there is nothing funny about this essay. Unless, of course, you found that sentence funny. If it did amuse, it may be because we tacitly assume that academic essays are serious business and that seriousness and humor are strange bedfellows (and not in the good way). Besides, seriousness and humor ought simply to be manifest, never pointed out. But suppose I began with a different statement: “This essay is not funny.” That would likely not solicit amusement but merely set a grave, slightly combative tone. We might then suppose that it is “nothing” that is funny. “Nothing” is funny, and we— those living through populist oligarchies and impending climate catastrophe— know it. “Nothing” demonstrates our shared understanding of how words, concepts, and etiquette affix to one another, and part of humor’s power is its talent for confirming our sense of when the adhesive is coming unstuck. Funny or not, this essay is concerned with this corroborative use of humor, with humor as a means of delineating a collective and, further, through such cartographic gestures, of ratifying it. The times call for thinking about the specificity and mechanisms of humor, too, because we are drowning in discourse about its meaning, or meaninglessness. From presidential candidate Trump asserting his entitlement to sexually assault women to corporate executives and esteemed professors facing sexual harassment charges to comics fired for racist quips, a consistent defense has been that the words under scrutiny were not meant, that the speaker was only kidding. It would be impossible to count the number of instances in which conservative pundits and Republicans have responded to President Trump’s tweets and statements by asserting he was “just joking,” while liberal critics have insisted that he is in fact in earnest.1

中文翻译：

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幽默的政治，从干到湿

这篇文章没有什么好笑的。当然，除非你觉得这句话很有趣。如果它确实很有趣，那可能是因为我们默认学术论文是严肃的事情，而严肃和幽默是奇怪的伙伴（而不是好的方式）。此外，严肃和幽默应该简单地表现出来，从不指出。但假设我从不同的陈述开始：“这篇文章不好笑。” 这可能不会引起娱乐，而只会设定一种严肃的、略带好斗的语气。然后我们可能会认为有趣的是“没什么”。“没什么”很有趣，我们——那些生活在民粹主义寡头政治和即将到来的气候灾难中的人——知道这一点。“无”展示了我们对词语、概念和礼仪如何相互关联的共同理解，幽默的部分力量在于它能够确认我们对粘合剂何时脱落的感觉。不管有趣与否，这篇文章关注的是幽默的这种佐证使用，幽默是描绘一个集体的一种手段，并进一步通过这种制图姿态，批准它。时代也需要思考幽默的特殊性和机制，因为我们正沉浸在关于其意义或无意义的讨论中。从总统候选人特朗普声称他有权对女性进行性侵犯，到面临性骚扰指控的企业高管和受人尊敬的教授，再到因种族主义讽刺而被解雇的漫画，一致的辩护是，受到审查的话语并不是故意的，演讲者只是在开玩笑。