Comedy is weird. People who seem very nice and people who you would never expect (e.g. some in the medical field) have a dark sense of humor. I don’t think they’re actually bad people. Breaking taboos is intrinsically funny so edgy and stereotyping jokes will always be funny. I doubt these taboo-breaking jokes are actually harmful.
You don’t say a semi-“racist” joke to someone who you know would get offended, you say it to someone who you think would actually think it’s funny. A common belief is that comedy is a way of dealing with hard feelings, I think a lot of people use politically-incorrect or rude comedy as a way to release tension from being politically correct and not rude otherwise. Well, some people definitely do use comedy to pass off genuine hate, but personally i can tell pretty quickly and i find those jokes annoying and not funny.
The author hypothesizes that e.g. a dictator could commit murder and frame it in a way that everyone just laughs it off. Actually yeah, hypothetically that could happen except you have to get the audience to completely disregard that person’s humanity in the first place, in which case you could just kill them anyways and everyone would move on. Person wouldn’t think it’s funny if they were behind the gun, they wouldn’t think it’s funny if their family member or friend was, and i doubt they would as long as someone they have any respect for is the one getting murdered. Some people like maybe the author think that genuine hate and comedy are the same, and you might not get it if you don’t have the sense of humor, but they’re actually kind of orthogonal.
The author thinks that laughter, comedy will be used in that case as an oppressive mean of compliance, confusion and blinding, so as to extinguish or constraint moral considerations and humanity feelings.
And that kind of ring a bell when listening to a few friends/family that have been touched by far/alt-right discourse the past few years.
Of course, there will be people to react - but comedy, as any other, is a tool to gather masses of people in one specific direction.
I only think that violent, dictatorial personalities cannot keep self-distancing themselves long enough to stay the comedy posture. They will crack ugly soon enough.
