|
About This Author
Come closer.
|
Carrion Luggage
Carrion Luggage
 
Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem.
This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it.
It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans.
It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier."
I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination.
November 6, 2025 at 8:38am November 6, 2025 at 8:38am
| |
I like to laugh. I like to make people laugh. I especially like to laugh when people groan at my puns. But comedy is one of those elusive subjects: the more you analyze it, the less funny it is. Here, Big Think tries their hand at analyzing it.
The biggest joke here is that this is from BT's "Mini Philosophy" department. I've long maintained that philosophers have no sense of humor. We have another word for philosophers with a sense of humor: we call them comedians.
There are many kinds of laughter. You can laugh cheerfully, mirthlessly, dryly, cruelly, drunkenly, unexpectedly, and pointedly.
Or my personal favorite, sarcastically. Ha!
Laughter is a noun with many possible adverbs.
And you can't spell slaughter without it.
This raises a problem for anyone wanting to tell a joke. Because a joke, at its most basic, is something that is intended to make someone laugh. And so, given the sheer variety of laughter, it makes sense that there’s an equally sheer variety of jokes.
I'm all for transparency in humor.
A joke might be good-natured or mean. It might be childish or intellectual.
Anyone who knows me should know that I like the ones that are both childish and intellectual.
The philosophy of humor is such an ill-defined and borderless discipline that a writer would be foolish to try to say anything meaningful at all.
And yet, who knows comedy better than a fool?
In this week’s Mini Philosophy interview, I spoke with Brett Belle, who runs the hugely successful social media account Mom’s Dad Jokes, about what she thinks makes her and her jokes so popular.
Well, they're dad jokes, so of course they're pop-ular.
I’m going to put my neck out and suggest that all jokes and all laughter can be divided into two categories: affiliative and adversarial.
Naturally, as a childish intellectual, my Oppositional Defiant Disorder kicks in here and demands to find counterexamples.
But all I can come up with, at least for now, is the observation that many jokes fall into both categories. And that those categories can switch depending on speaker and audience.
Let me give you an example. When I was a kid, a friend of mine and I would exchange Jewish jokes. These jokes could be really fucking dark (most of them involved the Holocaust). I'm not going to perpetuate Judeophobia by repeating them here, but chances are you know most of them because I was a kid a very long time ago. Later in life, when I decided that comedy would be a core principle of my existence, I thought about why we did that. Was it a sense of self-hatred? A pushing back against the cruel, unfeeling God who decided to make us Jewish? No, none of that. We did it, at least unconsciously, to armor ourselves against the real cruelty, which is Other People who would inevitably make such jokes as outsiders.
Mostly, though, we did it because it was funny.
Now, anyone who's not Jewish tells those jokes, I'll zap 'em with my space laser. But we give a pass to those of our in-group telling jokes to others of the in-group. In other words, the joke itself can be affliative or adversarial; it all depends on context.
A lot of what we call good-natured and wholesome humor is intended to be affiliative. These are uncontroversial jokes that aim to bring people together and get everyone chuckling or smiling along. “Why couldn’t the skeleton go to the ball?” I ask, and you smile, nod, and say, “Yeah, I know that one.”
Okay, fine, I'll admit it. I didn't know that one. "Because she had no body to go with." Dude, that's a pun, and we've already established that puns are only funny to the punster.
Of course, the epitome of the affiliative joke is the Christmas cracker joke. It’s been much commented on, but the fact that cracker jokes are so awful is not a bug but a feature.
My fellow Americans might not be familiar with Christmas crackers. They're a British thing. Think, like, fortune cookies? Only inedible ("cracker" in this sense is like "popper") and containing puns instead of questionable wisdom.
Again with the puns. Like I said: not really jokes.
For an affiliative joke to work, it has to be almost universally inoffensive. No one around the table can be offended or object to the joke. Rudolph is not there to cry about his shining nose, and Jim Skelton doesn’t storm off in a huff because you mocked his appearance.
Note the qualifier there: "almost." The joke doesn't exist that won't offend someone. Like with me and my friend up there I told you about: if we told those jokes to our parents, we'd have been grounded until we were 18. Maybe 25. They'd be offended.
The problem is that to be so universally inoffensive, an affiliative joke usually ends up being overworn and anodyne.
On that point, I can agree.
Of course, not all affiliation has to be universal. Sometimes an affiliative joke aims to affiliate only a certain portion of the room, group, or world... This is a kind of tribal affiliation that depends on an adversary.
Much has been made in recent years about the difference between "punching up" and "punching down" in comedy. It's okay to make jokes about the group in power. It's not usually okay to make jokes, especially mean-spirited ones, about those without social power. Apparently, the author here did a whole column on it. There's even a link in the article. I didn't follow it.
“I don’t find laughing at someone else’s expense that funny, personally,” Brett says. “Like, that’s a personal thing. But I do think there’s a line. Satire, for example — poking fun at politicians or someone in power when things get ridiculous — can help people see how silly a situation is. There’s a difference between that and just making fun of someone because of who they are. There’s a fine line, and I try to stay on the side that doesn’t hurt.”
We all have our own lines we won't cross. Mine's a picket line.
Seriously, though, that's really just a subset of what I just said about punching.
Of course, not all jokes can be so easily divided into these categories. Because often, jokes come from and are about something far harder to identify. “Jokes and dreams,” the Freudian says. Jokes and dreams are two of the best ways to reveal someone’s unconscious life.
As pretty much everything Freud hypothesized turned out to be less than true, I'm not sure I can believe this. But I do agree that the categorization has many exceptions, which makes me wonder how useful the categorization really is.
Still. I've been known to make puns in my dreams. Sometimes, I even remember them after I wake up.
Whether affiliative or adversarial, jokes tell us how we relate to others — and to ourselves. The affiliative joke wants to belong; the adversarial joke wants to set apart.
While I'm on board with this, at least provisionally, I should note that this isn't limited to jokes. All kinds of writing or spoken communication reveals something about the communicator. I mean... that's a big part of what communication is for.
In the end, I think it boils down to the basic advice any comedian receives: "read the room." Comedy is a two-way street, and sometimes, there's an accident or construction and traffic gets backed up to the intersection with Philosophy Avenue, or the other one at Stretched Metaphor Boulevard. |
© Copyright 2025 Robert Waltz (UN: cathartes02 at Writing.Com). All rights reserved.
Robert Waltz has granted InkSpot.Com, its affiliates and its syndicates non-exclusive rights to display this work.
|
None of the listed irritants have caused any problems for me. They're just a pain in the ass. QR codes in resteraunts are the worst! Yeah, I can magnify the screen to read it but I hate reading a sentence word by word. 
Comment • View 5 comments 
