On Punching Down
I've heard the presumptive advice to 'punch up, not down' which I guess, and hope I receive with my best poker face, for I don't wish to cause undue offence to a well intended Bill Cosby type.
There's something truismy of course about a one way 'punch up' policy. If people who are 'down' are permitted to punch up, but people who are 'up' are not permitted to punch down, then they are defenseless, and anyone up becomes down, and anyone down becomes up.
To be clear, I have nothing against punching up, it is one of my favorite things and furthermore a cornerstone of liberty everywhere. Punching up is the core of free speech, of parliamentary privilege. One has to be able to complain about and criticize the King of England, about El Presidente, about the Government.
And there's a certain artistry to punching up in comedy in particular, Nassim Taleb's 'the height of charm is to insult someone without offending them.' or Dan Dennet's evolutionary theory of humor as 'debugging pleasure'. The comic debugs our system of government by finding ways to be seditious that avoid detection, censure, denial, defensiveness.
Humor is important because it is disarming, and by now I assume everyone is aware of the phenomena of motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, selective attention, double standards. A well reasoned argument as to why the solar system is in fact heliocentric and not geocentric, can bring about the frustrating experience of your audience refusing to look through the telescope less they be corrupted by the blasphemous evidence.
But people gifted with wit don't have to flex their rhetorical muscles they can often get right past people's defenses. Which brings me to punching down.
When Lee Mack says 'My own wife got offended by something I said on stage. On the last tour there was one joke I must promise never to repeat again. It was offensive to her, it was offensive to the children and I must promise never to utter those words again on stage.' I shudder with anticipation when he take's a moment's pause and says 'I'll tell you the joke: I always wanted three kids, but now I have two I only want one.' and then he double's down with 'It's a joke isn't it! Of course it is... I don't want any.'
Which you know, of course Lee could be completely mischaracterizing his wife and children in the service of the joke. So when Dave Chappelle in his stand up special 'Equanimity' confides that he received a letter from a trans fan reporting they were 'devastated' by a transphobic joke he told. And he says something akin to 'my first response was that I felt bad, that I had made somebody feel bad. But then I began to wonder what I had said that had been so devastating, and I suspect it is the joke I am about to tell...' [paraphrased] and then he goes onto do a Caitlin Jenner bit, that I won't reproduce for reasons of spoliers, given that ruin one Lee Mack joke in an hour long set is to spoil 1/200th of the jokes, ruin a Chappelle bit and you might ruin the whole show.
But I enjoy viscerally the brinkmanship of comedy that punches down. I enjoy being scandalized. I enjoy seeing audiences laughing at something they know to be wrong. Scandalization is like the beautiful, glowing twin sibling of offense. Such that when I hear people advocate 'comedy should punch up, not down.' it rings in my ears like saying 'Rollercoasters should only go up, not down' the down part of the roller-coaster is where all the fun is, because it's frightening, the pleasure of going up on a roller-coaster is the building of anticipation. Punching down, by my personal preference has to be the pinnacle of comedic talent, because it's so high risk. Fuck it up and the whole crowd is against you, fuck up punching up as Bill Maher often does and the whole crowd is often still with you.
How to make the case, not that I am not a horrible person, but that you should be more horrible too.
So I would put it as the Nadir of humor is puns, and god help us all if people find a worse form of comedy. With a lot of hard work, someone like Tim Vine can elevate puns to something entertaining, but to the children out there, why waste your life? The Zenith of humor is to say the exact wrong thing at the exact wrong time.
For example, imagine your physics teacher has just drawn out a diagram explaining how vision works, like a camera obscura with arrows donating light rays hitting the top and bottom of a poorly drawn tree and then travelling in straight lines to intersect at the pupil of a poorly drawn head and then replicating an inverted tree on the retina at the back of the poorly drawn eyeball.
A student that doesn't get it might say: 'Mr Knight you dickhead, the trees upside down' precipitating the teacher explaining that our brains actually unconsciously invert the information to the retina automatically and maybe tells an anecdote about Michelangelo after doing the Sistine Chapel, or experiments conducted with eyeglasses that invert our vision.
An intelligent student might say: 'So light reflects off objects in the real world that then travel in straight lines through the lens that adjusts the focal length so the corresponding optic nerves on the retina are stimulated sending signals to the brain.' reassuring the teacher that they have successfully discharged their duties and won't be fired after the whole class flunks their assessment.
