Virtue-signalling over humour? What a sick joke

Ihaven’t heard a truly sick joke for at least a decade. By sick, I mean deliberately, competitively offensive. The kind we used to tell at school in the Eighties, whenever there was something in the news ghastly enough to penetrate the forcefield of our adolescent self-absorption. Famines, chemical spills, terrorist atrocities, civil wars, abductions and murders: the worse the tragedy, the faster and harder the gags came. It was a badge of honour to get your joke in first, even – especially – if the subject was still unbearably raw.

I remember tutting indulgently at a joke about starving Ethiopians, the morning after Michael Buerk’s famously harrowing BBC report. I had watched the news with my parents, scalp prickling with shock as the camera panned around a silent, dust-covered landscape that turned out to be the contours of dying humans. How could anyone make, or condone, a joke about that?

One possible explanation is that we were less nice back in the Eighties. Or at least, less self-consciously so. A new study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,

suggests that people who consider themselves highly moral are less inclined to make, or appreciate, jokes. Researchers asked volunteers to assess their own standard of morality. They were then asked to rate a series of jokes of varying edginess, and to make up a joke of their own. They were also paired in conversation with a stranger, who gave them marks for likeability and humour.

In every experiment, the pattern was the same: the more virtuous the participant, the less he or she laughed. In conversation, the morally superior specimens came across as sanctimonious and hard to like. This, say the researchers, can be especially problematic in situations such as the workplace, where humour is often the glue that binds people together.

The same could be said of wider society. Jokes make us like each other. Offensive jokes – although seldom very funny – bring us together in moments of conspiracy. It’s a kind of communal flatulence: not sophisticated or polite, but a necessary release of tension.

But virtue, not humour, is the quality that everyone wants to signal these days. So perhaps it’s not surprising that we feel increasingly irritated by each other. Sick jokes do still exist, but they have been relegated to the fringes of the internet, on websites that have a dangerous alt-right flavour to them. Being offensive is a political affiliation now, rather than a universal reflex.

Gallows humour – the gentler cousin of the sick joke – is still available in abundance. Indeed, thanks to Brexit, the mood of the nation is pretty much locked into despairing irony. Sardonic memes based on David Cameron’s 2015 campaign message – “Britain faces a simple and inescapable choice: stability and strong government with me, or chaos with Ed Miliband” – are ubiquitous on social media. Remainer jokes abound (“An Englishman, a Scotsman and an Irishman walk into a bar. The Englishman wanted to go, so they all had to leave”).

Pro-brexit gags, on the other hand, are almost nonexistent. This is partly because social media users (and comedians) have a strong Remain bias, but also because Remain voters are more in need of the psychic release only humour can provide. Even in our sense of humour, it seems, the British stand divided.