The “joke” Alice told — even if you put aside the offensiveness of it — isn’t funny. It isn’t really a joke, but a shibboleth in the form of a joke.
But of course the joke is funny. It’s got a classic joke structure: setting up an expectation, then subverting it by means of some sort of semantic ambiguity. The only reason to claim that such jokes simply aren’t funny is cheap virtue signaling.
Now, what we can say is that the joke isn’t funny to those who have heard it already (unsurprising), or that it’s not funny to those who already expect a punchline of that sort (because they are primed to—correctly—expect the joke to be racist). That is reasonable. But the claim that the joke is inherently not funny is not credible.
And, correspondingly, Bob’s claim to not get the joke is also not credible. His so-called “innocence” is very obviously performative and fake. Far from being “attractive”, such “innocence” is extremely off-putting; it reliably indicates that the person performing it is a tiresome, stuck-up, and self-righteous. (Note that Bob doesn’t even have the courage to simply come out and say “not cool, man; that’s racist”, though we can be sure that he’s thinking it!)
The reason I said “not funny” is not my sideways way of saying “I don’t approve of that sort of thing” but is more related to the point in your second paragraph. You can’t just state your opinion in the form of a joke and turn it into a joke that way. (Except perhaps in some rare edge cases: “Knock knock. Who’s there? Epstein didn’t kill himself.”) It’s like if I said “What do you call a ladder? An accident waiting to happen.” Have I said anything funny, or have I just chosen a strange way to say “I think a ladder is an accident waiting to happen”?
And in the case of Bob, I can certainly imagine someone from another culture, or who is young and sheltered, etc. not being up on American stereotyping and for whom such innocence would not be merely affected innocence.
The reason I said “not funny” is not my sideways way of saying “I don’t approve of that sort of thing” but is more related to the point in your second paragraph. You can’t just state your opinion in the form of a joke and turn it into a joke that way.
What does that have to do with the point in my second paragraph?
Frankly, it’s absurd to suggest that the joke in question amounts to simply “stat[ing] your opinion in the form of a joke and turn it into a joke”. It’s very obviously not that. As I said, it has a very straightforward, classic, “subversion of expectations” sort of joke structure. You can find it not funny (one’s individual sense of humor is hardly arguable), you can say that it’s a low-quality joke (true!), you can be offended by it… but if you say it “isn’t really a joke” or is just “stating your opinions”, etc., you’re simply wrong as a matter of fact.
And in the case of Bob, I can certainly imagine someone from another culture, or who is young and sheltered, etc. not being up on American stereotyping and for whom such innocence would not be merely affected innocence.
Someone who is genuinely confused would not be as impervious to explanation, or as flatly uninterested in understanding, as Bob is portrayed as being. (I know, because I have had the experience many, many times of not understanding some bit of humor or some cultural reference, due to being from another culture.) That sort of blank “I don’t get it” is, however, absolutely typical of the fake, performative incomprehension that I was talking about.
I agree that someone who behaves like Bob is almost certainly being performatively-fake-innocent, but I think you’re wrong to say that someone unfamiliar with the stereotypes couldn’t behave that way. For one thing, Bob-as-portrayed isn’t impervious to explanation or flatly uninterested in understanding. He asks for explanations and doesn’t really get them, and if he ends up not understanding it’s mostly because Alice hasn’t really tried to help him understand (perhaps because Alice thinks, as you do, that he can’t be sincere).
If someone told the “abortion clinic for pianists” version of the joke in my other comment in this thread, I can imagine responding very much like Bob. (Aside from the black paint / black people misunderstanding, which wouldn’t have a parallel in that case.) I’d be assuming that there was some relevant thing about pianists that I didn’t know, or some pun I was failing to detect, and I’m not sure I could do much better than “I still don’t get it”.
I agree that someone who behaves like Bob is almost certainly being performatively-fake-innocent, but I think you’re wrong to say that someone unfamiliar with the stereotypes couldn’t behave that way.
I didn’t say couldn’t, I said would not. Anyone could behave in any way they please; it’s just not likely.
By “couldn’t” I didn’t mean “would be physically incapable of”, I meant “certainly wouldn’t”, which is what I took your “would not be …” to be saying. “Usually wouldn’t”, I have no disagreement with.
