A fine line between witty and cruel

I currently belong to a circle in which humour is a core part of the group dynamic. Humour, I’ve realised, is a tool that develops in the act. It’s a competitive game - one person lays a card on the table and then the rest try and top it - and your skill improves with ongoing participation. Or perhaps every joke is like a communal project. The first person opens the gate, the rest quickly catch whiff of what’s going on, and head out to open more gates as the joke builds (or sometimes descends into filth.)

As a group our conversations more often than not operate between two modes, verbal jousting and ribbing. The verbal jousting involves extremely spirited arguing over some point or idea, poking holes in someone’s theory or knowledge, as well as showing off one’s own theory or knowledge. The ribbing is never letting someone off the hook. No person in our group - at least in group situations - can ever reveal their inner soul without someone throwing in a witty, takedown barb at the end - thereby casting a ridiculous light on their earnestness.

Sounds mean, doesn’t it? But actually I’ve come to realise it isn’t, generally, an act of destruction. The earnestness of the soliloquy or revelation remains intact and independent, protected by its purity. But the takedown, like all humour really, is a way of saying, “thank you for that, it was wonderful, but still, we shouldn’t take life too seriously.” Because really, in the scheme of things, in the big eternal, exploding planets and starry burst sky sort of way, we shouldn’t.

In that, I wonder if trying to be funny is becoming a modus operandi for me, and sometimes whether that humour is cruel. Last night my friend and I were heading to a party when we bumped into his friend, also on his way to the party. It was a house party and so it struck me as strange that he was wearing a suit with a striped yellow and blue silk tie, and so out popped my mouth, “hey, did you sell many houses today?” He said, “what?” not having heard me properly and I mumbled, “oh don’t worry,” horrified that I’d made such a mean - no, such a mean girls - comment to a total stranger.

That’s the thing, it’s all about context. If this guy was a time honoured member of the group - rather than some guy I’d never even met before - it would have been fine. Because in the group ribbing is our language, our sport.

Context is everything. And in the same vein, as my friend pointed out, this rape joke is offensive and funny, but would be more offensive and less funny if a man had said it. Ditto this joke in fact. Because by way of a woman saying these things, there is an in-built subversion.