture of Blame and Praise (OUP, 2024), as well as the author of nearly 70 articles on a number of topics, including personal identity, agency and responsibility, moral philosophy, moral psychology, political philosophy, bioethics, and the philosophy of humor. He is the founder and ongoing organizer of the New Orleans Workshop on Agency and Responsibility (NOWAR), as well as the general editor of the OUP series Oxford Studies in Agency & Responsibility.