A smartass student might say: 'So light comes from the eyes, shoots out and hits the tree and that absorbs the essence of the tree into the brain.' indicating to the teacher that they too not only understand what has been transmitted by the teacher, by saying something so heinously incorrect that they know exactly what is wrong. Furthermore demonstrating their erudition by actually voicing the psuedoscientific theory of sight espoused by ancient Greek philosophers.
In summary you can demonstrate you don't understand by saying the wrong thing, demonstrate you understand by saying the right thing, and demonstrate you understand by saying the wrong thing.
Such that sometimes the difference between the right thing and the wrong thing is not actually comprehension but sophistication. As confusingly, is the difference between the wrong thing and the wrong thing.
Here's one of my favorite examples of 'the wrong thing' which is the kind of ignoramus that doesn't get that racist jokes are most often anti-racist, as well as perfectly conveying the pain and suffering of someone with a sense of humor living in a largely humorless world:
That last guy's riff on the initial joke, demonstrates his actual values because the racism is inserted around the punchline.
Now Australian's of a certain age probably recall this joke that was the other 'wrong thing' but simply failed to land:
A botched attempt at punching down. Such was the public furor that the show was suspended for two weeks, and resumed with an apology for the sketch. The joke was obvious, perhaps even derivative of the far superior (and longer) Mr Show sketch of two bumbling idiots setting up their own 'Dream of a Lifetime' foundation. Albeit that joke works differently because it is punching down on the two idiots that over-promise and under-deliver. Sean Micallef similarly did another 'Make a Wish' inspired sketch where a bed stricken teen wishes for 'a handjob from Lisa McCune' to which Francis Greenslade turns to Sean and remarks 'well she did do The Potato Factory.'
I'm not sure where the Chaser's sketch went wrong, I mean obviously the line was 'they're going to die anyway' was what was offensive, but why did the punch fail to slip past defenses?
There's a class of jokes of which at a pinch I can recall at least 5, and worse known as 'dead baby jokes' that in Australia at least are jokes you tell either while in primary school and blissfully unaware of the tragedy and suffering in the world, or in a hushed voice after looking over your shoulder to make sure you know exactly everyone who will actually hear the joke, as a measure of calculated risks.
And when I write 'you tell' and 'your shoulder' I do not mean to impute an ignorant understanding on my part that everyone tells these jokes. I merely suggest that if you are to take a crack at black humor, gallows humor, offensive humor, this is the way I advise telling it, because the repercussions are real.
But with the Chaser sketch, I don't quite know, I'm agnostic. The degree to which they are broadcasting makes me think that to construe that their intent was to upset sick children, their families and friends seems to be acting in very bad faith. Nor can I fully credit any slippery slope, or contagion based arguments.
I actually heard the joke 'What did the blind, quadriplegic boy get for Christmas? Cancer' from a weatherman on one of Australia's more conservative morning breakfast shows. (although they are all conservative). Yeah, and maybe they received a bunch of complaint calls and letters, but it makes me suspect that Chaser went wrong with timing, and not comic timing but hadn't anticipated living in the age of Moral outrage pile-ons.
And I hear progressives 'Yes, but' this with 'pile ons are a problem but...' which like 'I'm not racist but,' indicates what you will immediately hear is going to be an apology for pile-on public shaming behavior.
Jimmy Carr wrote a book on comedy that I have no intention to read, but on Qi he asserted that all jokes work the same way, by employing two narratives such that the listener thinks they are on one narrative and the punch line switches them to another. In the case of the weatherman's cancer joke, the setup fosters the expectation culturally that something nice is going to happen to this unfortunate child because that's the feel good fluff piece trope, and the punchline then works by subverting the expectation and forcing us to deal with something really horrible.
This is punching down in humor, the joke is that we know it is wrong. If we can't get there, we can't get the joke, if enough people can't get the joke and it's punching down, then it fails and therein lies the delicious risk, the pleasure of being scandalized. Something is at stake.
A joke that doesn't work anymore is 'Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side.' I was in my early twenties before it was explained to me through a dissection by Alan Moore, that the whole joke hinges on the listener presuming they are being asked why the chicken crossed the road, and why a chicken in particular for some good reason. And once I could empathize with someone hearing the premise and trying to deduce a chicken related punchline, I suddenly got how this joke could have been funny, some where, some when.
