Challenge: Political correctness

Humour and International Challenges (Part #3)

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One of the main challenges is that much appreciated humour is "politically incorrect" in that jokes are often at the expense of stereotypes and scapegoats. This is notably the case with religious and ethnic jokes. More generally it might be said that most jokes are politically incorrect in some way, if only as a manifestation of speciesism. Careful attention is therefore required to this whole issue. It is also worth adding that absolute political correctness may be incompatible with a sense of humour.

Several approaches are possible:

• The joke text could be accompanied, where appropriate, by a text explaining why it was politically incorrect or in bad taste. This would have the advantage of rendering explicit the psycho-dynamics that may in fact be contributing to the existence of the associated problem.
• Where possible bodies representative of the stereotype victimized by the joke might be involved in preparing and approving the text, and any commentary on it. This would be especially the case where that culture is the principal source of jokes about themselves (as is often the case of English jokes and Jewish jokes).
• Consistent with one of the principles of positive humour (http://www.callamer.com/itc/aath/affirm.html) , namely: "All teasing and ethnic humour will be by mutual consent and will go both ways or I will not engage in such humor", it should be possible to locate equivalent jokes illustrating the same point but from the opposite ethnic or cultural perspective. Such jokes should then be juxtaposed.

A second challenge would be determining criteria for exclusion of jokes because they were "dirty", even though they might be a valuable illustration of a problem or strategy.