3.2: Joking as Truth-Telling

They say there’s a grain of truth in every joke. Presumably, then, jokes are used to communicate that truth in some way, and we can come to know something when we get the joke. The “aha!” moment when the punchline lands reveals some truth to us. In this essay, I’ll argue that joking often functions as a kind of truth telling, but not the kind of truth telling that I’m doing in this sentence or when I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. It’s a subtler kind of truth-telling that can sometimes serve to reinforce beliefs that a community holds in common and sometimes be used to bring them out into the open to be challenged.

Think about the last time you told someone the truth. It’s such an everyday occurrence that it almost seems strange to reflect on it. Your mom asks what you had for breakfast, and you tell her you ate a bagel. Your friend asks if you’re feeling alright, and you say your allergies are acting up. Someone asks for directions to the library, and you point them in the right direction and tell them to look for the building with all the books. When we speak in a way that aims to inform others, we generally say what we take to be the truth, or, as I’ll put it, we generally only make claims that we endorse. We give them our stamp of approval and stand behind them. We do a lot of truth-telling, even if we also lie, mislead, and conceal from time to time. In fact, we couldn’t pull off those deceits if people didn’t trust one another to tell something close to the truth most of time.

Most of our truth telling comes in the form of assertions. We use declarative sentences – “The cat is on the mat,” “The dog is out of food,” “The hungry dog is going to eat the cat on the mat” – to convey something that we believe to be true in a way that will, if everything goes right, lead to the hearer believing it to be true. Assertions have a deep connection to truth. The philosopher Paul Grice has argued that we intuitively follow a rule of truthfulness in our conversations. We should only say things we believe to be true and for which we have some evidence, and others expect that of us.

I expect your contributions to be genuine and not spurious. If I need sugar as an ingredient in the cake you are assisting me to make, I do not expect you to hand me salt; if I need a spoon, I do not expect a trick spoon made of rubber (Grice, 47).

Others have argued for the even stronger Knowledge Norm of Assertion (KNA). According to KNA, assertions play the role that they do in our language—they are what they are—in part because they follow a rule that says you should only assert that p if and only if you know that p, and, of course, you can only take yourself to know p if you take p to be true. Asserting something is the most common and straightforward way to tell a truth, i.e., to convey to someone something that you think you know.

Jokes are not assertions. There are often assertions used in the telling of a joke. “Three fonts walk into a bar…” but the joking frame, the context of the telling, usually indicates that this assertion is not to be taken at face value. KNA is relaxed; we no longer expect what you say in the form of an assertion to necessarily be something you take to be true. Instead, we’re engaged in a kind of playful exchange in which we’ll entertain clear falsehoods as if they’re true in order to engage with the cleverness of the punchline: The bartender says, “We don’t serve your type in here.”

There’s clearly no Knowledge Norm of Joking. KNJ would require that you tell a joke if and only if the premise is true, but a lot of jokes have false premises, and we’re just fine with that. Some jokes, of course, do rely on a true premise, and they’re funny precisely because they’re true. Take this classic from Jerry Seinfeld:

According to most studies, people's number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. Death is number two. Does that sound right? This means to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you're better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.

The contradiction between what most studies reveal and what we really feel about the funeral is where the humor lies. If we don’t accept the premise, if it doesn’t have the ring of truth, the joke isn’t very funny. But there are many jokes that don’t require the truth of the premise. Seinfeld’s schtick works for him, but not all jokers play the same game. Santa, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy walk into a bar. The bartender looks up and says, “What is this, some kind of joke?” Unless you believe that these figments of our cultural imagination really exist, this joke’s premise is clearly false.

Though it is not as straightforward a form of truth-telling as your average assertion, it would be too quick to conclude that joking is not a form of truth-telling at all. There’s nothing improper or incorrect about telling a joke that’s patently false. A patently false joke, though, need not fail to tell a truth or to convey some knowledge, for 65 often-times we use literal falsehoods to speak truths. The last time you told someone they looked like a million bucks, odds are even that you meant they looked great or like they’d been run over by a semi, and, of course, we’ve all faced the moment of truth in which we had to tell someone we cared about that their wardrobe, accessory, or hair choices are stuck in the last decade. When we do, we usually don’t tell it to them straight. Instead, we reach for a bit of sarcasm to soften the blow. Yet our intent is clearly to convey the truth to them in the hopes they’ll run upstairs and change before we have to be seen with them in public. You can convey something true by saying something that is literally false.

Even false jokes, then, might convey some grain of truth. Let’s think about how that might work first in the case of a false assertion and then in the case of a false joke. When your friend tells you, “Whoa, you look like a million bucks,” how do you know whether they’re saying something that’s literally true to convey that truth to you or saying something that’s literally false to soften the blow of telling you that you look like something the cat dragged in? Their tone and the shock on their face may be a hint, but the inference you make from the words you hear to the truth they convey turns on a presupposition that you both share. A friend only says this to you when they know that you know already that you don’t look so hot. Whether it’s because you’re lying in a hospital bed or because you had too good a time last night, you and your friend both know and both know that the other knows that you look awful. Your friends’ quip that you look like a million bucks is just another way of endorsing that presupposition, i.e., of committing themselves to its truth.

