Can jokes in terrible taste ever be funny?

IT MIGHT SOUND DEPRESSING TO WRITE “A book about humor while living through a cancer diagnosis, major surgery, and a global pandemic”. Yet David Shoemaker calls it “the most joyful experience of my academic life”. Wisecracks is clearly the work of an academic philosopher adept at teasing out fine distinctions between “offenses” and “harms”, or between “radical subjectivist, intersubjectivist, and objectivist theories of the funny”. Fortunately, it is also lively, provocative, and often very amusing in its determination to challenge many contemporary pieties. Shoemaker focuses not on jokes but on “the banter, teasing, mockery, prankery, taking the piss, leg-pulling, joshing, and quippery” which enliven so many families and friendship groups. Since pranks, for example, involve deliberate deception, such humour undoubtedly raises moral issues, so he describes the book as an unusual…