The chicken crossing the road, is actually despite it's reputation of being one of the oldest and lamest jokes in the book. (punching down pun on the lame not intended, I never intentionally pun) It actually can't be the oldest joke, because it's quite a sophisticated meta-joke. A joke about jokes. A variation of one of my favorite jokes 'what's brown and sticky? A stick.'
Chicken joke aside, how jokes work is so intuitive to me, what I really struggle with in defending and advocating for punching down, is that it's hard for me to get, what people don't get. I suspect it's why a lot of the people that push back, particularly comedians, suspect much of the moral outrage and sermonizing is conducted in bad faith. I suspect, it's the usual story of censorship, people advocating for censorship are never advocating on their behalf, that they don't get it's a joke, it's on behalf of the poor morons who won't get that it's a joke. Like the last guy to repeat back to Steven Russell the lawyer joke with extra racism. These censorship arguments in the words of Steven Russell are the province of 'fucking morons'.
Or maybe, it's that everyone has a sense of humor until the joke is on them. As my highschool running buddy use to say 'you can dish it but you can't take it' Here is the principle neatly illustrated by neat illustrator and generally left-wing artist Tom Gauld:
I went to Uni in the Bush Administration, and did a course that had me commute past the almost weekly protests driven by Bush's foreign policy or an emboldened IDF. Such that I can recall seeing the Lebanese community out on the state library lawns protesting the latest air strikes from Isreal, and thinking 'where were you all last week for the Iraqi protest?' which is equally true of where was the Iraqi community at this protest? It's just happenstance who the players were, but it struck me that the principle was a bit tribal. It's not that you are anti-war per se, it's that you are anti-war against your community. Which I feel isn't good enough.
Such that I respect the pacifists, and I respect the non-pacifists, but not the tribalists. This does somewhat undermine my opening remarks about the truism of 'punch up, not down' so allow me to steel man it, if unintentionally.
Punching up is fine, but in part it doesn't do it for me. Risk = reward, and perhaps in the domain of humor why I'm fine with punching up, is that when historically you've been on the side of the whip I have, (although statistically the odds that I am decended from a slave or multiple slaves is 100%, as are the odds I am decended on multiple occassions from rapists and the corresponding rape victims) those punches are quite impotent, flaccid, adorable even.
I recall fondly when my friend from Thailand complained audibly how 'white people fucking loooooove potatoes.' and my white friend remarked how he loved collecting white stereotypes citing an example of 'white people smell like cheese.'
Even as a stranger in a strange land, I thrilled to the novelty of having a Han Chinese in an upmarket Beijing restaurant wearing military uniform see me balk at the squat toilets and scoff before derisively saying 'guilo' or however it is spelled.
There may be a future where China comes to dominate the Pacific in such a way that I develop a sensitivity, but as of now, I don't.
But there are people who are 'upwards' in society that are clearly sensitive, and their moves to censure 'punching up' have to be resisted. Like when Australia passes a law criminalising any reporting on their offshore detention centers. Or in the world's most prominent example and psychological case study in how to share the misery: Donald Trump, you have a man who is ostensibly powerful, but doesn't feel powerful until such a time as he can do whatever he wants and nobody will criticize him, at which point I suspect his sensitivity will convert into full blown paranoia that nobody actually loves or respects him.
These are the types for which the ability to punch up is admirable and indeed vital.
I have no problem, if a new market is emergent and sustained for people who cannot enjoy punching down. Who's idea of a comedy special is Nanette. I believe that it's actually been a long emerging trend perhaps started by Daniel Kitson of the UK to basically do 'comedy' shows that are tragic one-man plans about people's struggles in life. The Athenians used to regularly watch tragedies, and talking about traumatic events and struggle and suffering is a good and healthy thing.
I just enjoy it more when people make fun of trauma, struggle and suffering in an artful way. And I hope just as I wouldn't want to tell people how they can spend $120 on a Saturday evening, people will not tell me how to spend mine. It's possible in certain quarters, certain markets, what I find funny will have to go underground, and my only consolation is John Waters who complains that it was more fun to be a homosexual when it was illegal and all underground.
What would scare me is if the zeitgeist got such that genuinelly funny comedians had to perform to the Ku Klux Klan or Neo-Nazi's thanks to their experience of running clandestine meetings. That would be a really bad development.
