The Practical Disengagement Of Humor Analysis

1. Thesis
“Morreall argues that, if we want to answer these questions, we shouldn’t focus on whether the joke happens to trade on a stereotype. Instead, he takes the primary problem with some humor to be that it involves disengaging from things with which we ought to be engaged.” (Morreall, 529)
2. Support for Thesis
“The practical disengagement of humor…helps explain the opposition between amusement and negative emotions.” (530) There are three effects of humor; irresponsibility, blocking compassion, and promoting prejudice. Humor can take away what we are/should be doing in life and sometimes there isn’t anything wrong with that. Sometimes when we hear a hateful thing we just laugh it off as if it was no big deal when it really was. “An

extreme case of humor supporting irresponsibility is the “total cynic” who laughs at everything and assumes no responsibility for anything.” (531) There are two ways of humor one being displacing action and another being making fun of those who are in pain and making it worse. Sexist and racist jokes are actually considered to be fake. The point of these jokes that are being made is to make even more negative stereotypes.
3. Critical Response
I disagree with the authors statement “Adding to this unreality, what characters in jokes say and do is unlike what real people say and do.” (533) I don’t agree with this because a character in a game for example is created from a real person which will have a little bit of human characteristics in them. The character may not act like a human one hundred percent of the time but it still has those instincts inside of them. When you make a character do something in a game like kick a ball for example that is the same thing as us doing that in real life. A character does have our features whether we want to admit it or not there is a part of us in that little avatar. This is why I feel the authors statement that the jokers a character makes are not what we would say in real life is not accurate nor is it correct.