real danger of laughter, then, is the fact that we don’t all share the same norms to the same degree. What’s sacred to one person can be an object of mere play to another. And so when we laugh at norm violations, it often serves to weaken the norms that others may wish to uphold. This helps explain why people charged with maintaining the highest standards of propriety—schoolmarms, religious leaders, the guardians in Plato’s Republic, the Chinese officials who banned puns in 201443—have an interest in tamping down on laughter and humor. When two people laugh at the same joke for the same
...more