I also feel entitled to come down hard on the position that academics have no place nor say on comedy, particularly stand up comedy. Comedy is a practice, not a profession. It is the only artform that has to be practiced in front of a crowd, which is to say the only way you can practice stand up is through the practice of stand up.
And in a situation where Chappelle, or Tosh, or Louis CK, or Anthony Jeselnik, or Ricky Gervais tell a joke that punches down, and it results in a pile-on of thousands, or tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of anonymous people online expressing their moral outrage. In a situation where it is one against a mob, who is punching down and who is punching up?
Jon Oliver might argue that all those men are public figures, powerful celebrities and also that they are all notable for their unapologetic ability to withstand a pile on, but you don't get to their level (with the possible exception of Gervais) without cutting your teeth on open mics, college tours, comedy clubs.
Or whether some civilian like Justine Sacco deserves to have her life ruined by making a racist joke on twitter.
If people can't hone their craft at punching down, such that they can successfully ridicule the ridiculous, then it will be the case that 'punch up, not down' will become a truism, because having the position to punch up will be the position of privilege if you cannot punch down.
Comedy is definitely a domain where it is especially true that 'those that can't do, teach' and I think since the whole SJW vs Alt-right polarisation broke out, I always knew which side I was on. I am on the side of the comedians.
It'll be interesting, as it is interesting to see how this plays out. Because a philosophy that defines speech as violence, and violence as contingent on privilege and not contingent on intent, is fundamentally incompatible with the existence of comedy. Nor do I suspect, is an edict of 'punch up not down' even sincere. I do not believe that people who espouse it for example, think that a wheelchair bound Nigerian lesbian comedian could do a set of vicious racist jokes about Asians, even though she would technically be punching up.
When I see compelling evidence of an efficient causal chain between say racist jokes, and race hate crimes or sexist jokes and domestic violence, I might actually entertain notions of censorship. However to my knowledge while the causal arguments exist, and lived experience narratives exist, and are worth hearing, the causal evidence does not. I suspect because it cannot, and other correlates prove more compelling for these social problems such as the presence of austerity, economic inequality and honor cultures (of which much progressive thought resembles).
I feel like I should end on a lighthearted note so here:
There's something truismy of course about a one way 'punch up' policy. If people who are 'down' are permitted to punch up, but people who are 'up' are not permitted to punch down, then they are defenseless, and anyone up becomes down, and anyone down becomes up.
To be clear, I have nothing against punching up, it is one of my favorite things and furthermore a cornerstone of liberty everywhere. Punching up is the core of free speech, of parliamentary privilege. One has to be able to complain about and criticize the King of England, about El Presidente, about the Government.
And there's a certain artistry to punching up in comedy in particular, Nassim Taleb's 'the height of charm is to insult someone without offending them.' or Dan Dennet's evolutionary theory of humor as 'debugging pleasure'. The comic debugs our system of government by finding ways to be seditious that avoid detection, censure, denial, defensiveness.
Humor is important because it is disarming, and by now I assume everyone is aware of the phenomena of motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, selective attention, double standards. A well reasoned argument as to why the solar system is in fact heliocentric and not geocentric, can bring about the frustrating experience of your audience refusing to look through the telescope less they be corrupted by the blasphemous evidence.
But people gifted with wit don't have to flex their rhetorical muscles they can often get right past people's defenses. Which brings me to punching down.
When Lee Mack says 'My own wife got offended by something I said on stage. On the last tour there was one joke I must promise never to repeat again. It was offensive to her, it was offensive to the children and I must promise never to utter those words again on stage.' I shudder with anticipation when he take's a moment's pause and says 'I'll tell you the joke: I always wanted three kids, but now I have two I only want one.' and then he double's down with 'It's a joke isn't it! Of course it is... I don't want any.'
Which you know, of course Lee could be completely mischaracterizing his wife and children in the service of the joke. So when Dave Chappelle in his stand up special 'Equanimity' confides that he received a letter from a trans fan reporting they were 'devastated' by a transphobic joke he told. And he says something akin to 'my first response was that I felt bad, that I had made somebody feel bad. But then I began to wonder what I had said that had been so devastating, and I suspect it is the joke I am about to tell...' [paraphrased] and then he goes onto do a Caitlin Jenner bit, that I won't reproduce for reasons of spoliers, given that ruin one Lee Mack joke in an hour long set is to spoil 1/200th of the jokes, ruin a Chappelle bit and you might ruin the whole show.