Having the form of a joke is not sufficient to make something funny. I think you’re right that David goes too far when he says it “isn’t really a joke”—it is really a joke—but to whatever extent it’s even meaningful to say “this is/isn’t funny” without appending “to me” or “to the average 21st-century San Franciscan” or whatever, you can’t refute “it isn’t funny” just by saying that the thing is joke-shaped.
Suppose it had been “What do you call an abortion clinic for pianists?” with the same punchline. There would be the exact same structure, the exact same “subverting by means of semantic ambiguity” at the end. But I am fairly sure that essentially no one in the world would find it funny. And the only difference between this version and the one in the OP is that some people think black people are very often criminals and no one thinks that about pianists.
Maybe that’s enough to make the joke funny for people who think black people are very often criminals. (I’m inclined to think not.) But I don’t think you can claim that “of course it’s funny” if its funniness depends on a belief that not everyone shares.
(“But black people are more likely to be criminals than white people, I’ve seen the statistics!” Maybe so, but I don’t think that’s enough. Suppose it turns out that pianists are a bit more likely to be criminals than the general population; would that make the pianist version funny? Nope. I think the joke depends on equating “black people” and “criminals”; of course that doesn’t mean that to find it funny you have to think all criminals are black and all black people are criminals, but I think you do need opinions that can round off to that; part of the humour, such as it is, comes from the exaggeration involved in doing so.)
Suppose it had been “What do you call an abortion clinic for pianists?” with the same punchline.
Doesn’t work, because there is no ambiguity here (as you note in your other comment); so this transformation does not preserve the joke structure. This refutes your point.
I’m not sure whether the ambiguity you’re referring to is (1) the black paint / black skin one (which I mention in my other comment) or (2) something else.
If (1), I flatly disagree that that ambiguity is essential to (or even relevant to) the joke. I think Alice is expecting Bob and Carol to understand “black” as meaning “for black people” right from the outset.
If (2), then I’m not sure whether you mean (a) something to do with the alleged criminality of black people, or (b) something else.
If (a), then I think you misunderstand what I’m doing with the comparison. (Also, I don’t think “there is no ambiguity here” is a good way of describing the difference between the two jokes.)
If (b), then perhaps you could do me the favour of explaining more clearly what you have in mind, because in case (2b) I have clearly failed to grasp it.
I should justify “I think you misunderstand what I’m doing with the comparison”. (Here I’m assuming we’re in case 2a.) I’m not saying “the black-people version of the joke isn’t funny, because the pianist version of the joke isn’t funny and there are no relevant differences between them”. I’m saying “since the pianist version of the joke is uncontroversially not-funny, any funniness in the black-people version of the joke must depend on what’s different about the two versions of the joke”—more specifically, I think it depends mostly on the idea that black people are criminals—which is relevant because you claimed that (apparently as a matter of objective fact) the black-person version of the joke “is funny”, and I don’t think that’s an accurate way to describe something whose funniness is completely dependent on particular ideas or attitudes that many people don’t hold.
People who think that pianists are criminals would (I think) find the pianist version of the joke about as funny as people who think that black people are criminals find the black-people version. The difference isn’t in (what I at least would call) the structure of the joke, it’s in the context that makes certain aspects of the structure salient.
Suppose it turns out that pianists are a bit more likely to be criminals than the general population; would that make the pianist version funny? Nope.
Eh… I can imagine that happening, if, say, there’s a group of criminologists, one of whom presents a report about crime associations by profession, and one of the results mentioned is “Turns out pianists commit 20% more crime, at least based on this sample! Huh!” Then I can imagine, a while later (when half of them had started to forget), one of them making that joke about pianists, and that producing a real ”...Hmm? Oh, ho ho ho, very nice” response. It does depend on shared awareness of the statistic rather than directly on the truth of the statistic.
I can also imagine making a similar joke about cardiologists, for an audience who’s read Cardiologists and Chinese Robbers (where cardiologists were completely arbitrarily chosen to make the point “With large n, you can pick lots of individual bad examples even if they’re per capita no more likely to be criminal”, and you lean into acting like cardiologists are a known scourge of humanity).
I actually considered writing “cardiologists” instead of “pianists” :-).
