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We’ve got excellent reasons to engage in the wisecracking life, but we may also have serious moral qualms about doing so. My title points to a kind of pun: Wisecracks may both bridge cracks and crack bridges, bond people and divide them. Which one occurs depends crucially on what role, if any, empathy plays in the exchange.

David Shoemaker is a much-published philosopher and a Professor at the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University, and in our modern reality of social media piling-on and cancel culture, he was interested in investigating what role humour (specifically wisecracks) plays in human interaction and whether there is something objectively valuable about this kind of “put down� humour that could speak back to the “prigs� with their efforts to silence others with a blanket “There’s nothing funny about ______� attitude. Wisecracks is the result of that investigation, and as Shoemaker is a fan of wisecracking humour himself, he entertainingly balances scholarship with snark and assembles what I found to be a compelling argument in favour of this type of joking around. This is exactly the sort of thing I like to read about, and it was well done. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Wisecracks are ways of interacting with other people, but they are distinctive because what makes wisecracks aesthetically good � amusing � is often the very same thing that can make them morally bad. They tweak or ignore some of the norms that sustain our interpersonal lives, such as our expectations of trust and honesty, our desires for respect and equal worth, our concern to be viewed as the particular people we are (rather than as members of some group). These features make them very different, and far more interesting, than jokes.

As a philosopher, Shoemaker begins by defining terms: the difference between jokes and wisecracks, the surprisingly long list of elements (his “kitchen sink theory�) that can make a statement humorous, and the admittedly tautologically cute definition of amusing as that which a “properly developed, refined, and unobstructed human sense of humor would respond to with amusement� (each element of which is further explored). I found it interesting that Shoemaker found no philosophical scholarship on wisecracking in particular (although there has been research on written “jokes�, which Shoemaker contrarily argues have zero moral element; a position which piqued me), but as someone whose own family regularly roasts one another at the dinner table, I can certainly agree that this kind of humour � and especially wisecracks based on inside information and long memories � serves to raise the mood and reinforce bonds (as they say on Comedy Central: we only roast the ones we love). Along the way, Shoemaker addresses taboo topics (racism, sexism, disabilities, sexual assault), those without “properly developed� senses of humour (such as folks with autism or psychopaths), those with “obstructed� senses of humour (buffoons � they who mistakenly, and annoyingly, see humour in everything � and prigs, who refuse to look for humour behind a wisecrack based on misguided principles). And I found all of this to be fascinating and compelling.

What crucially matters in responding correctly to both the funniness and the moral status of a wisecrack are the wisecrackers intentions and motives, which amount to what the wisecracker means by it and what his or her attitudes are toward others affected or targeted by the wisecrack.

Ultimately, intentions are everything; the love behind the roast. There’s a passage in which Shoemaker compares a picture of Demi Lovato getting “slimed� at the Nickelodeon Kids� Choice Awards and Stephen King’s Carrie having the bucket of pigs� blood dumped on her head at Prom: a pan to the audience in each situation shows people laughing hysterically, but if you had to explain the difference in the two similar-looking scenes to a visitor from another planet (my own analogy), you’d harken to the pranksters� intentions and desired effects and easily be able to explain that one was meant in fun and the other in cruelty. And when it comes to wisecracks, whether at the dinner table or on social media, the “morality� of any quip ought to be judged in these terms as well. Very interesting and timely stuff, well argued.