'Only joking' Negotiating offensive humour in interaction

In this special issue, we view ‘offensive humour’ as a purposefully broad, catch-all category that includes teasing, sarcasm, put downs and jocular insults (e.g., Dynel & Sinkeviciute 2021). While both ‘offence’ and ‘humour’ are notoriously difficult to define, across the papers in this collection we find the common threads that identify offensive humour are (a) a speaker’s (assumed) intent to amuse, and (b) recipients’ judgements or reactions to the humour as offensive. Crucially, offensive humour typically focuses on attempts to produce amusement through a seemingly faux negative attitude towards some target but without claimed malicious intent, differentiating offensive humour from insults proper, which purposefully — or at least overtly — seek to offend (cf. Dynel & Poppi 2020).

This issue raises a number of interrelated theoretical questions regarding the nature of offensive humour and how it is negotiated by participants across different communicative domains. From the outset, characterising offensive humour through a speaker’s humorous intent presents an immediate — practical and theoretical — challenge: since neither recipients nor analysts have access to a speaker’s private intentions, was the denigrating humour meant to be offensive (e.g., Zajdman 1995)? One difficulty for recipients is that by framing (purposefully) offensive messages through the lens ofhumour offers perpetrators deniability for having intended any offence, and hence relieves them from being held accountable for the problematic content of their joke: they can always claim to be ‘only joking’. Indeed, it is exactly by invoking a non-serious frame that a speaker may disguise any disparaging and discriminatory attitudes (e.g., racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia), which may be present at a conscious or unconscious level. However, the ‘only joking’ defence is not always successful, leaving open the question of how far this strategy is truly plausible as deniable (see Haugh & Márquez Reiter, this issue; Horn, this issue).

From the perspective of the recipient, feelings of offence may be experienced without necessarily either (a) attributing offensive intentions to the speaker, or even (b) attributing a clear offensive meaning to the speaker’s utterance. Of course, what counts as ‘offensive’ is subjective, and what might be considered offensive in one context may be viewed as playful teasing in another (Biri & Tanskanen, this issue). The ‘intergroup sensitivity effect’ means that it is more permissible for an in-group member to make a joke at that group’s expense than it is for an out-group member to do so (Thai et al. 2019). The matter of ‘who’s listening’ is equally important: while some people — who are typically not the targets of the joke — may fin d it funny, others may be offended (Dynel 2013). And while some might be offended, others may not be, simply because they don’t understand the (potential) offensive import of what has been said (Howes et al, this issue). For those recipients who experience feelings of offence, the guise of humour can make it difficult for them to flag and register having taken offence (Haugh 2015). This is partly because offensive content is often backgrounded as an under-lying prejudiced attitude, which makes the act of explicitly calling out the offensive content interactionally difficult (Elder 2021). Furthermore, while what counts as funny is both context-dependent and subject to individual interpretation, to take offence is generally met with disapproval in society (Stollznow 2020). To criticise offensive humour can be seen as ‘political correctness gone too far’, encouraging censorship and posing a threat to free speech, and to refuse to laugh is to be charged as lacking a sense of humour. The so-called ‘snowflake generation’ are labelled by their supposed sensitivity and proneness to offence, being associated with terms such as ‘sensitive’ and ‘triggered’. At the same time, in the wake of #MeToo and global awareness of the Black Lives Matter movement in the past decade, there is greater sensitivity in society towards certain kinds of humour, and it can be argued that making the jokes in the fir st place contributes to shaping and reinforcing broader societal attitudes towards certain social identities. Indeed, psychological studies have shown that humour that disparages particular groups of people can evidence tolerance and even encouragement of discrimination towards social groups who are the target of such humour (e.g., Ford & Ferguson 2004), and to laugh at a joke can be considered a way of endorsing its ideology. This opens the question of how far speakerscan and should be held accountable for their (potentially) offensive humour, especially when that humour is aired in the public domain (see Assimakopoulos et al., this issue; Kapogianni et al., this issue). Finally, it has to be acknowledged that humorous frames arising in spontaneous interaction, whether that is face-to-face or in written communication, differ from the humorous frame in scripted and/or live-performed comedy. While the humorous frame in spontaneous interaction is under constant negotiation, in comedic settings, the audience opts-in to the humorous frame (Kapogianni et al., this issue). However, live audiences and post-performance audiences opt-in to the humorous frame in different ways. Several papers in this special issue focus on offensive humour in both scripted and live-performance comedy, addressing how offensive humour is viewed and received is relative to joker persona and identity.

Bookended by two papers that survey offensive humour occurring in a range of private and public settings (Haugh & Márquez Reiter; Horn), the publications in this issue also focus on comedic live performance (Kapogianni et al.; Constantinescu; Filani), scripted TV dialogue (Saloustrou & Tsami), online platforms (Tanskanen & Biri), and political discourse (Assimakopoulos et al.; Howes et al.), thus covering a wealth of contextual and discursive perspectives.