Now suppose you did have a bit too much fun last night, but you think you’ve pulled yourself together pretty respectably. When your friend makes the quip, you’re unsure how to take it. You think you look alright; not great, but not terrible. You surmise that your friend must think that you know you don’t look so hot, even if you think you’re pulling it off. Your friend endorses what they take to be a shared presupposition, but it is in fact one that you don’t accept. Now you face a choice. Do you trust your friend’s judgment and accept, on the basis of their testimony, that you don’t look as good as you thought or do you push back? We’ve arrived here at an important point in our investigation. That you face this choice reveals that your friend’s quip has conveyed to you their endorsement of this presupposition. You know what they meant even if it 66 wasn’t what they said and even if you don’t endorse the presupposition yourself. Their endorsement now gives you some evidence for its truth, and you must weigh that evidence with all the other evidence you have and decide whether to endorse it or not. But your friend has hedged their bet. They didn’t just come out and tell you how awful you look. As such, they’ve left themselves room to withdraw their endorsement of the presupposition. If you say, “Rough night, but I think I did alright pulling myself together. You don’t think I look good?” they’ve left themselves room to say, “No, no! I really meant it; you look great!”

Let’s call your friend’s endorsement of the presupposition in this scenario a kinda-sorta endorsement (that’s the technical philosophical term). It’s a hedge; it leaves conversational wiggle room for withdrawal or softening of the endorsement. Jokes, I will argue, engage in just the same kinda-sorta endorsement. When you tell a joke, you kinda-sorta endorse the presupposition(s) one needs to accept in order to get the joke, and you do this with the expectation that the presupposition(s) on which the joke turns is one that your audience also kinda-sorta endorses. If they do, then they’re in on the joke.

Within the frame of a joke, the endorsement of the presupposition is flexible in a way that a speaker’s endorsement of an assertion is not. This flexibility manifests as ease of withdrawal. When you make a claim in the form of an assertion, you’ve given others license to hold you to account for that claim. They can challenge you to give reasons for it. If they trust you, they can repeat it and send others who challenge it your way. And, importantly, if what you’ve said is dangerous, harmful, insulting, or troubling in some other respect, you’re on the hook for it. You’ve given it your endorsement it, after all. You’re committed to it and ought to be held to account for it. But the kinda-sorta endorsement of a sarcastic remark or a joke leaves you an out. Its flexibility is so pronounced that, in some cases, it’s withdrawn as soon as it’s made. We simply act as if we are endorsing the presupposition for the fun of the joke, but everyone involved knows that the endorsement is dropped as soon as the joke has been told. The joker and the audience endorsed the presupposition that Santa could walk into a bar for the sake of the joke, but neither believes this could really happen outside of joking frame. We all know that Santa’s more likely to be found in a bakery than a bar.

Kinda-sorta endorsement of the presupposition of a joke, however, doesn’t always disintegrate once the telling is done. It can linger, leaving the audience wondering whether the teller meant to endorse the presupposition beyond the context of the joke. The intrigue, power, and frustration of jokes is found in this ambiguity. The telling of a joke that plays on racial, ethnic, or gender stereotypes, for example, kindasorta endorses those stereotypes. In some contexts, when it is clear that the kinda-sorta endorsement is withdrawn as soon as the telling is complete, these jokes are relatively harmless. The trouble arises from the fact that the joke teller is rarely in full control of the context. Jokes, like all speech acts, are public and open to interpretation and appraisal by anyone who hears them. If the context of the telling is not one in which the endorsement of the presupposition is clearly cancelled for all hearers, even if the joke teller intends to cancel it, hearers may take offense. They understand, perhaps rightfully, that the endorsement of the problematic presupposition could be understood by others as an endorsement of its literal truth beyond the joking context.

In some contexts, the endorsed presupposition is (intentionally or not) reinforced by the telling of the joke. Those who are in on the joke see that others also accept the presupposition. They may take that as evidence in its favor, or, more likely, they may be influenced to implicitly accept the presupposition as a result of its repetition. Even if they know it’s something that shouldn’t be said openly, the joke communicates to them that others accept the stereotype on which it turns and licenses their acceptance of it in turn. The hearers who are in on the joke, the cultural in-group, feel vindicated in holding the stereotype because they know that others hold it, too. The repetition of this process is one mechanism by which stereotypes are held in place within a social group.

Sometimes, however, when told in a skillful way and in just the right context, jokes that play on stereotypes can also serve as a challenge to those very stereotypes. The kinda-sorta endorsement of the presupposition serves to remind the audience that these stereotypes are deeply engrained by our culture. They get the joke precisely because they grasp these stereotypes and easily call them to mind. The context of the telling—who’s telling the joke, who’s in the audience, what else has been said, and even the broader social context—makes it clear that the joker takes the stereotype to be false. They endorse it only within the joking frame with the broader aim of taking us to task for tacitly accepting it. Jokes told in this setting are a powerful way to coax people in 68 positions of privilege to examine and, perhaps, reject problematic stereotypes that they hold. In the hands of a skillful comedian, these jokes can prompt critical reflection on the drive home from the club or as one lies awake in bed remembering the show.

So, do jokes tell truths? Do we gain some knowledge when we get the joke? I answer that, in an important if non-literal way, they do and we do. Jokes requires us to entertain the presupposition as if it were true, to kinda-sorta endorse it. Unless the context is one that explicitly cancels that endorsement for both the joke teller and the audience, the endorsement extends beyond the joking frame. The joke serves, in some contexts, to reinforce the communally held beliefs it presupposes and, in others, to challenge those very beliefs. Jokes can build community around common knowledge of shared beliefs, and they can also force us to reckon with the shared beliefs around which we’ve built our communities. The truths they tell, then, are second-order. The joker doesn’t literally tell us the presupposition of the joke, she reveals it to us and makes us communally aware that we share it. Unlike the mathematical knowledge we gain when we reach the “aha!” moment of a mathematical puzzle, the “aha!” moment of the joke gives us knowledge about ourselves, our communities, and our shared beliefs.

References

Grice, H.P. ‘Logic and Conversation’, in The Logic of Grammar, D. Davidson and G. Harman (eds.), Encino, CA: Dickenson, 64–75.