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A place to pause and reflect on life’s bigger questions, with Big Think’s Jonny Thomson.

There are many kinds of laughter. You can laugh cheerfully, mirthlessly, dryly, cruelly, drunkenly, unexpectedly, and pointedly. Laughter is a noun with many possible adverbs. This raises a problem for anyone wanting to tell a joke. Because a joke, at its most basic, is something that is intended to make someone laugh. And so, given the sheer variety of laughter, it makes sense that there’s an equally sheer variety of jokes. A joke might be good-natured or mean. It might be childish or intellectual. It might be universal or niche. It might be about a social norm or about a specific person. Different jokes for different laughter.

The philosophy of humor is such an ill-defined and borderless discipline that a writer would be foolish to try to say anything meaningful at all. Well, hello, I’m Jonny Thomson, I run the Mini Philosophy column, and I’m a foolish writer.

In this week’s Mini Philosophy interview, I spoke with Brett Belle, who runs the hugely successful social media account Mom’s Dad Jokes, about what she thinks makes her and her jokes so popular. And, after sitting down and reflecting on our conversation, I’m going to put my neck out and suggest that all jokes and all laughter can be divided into two categories: affiliative and adversarial.

Affiliative

A lot of what we call good-natured and wholesome humor is intended to be affiliative. These are uncontroversial jokes that aim to bring people together and get everyone chuckling or smiling along. “Why couldn’t the skeleton go to the ball?” I ask, and you smile, nod, and say, “Yeah, I know that one.” Slaps on backs, bonhomie, and let’s all pop to the pub.

Of course, the epitome of the affiliative joke is the Christmas cracker joke. It’s been much commented on, but the fact that cracker jokes are so awful is not a bug but a feature. The eye-rolling, groaning, mock-despair brings the group together. Auntie Jillie might be drunk, Grandad might be an ass, and Dad might be arguing with his brother, but at least we can all laugh at snowmen, Santa, and reindeer puns.

For an affiliative joke to work, it has to be almost universally inoffensive. No one around the table can be offended or object to the joke. Rudolph is not there to cry about his shining nose, and Jim Skelton doesn’t storm off in a huff because you mocked his appearance.

As Brett put it, “I want to keep on this route of not straying too far into politics, not straying too far into religion. I don’t really want to exclude somebody when the whole point of this is just to make you roll your eyes and smile.”

If you want to become successful and popular on social media, you cannot appeal to only one tribe for long. You have to master the art of the affiliative joke.

The problem is that to be so universally inoffensive, an affiliative joke usually ends up being overworn and anodyne. They make you smile but rarely cackle. They are warm and comforting, like an episode of Cheers, but probably don’t have you bent over in a near-suffocating hysteria.

Adversarial

Of course, not all affiliation has to be universal. Sometimes an affiliative joke aims to affiliate only a certain portion of the room, group, or world. Men make jokes about women. Women make jokes about men. Our group laughs at your group. Your group laughs at ours. This is a kind of tribal affiliation that depends on an adversary. It points at a target and laughs. And that target can either shrug, laugh along, or take offense.

“I don’t find laughing at someone else’s expense that funny, personally,” Brett says. “Like, that’s a personal thing. But I do think there’s a line. Satire, for example — poking fun at politicians or someone in power when things get ridiculous — can help people see how silly a situation is. There’s a difference between that and just making fun of someone because of who they are. There’s a fine line, and I try to stay on the side that doesn’t hurt.”

In this week’s Mini Philosophy newsletter, I explore the philosophy behind “punching up” and “punching down,” but even outside of the philosophy of power dynamics, adversarial jokes can often serve a purpose.

When we laugh at what someone does, it’s often an example of what sociologists call a norm-enforcing practice: It draws boundaries of belonging by marking who conforms and who deviates. An adversarial joke will mock a way of life or a norm because it seeks to validate another norm instead. It’s a kind of verbal social policing. It says that this should be seen as silly, and that is okay. It brings together all the good, conforming people to laugh at the bad, non-conforming ones.

Think about the last time you and a friend laughed at someone you both know. When you dig into what’s going on here, you and your friend are bonding over mutual disapproval or distance from that other person. When you mock someone — however cruelly or good-naturedly — you are telling your joking buddy that you are both “not like that.”

Self-directed humor

Of course, not all jokes can be so easily divided into these categories. Because often, jokes come from and are about something far harder to identify. “Jokes and dreams,” the Freudian says. Jokes and dreams are two of the best ways to reveal someone’s unconscious life. What someone jokes about reflects their inner values and unseen workings.

So, to add a little psychoanalytic nuance to my division, we can concede that some affiliative jokes are self-affiliative, and some adversarial jokes are self-adversarial.

By self-affiliative, I mean those jokes that are used as a defense mechanism or coping strategy, for better or worse. People joke about their quirks and idiosyncrasies. People laugh about their own mental health issues. Making light of serious issues can help people to better live with and understand themselves. But either way, self-affiliative jokes are intended to make us happier and whole.

By self-adversarial, I mean those self-mocking and deprecating jokes that are often used to justify some poor behavior or trait. For example, if someone says, “I’ve not met a deadline I haven’t missed yet,” or “I’m committing to being a cat lady with no friends,” they can often be making a joke at their own expense. Sometimes this might be a self-affiliative act of acceptance, but at other times, they are a kind of self-harm. They might be an attempt to deflect from an issue that actually needs a more serious touch.

You don’t have to be a Freudian to accept that the jokes we tell often reveal more than they seem. Whether affiliative or adversarial, jokes tell us how we relate to others — and to ourselves. The affiliative joke wants to belong; the adversarial joke wants to set apart. Laughter can bind or divide, heal or conceal, depending on whether it’s reaching out or striking back. So perhaps we should look at the jokes we tell a bit more to see just what that tells us about who we are.

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A place to pause and reflect on life’s bigger questions, with Big Think’s Jonny Thomson.