But I enjoy viscerally the brinkmanship of comedy that punches down. I enjoy being scandalized. I enjoy seeing audiences laughing at something they know to be wrong. Scandalization is like the beautiful, glowing twin sibling of offense. Such that when I hear people advocate 'comedy should punch up, not down.' it rings in my ears like saying 'Rollercoasters should only go up, not down' the down part of the roller-coaster is where all the fun is, because it's frightening, the pleasure of going up on a roller-coaster is the building of anticipation. Punching down, by my personal preference has to be the pinnacle of comedic talent, because it's so high risk. Fuck it up and the whole crowd is against you, fuck up punching up as Bill Maher often does and the whole crowd is often still with you.
How to make the case, not that I am not a horrible person, but that you should be more horrible too.
So I would put it as the Nadir of humor is puns, and god help us all if people find a worse form of comedy. With a lot of hard work, someone like Tim Vine can elevate puns to something entertaining, but to the children out there, why waste your life? The Zenith of humor is to say the exact wrong thing at the exact wrong time.
For example, imagine your physics teacher has just drawn out a diagram explaining how vision works, like a camera obscura with arrows donating light rays hitting the top and bottom of a poorly drawn tree and then travelling in straight lines to intersect at the pupil of a poorly drawn head and then replicating an inverted tree on the retina at the back of the poorly drawn eyeball.
A student that doesn't get it might say: 'Mr Knight you dickhead, the trees upside down' precipitating the teacher explaining that our brains actually unconsciously invert the information to the retina automatically and maybe tells an anecdote about Michelangelo after doing the Sistine Chapel, or experiments conducted with eyeglasses that invert our vision.
An intelligent student might say: 'So light reflects off objects in the real world that then travel in straight lines through the lens that adjusts the focal length so the corresponding optic nerves on the retina are stimulated sending signals to the brain.' reassuring the teacher that they have successfully discharged their duties and won't be fired after the whole class flunks their assessment.
A smartass student might say: 'So light comes from the eyes, shoots out and hits the tree and that absorbs the essence of the tree into the brain.' indicating to the teacher that they too not only understand what has been transmitted by the teacher, by saying something so heinously incorrect that they know exactly what is wrong. Furthermore demonstrating their erudition by actually voicing the psuedoscientific theory of sight espoused by ancient Greek philosophers.
In summary you can demonstrate you don't understand by saying the wrong thing, demonstrate you understand by saying the right thing, and demonstrate you understand by saying the wrong thing.
Such that sometimes the difference between the right thing and the wrong thing is not actually comprehension but sophistication. As confusingly, is the difference between the wrong thing and the wrong thing.
Here's one of my favorite examples of 'the wrong thing' which is the kind of ignoramus that doesn't get that racist jokes are most often anti-racist, as well as perfectly conveying the pain and suffering of someone with a sense of humor living in a largely humorless world:
That last guy's riff on the initial joke, demonstrates his actual values because the racism is inserted around the punchline.
Now Australian's of a certain age probably recall this joke that was the other 'wrong thing' but simply failed to land:
A botched attempt at punching down. Such was the public furor that the show was suspended for two weeks, and resumed with an apology for the sketch. The joke was obvious, perhaps even derivative of the far superior (and longer) Mr Show sketch of two bumbling idiots setting up their own 'Dream of a Lifetime' foundation. Albeit that joke works differently because it is punching down on the two idiots that over-promise and under-deliver. Sean Micallef similarly did another 'Make a Wish' inspired sketch where a bed stricken teen wishes for 'a handjob from Lisa McCune' to which Francis Greenslade turns to Sean and remarks 'well she did do The Potato Factory.'
I'm not sure where the Chaser's sketch went wrong, I mean obviously the line was 'they're going to die anyway' was what was offensive, but why did the punch fail to slip past defenses?
There's a class of jokes of which at a pinch I can recall at least 5, and worse known as 'dead baby jokes' that in Australia at least are jokes you tell either while in primary school and blissfully unaware of the tragedy and suffering in the world, or in a hushed voice after looking over your shoulder to make sure you know exactly everyone who will actually hear the joke, as a measure of calculated risks.