I think what’s needed is some sort of context in which the thought “group X are all criminals” is salient (even if only as a deliberate exaggeration). For someone who has strongly anti-black attitudes, that thought may be salient all the time when X = black people. For someone who’s just heard about some statistics saying that pianists commit a bit more crime, it’s probably salient enough because they’ve specifically been thinking about pianists and crime. But e.g. a few years after that criminologists’ conference, when everyone’s aware that pianists commit a bit more crime but no one particularly hates pianists as a result or anything, I don’t think they’d find the joke funny.
But of course the joke is funny. It’s got a classic joke structure: setting up an expectation, then subverting it by means of some sort of semantic ambiguity. The only reason to claim that such jokes simply aren’t funny is cheap virtue signaling.
Now, what we can say is that the joke isn’t funny to those who have heard it already (unsurprising), or that it’s not funny to those who already expect a punchline of that sort (because they are primed to—correctly—expect the joke to be racist). That is reasonable. But the claim that the joke is inherently not funny is not credible.
And, correspondingly, Bob’s claim to not get the joke is also not credible. His so-called “innocence” is very obviously performative and fake. Far from being “attractive”, such “innocence” is extremely off-putting; it reliably indicates that the person performing it is a tiresome, stuck-up, and self-righteous. (Note that Bob doesn’t even have the courage to simply come out and say “not cool, man; that’s racist”, though we can be sure that he’s thinking it!)
The reason I said “not funny” is not my sideways way of saying “I don’t approve of that sort of thing” but is more related to the point in your second paragraph. You can’t just state your opinion in the form of a joke and turn it into a joke that way. (Except perhaps in some rare edge cases: “Knock knock. Who’s there? Epstein didn’t kill himself.”) It’s like if I said “What do you call a ladder? An accident waiting to happen.” Have I said anything funny, or have I just chosen a strange way to say “I think a ladder is an accident waiting to happen”?
And in the case of Bob, I can certainly imagine someone from another culture, or who is young and sheltered, etc. not being up on American stereotyping and for whom such innocence would not be merely affected innocence.
What does that have to do with the point in my second paragraph?
Frankly, it’s absurd to suggest that the joke in question amounts to simply “stat[ing] your opinion in the form of a joke and turn it into a joke”. It’s very obviously not that. As I said, it has a very straightforward, classic, “subversion of expectations” sort of joke structure. You can find it not funny (one’s individual sense of humor is hardly arguable), you can say that it’s a low-quality joke (true!), you can be offended by it… but if you say it “isn’t really a joke” or is just “stating your opinions”, etc., you’re simply wrong as a matter of fact.
Someone who is genuinely confused would not be as impervious to explanation, or as flatly uninterested in understanding, as Bob is portrayed as being. (I know, because I have had the experience many, many times of not understanding some bit of humor or some cultural reference, due to being from another culture.) That sort of blank “I don’t get it” is, however, absolutely typical of the fake, performative incomprehension that I was talking about.
I agree that someone who behaves like Bob is almost certainly being performatively-fake-innocent, but I think you’re wrong to say that someone unfamiliar with the stereotypes couldn’t behave that way. For one thing, Bob-as-portrayed isn’t impervious to explanation or flatly uninterested in understanding. He asks for explanations and doesn’t really get them, and if he ends up not understanding it’s mostly because Alice hasn’t really tried to help him understand (perhaps because Alice thinks, as you do, that he can’t be sincere).
If someone told the “abortion clinic for pianists” version of the joke in my other comment in this thread, I can imagine responding very much like Bob. (Aside from the black paint / black people misunderstanding, which wouldn’t have a parallel in that case.) I’d be assuming that there was some relevant thing about pianists that I didn’t know, or some pun I was failing to detect, and I’m not sure I could do much better than “I still don’t get it”.
I didn’t say couldn’t, I said would not. Anyone could behave in any way they please; it’s just not likely.
By “couldn’t” I didn’t mean “would be physically incapable of”, I meant “certainly wouldn’t”, which is what I took your “would not be …” to be saying. “Usually wouldn’t”, I have no disagreement with.
Having the form of a joke is not sufficient to make something funny. I think you’re right that David goes too far when he says it “isn’t really a joke”—it is really a joke—but to whatever extent it’s even meaningful to say “this is/isn’t funny” without appending “to me” or “to the average 21st-century San Franciscan” or whatever, you can’t refute “it isn’t funny” just by saying that the thing is joke-shaped.
