Negative Effects of Humor

Humor can cause someone to lose control, both physically and mentally

Humor breaks the standard rules of conversation

Humor can be vulgar, obscene, crude, malicious, racist, and sexist

Humor can express hostility, contempt, and disdain towards others

Humor can lead to insensitivity and callous disregard

Humor is insincere, idle, irresponsible, hedonistic, hostile, anarchistic, and foolish

Negative humor blocks concern for others and diminishes the capacity to feel or express compassion

Humor can desensitizes people (eliminating the capacity for empathy)

Humor can lead to indifference towards truth

Humor invariably relies on stereotypes that diminish individual identity

Humor promotes prejudice

Plato: laughter overrides rational self-control, laughter is mixed with malice at those being laughed at

Plato, the most influential critic of laughter, treated it as an emotion that overrides rational self-control. In the Republic (388e), he says that the Guardians of the state should avoid laughter, “for ordinarily when one abandons himself to violent laughter, his condition provokes a violent reaction.” Especially disturbing to Plato were the passages in the Iliad and the Odyssey where Mount Olympus was said to ring with the laughter of the gods. He protested that “if anyone represents men of worth as overpowered by laughter we must not accept it, much less if gods.”

Another of Plato's objections to laughter is that it is malicious. In Philebus (48–50), he analyzes the enjoyment of comedy as a form of scorn. “Taken generally,” he says, “the ridiculous is a certain kind of evil, specifically a vice.” That vice is self-ignorance: the people we laugh at imagine themselves to be wealthier, better looking, or more virtuous than they really are. In laughing at them, we take delight in something evil—their self-ignorance—and that malice is morally objectionable.

Because of these objections to laughter and humor, Plato says that in the ideal state, comedy should be tightly controlled. “We shall enjoin that such representations be left to slaves or hired aliens, and that they receive no serious consideration whatsoever. No free person, whether woman or man, shall be found taking lessons in them.” “No composer of comedy, iambic or lyric verse shall be permitted to hold any citizen up to laughter, by word or gesture, with passion or otherwise” (Laws, 7: 816e; 11: 935e).

Greek thinkers after Plato had similarly negative comments about laughter and humor. Though Aristotle considered wit a valuable part of conversation (Nicomachean Ethics 4, 8), he agreed with Plato that laughter expresses scorn. Wit, he says in the Rhetoric (2, 12), is educated insolence. In the Nicomachean Ethics (4, 8) he warns that “Most people enjoy amusement and jesting more than they should … a jest is a kind of mockery, and lawgivers forbid some kinds of mockery—perhaps they ought to have forbidden some kinds of jesting.” The Stoics, with their emphasis on self-control, agreed with Plato that laughter diminishes self-control. Epictetus's Enchiridion (33) advises “Let not your laughter be loud, frequent, or unrestrained.” His followers said that he never laughed at all.

Proverbs 26: 18-19: A man who deceives another and then says, “It was only a joke,” is like a madman shooting at random his deadly darts and arrows

2 Kings 2:23: He [the prophet Elijah] went up from there to Bethel and, as he was on his way, some small boys came out of the city and jeered at him, saying “Get along with you, bald head, get along.” He turned around and looked at them and he cursed them in the name of the lord; two she-bears came out of the wood and mauled forty-two of them

Basil the Great: Raucous laughter and uncontrollable shaking of the body are not indications of a well-regulated soul, or of a person of dignity and self-mastery

John Chrysostom’s slippery slope: Laughter often gives birth to foul discourse—foul actions—railing and insult—slows and wounds—slaughter and murder—avoid unseasonable laughter

The Rule of St. Benedict: monks are to prefer moderation in speech and speak no foolish chatter, nothing to provoke laughter

The monastery Columban’s punishments: He who smiles in service . . . six strokes

Abbot Ephraem: Laughter is the beginning of the destruction of the soul . . . the depth of evil

Hobbes: laughter expresses feelings of superiority and hostility, people are individualistic and competitive, the basic state of human nature is “a war of all against all,” in our competition against each other we relish those moments when we are winning and others losing, these are moments that cause laughter

Sudden glory [over another] is the passion which makes those grimaces called laughter, and is caused either by some sudden act of their own, that pleases them, or by the apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof they suddenly applaud themselves. And it is incident most to them . . . to keep themselves in their own favor by observing imperfections of other men. And therefore much laughter at the defects of others, is a sign of pusillanimity [cowardice]. Leviathan

The Superiority Theory states that humor is anti-social; laughter is caused by derision