And when I write 'you tell' and 'your shoulder' I do not mean to impute an ignorant understanding on my part that everyone tells these jokes. I merely suggest that if you are to take a crack at black humor, gallows humor, offensive humor, this is the way I advise telling it, because the repercussions are real.
But with the Chaser sketch, I don't quite know, I'm agnostic. The degree to which they are broadcasting makes me think that to construe that their intent was to upset sick children, their families and friends seems to be acting in very bad faith. Nor can I fully credit any slippery slope, or contagion based arguments.
I actually heard the joke 'What did the blind, quadriplegic boy get for Christmas? Cancer' from a weatherman on one of Australia's more conservative morning breakfast shows. (although they are all conservative). Yeah, and maybe they received a bunch of complaint calls and letters, but it makes me suspect that Chaser went wrong with timing, and not comic timing but hadn't anticipated living in the age of Moral outrage pile-ons.
And I hear progressives 'Yes, but' this with 'pile ons are a problem but...' which like 'I'm not racist but,' indicates what you will immediately hear is going to be an apology for pile-on public shaming behavior.
Jimmy Carr wrote a book on comedy that I have no intention to read, but on Qi he asserted that all jokes work the same way, by employing two narratives such that the listener thinks they are on one narrative and the punch line switches them to another. In the case of the weatherman's cancer joke, the setup fosters the expectation culturally that something nice is going to happen to this unfortunate child because that's the feel good fluff piece trope, and the punchline then works by subverting the expectation and forcing us to deal with something really horrible.
This is punching down in humor, the joke is that we know it is wrong. If we can't get there, we can't get the joke, if enough people can't get the joke and it's punching down, then it fails and therein lies the delicious risk, the pleasure of being scandalized. Something is at stake.
A joke that doesn't work anymore is 'Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side.' I was in my early twenties before it was explained to me through a dissection by Alan Moore, that the whole joke hinges on the listener presuming they are being asked why the chicken crossed the road, and why a chicken in particular for some good reason. And once I could empathize with someone hearing the premise and trying to deduce a chicken related punchline, I suddenly got how this joke could have been funny, some where, some when.
The chicken crossing the road, is actually despite it's reputation of being one of the oldest and lamest jokes in the book. (punching down pun on the lame not intended, I never intentionally pun) It actually can't be the oldest joke, because it's quite a sophisticated meta-joke. A joke about jokes. A variation of one of my favorite jokes 'what's brown and sticky? A stick.'
Chicken joke aside, how jokes work is so intuitive to me, what I really struggle with in defending and advocating for punching down, is that it's hard for me to get, what people don't get. I suspect it's why a lot of the people that push back, particularly comedians, suspect much of the moral outrage and sermonizing is conducted in bad faith. I suspect, it's the usual story of censorship, people advocating for censorship are never advocating on their behalf, that they don't get it's a joke, it's on behalf of the poor morons who won't get that it's a joke. Like the last guy to repeat back to Steven Russell the lawyer joke with extra racism. These censorship arguments in the words of Steven Russell are the province of 'fucking morons'.
Or maybe, it's that everyone has a sense of humor until the joke is on them. As my highschool running buddy use to say 'you can dish it but you can't take it' Here is the principle neatly illustrated by neat illustrator and generally left-wing artist Tom Gauld:
I went to Uni in the Bush Administration, and did a course that had me commute past the almost weekly protests driven by Bush's foreign policy or an emboldened IDF. Such that I can recall seeing the Lebanese community out on the state library lawns protesting the latest air strikes from Isreal, and thinking 'where were you all last week for the Iraqi protest?' which is equally true of where was the Iraqi community at this protest? It's just happenstance who the players were, but it struck me that the principle was a bit tribal. It's not that you are anti-war per se, it's that you are anti-war against your community. Which I feel isn't good enough.
Such that I respect the pacifists, and I respect the non-pacifists, but not the tribalists. This does somewhat undermine my opening remarks about the truism of 'punch up, not down' so allow me to steel man it, if unintentionally.
Punching up is fine, but in part it doesn't do it for me. Risk = reward, and perhaps in the domain of humor why I'm fine with punching up, is that when historically you've been on the side of the whip I have, (although statistically the odds that I am decended from a slave or multiple slaves is 100%, as are the odds I am decended on multiple occassions from rapists and the corresponding rape victims) those punches are quite impotent, flaccid, adorable even.