Suppose it had been “What do you call an abortion clinic for pianists?” with the same punchline. There would be the exact same structure, the exact same “subverting by means of semantic ambiguity” at the end. But I am fairly sure that essentially no one in the world would find it funny. And the only difference between this version and the one in the OP is that some people think black people are very often criminals and no one thinks that about pianists.
Maybe that’s enough to make the joke funny for people who think black people are very often criminals. (I’m inclined to think not.) But I don’t think you can claim that “of course it’s funny” if its funniness depends on a belief that not everyone shares.
(“But black people are more likely to be criminals than white people, I’ve seen the statistics!” Maybe so, but I don’t think that’s enough. Suppose it turns out that pianists are a bit more likely to be criminals than the general population; would that make the pianist version funny? Nope. I think the joke depends on equating “black people” and “criminals”; of course that doesn’t mean that to find it funny you have to think all criminals are black and all black people are criminals, but I think you do need opinions that can round off to that; part of the humour, such as it is, comes from the exaggeration involved in doing so.)
fp
Doesn’t work, because there is no ambiguity here (as you note in your other comment); so this transformation does not preserve the joke structure. This refutes your point.
I’m not sure whether the ambiguity you’re referring to is (1) the black paint / black skin one (which I mention in my other comment) or (2) something else.
If (1), I flatly disagree that that ambiguity is essential to (or even relevant to) the joke. I think Alice is expecting Bob and Carol to understand “black” as meaning “for black people” right from the outset.
If (2), then I’m not sure whether you mean (a) something to do with the alleged criminality of black people, or (b) something else.
If (a), then I think you misunderstand what I’m doing with the comparison. (Also, I don’t think “there is no ambiguity here” is a good way of describing the difference between the two jokes.)
If (b), then perhaps you could do me the favour of explaining more clearly what you have in mind, because in case (2b) I have clearly failed to grasp it.
I should justify “I think you misunderstand what I’m doing with the comparison”. (Here I’m assuming we’re in case 2a.) I’m not saying “the black-people version of the joke isn’t funny, because the pianist version of the joke isn’t funny and there are no relevant differences between them”. I’m saying “since the pianist version of the joke is uncontroversially not-funny, any funniness in the black-people version of the joke must depend on what’s different about the two versions of the joke”—more specifically, I think it depends mostly on the idea that black people are criminals—which is relevant because you claimed that (apparently as a matter of objective fact) the black-person version of the joke “is funny”, and I don’t think that’s an accurate way to describe something whose funniness is completely dependent on particular ideas or attitudes that many people don’t hold.
People who think that pianists are criminals would (I think) find the pianist version of the joke about as funny as people who think that black people are criminals find the black-people version. The difference isn’t in (what I at least would call) the structure of the joke, it’s in the context that makes certain aspects of the structure salient.
Eh… I can imagine that happening, if, say, there’s a group of criminologists, one of whom presents a report about crime associations by profession, and one of the results mentioned is “Turns out pianists commit 20% more crime, at least based on this sample! Huh!” Then I can imagine, a while later (when half of them had started to forget), one of them making that joke about pianists, and that producing a real ”...Hmm? Oh, ho ho ho, very nice” response. It does depend on shared awareness of the statistic rather than directly on the truth of the statistic.
I can also imagine making a similar joke about cardiologists, for an audience who’s read Cardiologists and Chinese Robbers (where cardiologists were completely arbitrarily chosen to make the point “With large n, you can pick lots of individual bad examples even if they’re per capita no more likely to be criminal”, and you lean into acting like cardiologists are a known scourge of humanity).
I actually considered writing “cardiologists” instead of “pianists” :-).
I think what’s needed is some sort of context in which the thought “group X are all criminals” is salient (even if only as a deliberate exaggeration). For someone who has strongly anti-black attitudes, that thought may be salient all the time when X = black people. For someone who’s just heard about some statistics saying that pianists commit a bit more crime, it’s probably salient enough because they’ve specifically been thinking about pianists and crime. But e.g. a few years after that criminologists’ conference, when everyone’s aware that pianists commit a bit more crime but no one particularly hates pianists as a result or anything, I don’t think they’d find the joke funny.