Zoe Walker (Trinity College - Oxford University), "Just Kidding? Two Roles for the Concept of Joking in Political Speech"

Forthcoming, Philosophical Quarterly

Just Kidding? Two roles for the concept of joking in political speech

By Zoe Walker

Imagine you’re a politician and you say something that doesn’t go down well. What do you do about it? You could double down on what you said – but upon reflection, you’re not really sure it was such a great thing to say after all. Alternatively, you could apologise – but that would mean admitting that you were in the wrong, and you really don’t want to do that. Or you could just stay silent – but that means letting your critics have the last word. Is there any way you can respond without standing by what you said and without admitting to any wrongdoing?

One strategy that has recently been popularised by Donald Trump and his base is to claim that you were ‘just kidding’, or as he sometimes puts it, ‘being sarcastic’. Here, of course, the strategy is to deny that you ever said this awful or stupid thing people are attributing to you: it may have sounded like I was sincerely asserting that Jimmy Carter was dead, or sincerely asking whether injecting disinfectant might cure Covid, but these apparent speech acts were performed in jest, not in earnest.

Now, there are other ways to achieve deniability – other ways to pretend that you never said what you appeared to say. You could mumble your utterance and then pretend you’d been misheard, or you could insinuate it rather than saying it outright, and then pretend you were insinuating something else. But, as I argue in the first part of my paper, claiming that one was joking can be an especially effective way of achieving deniability, because of the aesthetic element of a joke: joking aims at amusement.

Why does this aesthetic element of joking help with deniability? Well, on the one hand, it saves you from having to come up with a plausible alibi for your speech act. If you claim that you really meant something else, you’re going to have to say what that other thing was – and it better be something you could reasonably have meant at that point in the conversation, or your denial isn’t going to be very plausible. But joking gets you out of providing such an alibi, or so I argue, for the aesthetic aspect of joking gives you a kind of poetic licence. If you were joking, you don’t need to justify your joke as an acceptable conversational move, because you weren’t trying to further the aims of the conversation: you were just trying to make people laugh.

And on the other hand, it’s pretty embarrassing to have a bad sense of humour, and that’s something you can use to your advantage as well. Drawing on Kate Manne’s recent discussion of moral gaslighting, I argue that the aesthetic aspect of joking allows political speakers to perform what I call ‘aesthetic gaslighting’, whereby they can make hearers feel aesthetically defective – lacking in a good sense of humour – for thinking that the speaker’s original utterance was sincere. In other words, you can characterize anyone who took you seriously as a humourless boor – and that’s not something anyone will want to admit to in a hurry.

So far, I’ve been asking you to imagine that you’re a politician who wants to obtain deniability for something you said in the past. But I think there’s a second important role for joking in political speech which is more forward-looking. For imagine now that you’re a politician who wants to influence your hearers to dislike your opponent, by making spurious claims about them. Obviously, you can’t assert these claims outright, or you’ll land yourself in the same kind of hot water you were in in the previous thought experiment. But what if you make a joke about these spurious claims instead? That might avoid the accountability issue, but does making a joke of it ruin your attempts to influence your hearers?

In the second part of my paper, I argue that on the contrary, joking about spurious claims about your opponent can still influence your hearers – in fact, it may be a more effective way of influencing them than asserting the claims outright. First of all, it may be true that if you’re joking, then you haven’t sincerely performed any speech act: you haven’t actually asserted, or asked, or promised, or requested anything, but only did so in jest. But that doesn’t mean your pseudo-speech act hasn’t had any genuine effects. In particular, an assertion said in jest can still raise something to salience – even if you’re just kidding about your opponent having connections to ISIS, this still raises that possibility to salience in your hearers’ minds. And, I argue, this raising to salience may affect their subsequent thinking and action. Moreover, when it comes to raising to salience sexist or racist views, experimental data suggests that doing so in jest rather than sincerely can make your hearers more likely to act on their pre-existing sexist or racist biases – and not only that, but its negative effect on hearers’ behaviour is even greater than when sexist or racist views are asserted sincerely. Great news for the seedy politician. Not such good news for everyone else.