I recall fondly when my friend from Thailand complained audibly how 'white people fucking loooooove potatoes.' and my white friend remarked how he loved collecting white stereotypes citing an example of 'white people smell like cheese.'
Even as a stranger in a strange land, I thrilled to the novelty of having a Han Chinese in an upmarket Beijing restaurant wearing military uniform see me balk at the squat toilets and scoff before derisively saying 'guilo' or however it is spelled.
There may be a future where China comes to dominate the Pacific in such a way that I develop a sensitivity, but as of now, I don't.
But there are people who are 'upwards' in society that are clearly sensitive, and their moves to censure 'punching up' have to be resisted. Like when Australia passes a law criminalising any reporting on their offshore detention centers. Or in the world's most prominent example and psychological case study in how to share the misery: Donald Trump, you have a man who is ostensibly powerful, but doesn't feel powerful until such a time as he can do whatever he wants and nobody will criticize him, at which point I suspect his sensitivity will convert into full blown paranoia that nobody actually loves or respects him.
These are the types for which the ability to punch up is admirable and indeed vital.
I have no problem, if a new market is emergent and sustained for people who cannot enjoy punching down. Who's idea of a comedy special is Nanette. I believe that it's actually been a long emerging trend perhaps started by Daniel Kitson of the UK to basically do 'comedy' shows that are tragic one-man plans about people's struggles in life. The Athenians used to regularly watch tragedies, and talking about traumatic events and struggle and suffering is a good and healthy thing.
I just enjoy it more when people make fun of trauma, struggle and suffering in an artful way. And I hope just as I wouldn't want to tell people how they can spend $120 on a Saturday evening, people will not tell me how to spend mine. It's possible in certain quarters, certain markets, what I find funny will have to go underground, and my only consolation is John Waters who complains that it was more fun to be a homosexual when it was illegal and all underground.
What would scare me is if the zeitgeist got such that genuinelly funny comedians had to perform to the Ku Klux Klan or Neo-Nazi's thanks to their experience of running clandestine meetings. That would be a really bad development.
I also feel entitled to come down hard on the position that academics have no place nor say on comedy, particularly stand up comedy. Comedy is a practice, not a profession. It is the only artform that has to be practiced in front of a crowd, which is to say the only way you can practice stand up is through the practice of stand up.
And in a situation where Chappelle, or Tosh, or Louis CK, or Anthony Jeselnik, or Ricky Gervais tell a joke that punches down, and it results in a pile-on of thousands, or tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of anonymous people online expressing their moral outrage. In a situation where it is one against a mob, who is punching down and who is punching up?
Jon Oliver might argue that all those men are public figures, powerful celebrities and also that they are all notable for their unapologetic ability to withstand a pile on, but you don't get to their level (with the possible exception of Gervais) without cutting your teeth on open mics, college tours, comedy clubs.
Or whether some civilian like Justine Sacco deserves to have her life ruined by making a racist joke on twitter.
If people can't hone their craft at punching down, such that they can successfully ridicule the ridiculous, then it will be the case that 'punch up, not down' will become a truism, because having the position to punch up will be the position of privilege if you cannot punch down.
Comedy is definitely a domain where it is especially true that 'those that can't do, teach' and I think since the whole SJW vs Alt-right polarisation broke out, I always knew which side I was on. I am on the side of the comedians.
It'll be interesting, as it is interesting to see how this plays out. Because a philosophy that defines speech as violence, and violence as contingent on privilege and not contingent on intent, is fundamentally incompatible with the existence of comedy. Nor do I suspect, is an edict of 'punch up not down' even sincere. I do not believe that people who espouse it for example, think that a wheelchair bound Nigerian lesbian comedian could do a set of vicious racist jokes about Asians, even though she would technically be punching up.
When I see compelling evidence of an efficient causal chain between say racist jokes, and race hate crimes or sexist jokes and domestic violence, I might actually entertain notions of censorship. However to my knowledge while the causal arguments exist, and lived experience narratives exist, and are worth hearing, the causal evidence does not. I suspect because it cannot, and other correlates prove more compelling for these social problems such as the presence of austerity, economic inequality and honor cultures (of which much progressive thought resembles).
I feel like I should end on a lighthearted note so here:
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