Lockyear, Sharon and Michael Pickering, Eds. Beyond a Joke. New York: Palgrave, 2005.

This book aims to investigate the line between offensiveness and humour. Citing several examples, from Berlusconi's comparison between a German MP and a concentration camp guard to an MP who made not one but two racist jokes at public functions in Britain, the editors suggest that there is a certain line between humour and offensiveness. Unlike Ted Cohen, who argues that the debate around offensive jokes should not revolve around whether or not they are funny, the editors suggest that some jokes, including Berlusconi's, are "desperately unfunny" (3). Teasing out additional strands to describe this split, the editors describe the "negotiation" that takes place in the creation of humour, often implicitly and quickly, sometimes in the length of time it takes to tell the joke—by the time the punchline occurs, we've decided whether or not to laugh (9-10).

The editors don't believe, as they say Howard Jacobson does in his book Seriously Funny, that there are no lines to be drawn within humour (11). They balk at the assumption that to consider such lines paints one as humourless or anti-humour; instead, they suggest more carefully analyzing the relations between the aesthetics and ethics of humour and a prominent theme in their analysis is the line between offensiveness and funniness (12). The line here, they argue, becomes very clear in jokes that revel "violent racism" or physical violence (13). More often, however, they recognize that the line between offense and humour is blurry and in flux, not to mention the face that "who 'we' might be is heavily burdened with political as well as moral issues" (13). The complications, they suggest, have lead critics like Jacobson to argue instead for a line between so-called "make believe" or fiction in joking as opposed to "real" life. The editors, however, recognize that humour is as much a part of real life as it is a kind of fiction, as well as noting that make believe precisely makes one believe, or constructs reality.

The editors position their project in terms of building tolerance in an increasingly multicultural world (14).The question of which "we" is the source of laughter and the rationale of ethical values makes up the core project of this collection. The editors write, "One of the aims of this book is to explore this tension and the question as to where the limits of humour might lie in order that 'we', in the multicultural sense of the word, may come to laugh together on a much wider basis and without the unexamined prejudice that allows for humour calculated to do little else than cause deep offense in others" (14). In accomplishing this goal, however, they don't aim to create an "absolute evaluative template" by which to measure humour, but rather to recognize the way in which the ethics and aesthetics of humour are "inextricably entwined" (15). In this way, they work with humour in a way that recognizes and accepts its slipperiness, its ability to be read and misread in multiple ways, to confirm prejudices or defy conventional wisdom, to posit ambiguity or to create the impression of certainty.

Morreall, John. Comic Relief: A Comprehensive Philosophy of Humour. Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

The latest book from a man who has made it one of his academic missions to establish the parameters of the philosophical understanding of humour. The first part of the book summarizes work he has done in the past to collect and name the three central theories of humour: 1) superiority theory, which Morreall describes as seeing humour as anti-social; 2) incongruity theory, which he describes as the view of humour as irrational; and 3) relief theory, which sees humour as a kind of pressure valve that releases social or psychic tension. He adds to these the minority view of Aristotle and Aquinas and, more recently, Robert Latta, which sees humour as playful relaxation.

In "That Mona Lisa Smile: The Aesthetics of Humour," one of the more interesting chapters in the book for the purposes of this work, Morreall describes humour as an aesthetic experience aligning it with the Kantian notion of disinterestedness (or suggesting that the goal of aesthetic humour is disinterested, focused only on providing amusement), adding to his description of the aesthetic of humour the elements of surprise or a shift in perspective, which contribute to its aesthetic appeal or pleasure (70). He distinguishes this from "non-aesthetic" humour on the basis of the motivation behind the joke, with jokes focused on superiority, for instance, falling into the latter category (72). Morreall wants to distinguish humorous amusement from similar kinds of cognitive shifts at work in tragedy, horror, the grotesque or macabre, suggesting, "humorous amusement, by contrast, is by itself a positive state with no negative emotions" (74). He also separates the fantastic or bizarre from humour, citing the Surrealists as an example and suggesting that these elicit cognitive rather than emotional shocks and thus cannot be considered humour. In his effort to delineate a unique kernel that is humour, however, one wonders at the exceptions to these rules: black humour, Holocaust jokes, killing jokes or nervous laughter, and how these would be accounted for in terms of their aesthetic function.

In the chapter, "Laughing at the Wrong Time: The Negative Ethics of Humor," Morreall goes on to describe 8 basic moral objections to humour, which he claims as the most common objections; that it is: insincere, idle, irresponsible, hedonistic, reducing self-control, hostile, anarchistic and foolish. In each case, Morreall cites examples to debunk each claim, though, equally, in each case, some example could be offered in support of the initial objection as well. Overall, however, in his effort to defuse these negative objections, Morreall wants to get past an ethical argument against humour that focuses on its phthonic element (Ronald de Sousa), or malicious attitude (98). Instead, Morreall describes humour as offering a "practical disengagement" (101), in this separating laughter and humour from emotion (101). In support of this division, he writes, "when we want to evoke anger or outrage about some problem, we don't present it in a humorous way, precisely because of the practical disengagement of humour. Satire is not a weapon of revolutionaries" (101). Though unclear on how someone like Swift fits into such a claim, Morreall moves on quickly from this claim to suggest in this context that the negative implications of humour are better viewed as stemming from this practical disengagement. He describes three such negative ethics in the bulk of the chapter: irresponsibility, the blocking of compassion and the promotion of prejudice, each of which is relatively self-explanatory.

In the following chapter, entitled "Having a Good Laugh: the Positive Ethics of Humour," Morreall counters the negative ethics of humour by describing the "intellectual virtues fostered by humour" (112). THeseinclude: fostering open-mindedness and spurring critical thinking (113). Here, he cites Jon Stewart and Bill Mahar (sic) as examples of political satirists who "encourage us to think twice before accepting any political message" (113).

The descriptions Morreall offers of both the negative and positive attributes of humour seem anecdotal and heavily tied to whichever example he chooses to illustrate his point. For instance, humour can be said to promote prejudice when the example cited is Don Imus's "joke" about the Rutgers women's basketball team, but political (perhaps even revolutionary?) when referencing Jon Stewart. While Morreall's work reinforces the idea that critical analysis should be applied to the topic of humour, his approach is largely anecdotal and relies heavily on generalizations that don't hold when applied to a range of examples.