CFCP Annual Public Lecture: David Shoemaker

Quarrels and Cracks: On the Values of Comic Distraction

Monday, April 1, 2024 - Room MHP 101 - 2:00-4:00pm

or join us remotely:

quarrels

Quarrels and wisecracks are essential features of interpersonal life. Quarrels are conflicts that typically take place only between friends, family, and those with whom we are personally engaged and whose attitudes toward us matter. Wisecracks are bits of improvised wit—banter, teasing, mockery, and ball busting—that also typically take place only in interpersonal life (note the following odd but revealing comment: “I can’t tease her like that; I barely even know her!”). Quarrels and cracks are, though, mutually exclusive. People know their quarrel is basically over once they start being amused by each others’ wisecracks again, and if you’re enjoying wisecracks with each other, it’s very hard, if not impossible, to quarrel at the same time. Why is this and what does it mean for interpersonal conflict? 

cracks

In this talk, I’ll take a deep dive into the nature of wisecracking humor to explore the unrecognized—and valuable—role it plays in our interpersonal lives. This will include a discussion of what makes things funny, the close connection between having a good sense of humor and a good sense of morality (drawn from discussion of psychopaths and narcissists), how (and why!) to find the funny in misery, tragedy, and conflict, how humor reveals our shared humanity, and the way in which humor can operate to dissolve the anger in conflict.

Speaker: David Shoemaker

David Shoemaker is Professor of Philosophy at Cornell University, where he works on moral psychology, agency and responsibility, the nature of the self (including self-ownership), personal identity and ethics, and the philosophy and moral psychology of humor (especially as it is affected by and bears on morality).

He is the author of Responsibility from the Margins (Oxford University Press 2015), which develops a pluralistic theory of responsibility, drawn in part from empirical work on agents with various mental and personality disorders, and leaning heavily on a wide array of human emotional responses. And his new book, Wisecracks (University of Chicago Press - on shelves soon) is about the surprisingly intimate relationship between humor and morality.