A Joke Gone Wrong

I often receive text messages the content of which range from purely spiritual to downright obscene depending on the source. I, in turn, save the inspirational ones and forward the funny ones.

One time, I forwarded a nasty joke to someone who regularly sent me inspirational quotes. It went back to me seconds later with a sentence written in bold letters added: NEVER SEND ME A MESSAGE LIKE THIS NEXT TIME. 'Til now, I never have the chance of knowing whether she still reads my other messages because her number is always "out of coverage area". That was a case of a joke gone wrong.

James Ogilvy, in his book Living without a Goal: Finding the Freedom to Live a Creative and Innovative Life, profoundly explains what happens when humor gets out of hand and what is to be done about it.

Now for the bad news that follows from De Saussure's liberation of symbols from nonarbitrary tethers things. Evil is inevitable because its source is to be found among the most innocent. The origin of evil is to be found in the play of innocents, in the joke gone wrong. The origin of evil is to be found in play and teasing and joking around. Sometimes the naughty slides down toward decadence. The playful teasing that could be an act of love becomes instead a step toward depravity.

A joke, in order to be a joke, always requires duplicity, some sort of double entendre, some play on words or switch of context that places an entirely different significance on the punch line. In every piece of humor there is always some sort of doubling. To the extent that play involves or is like humor, like playing a joke on someone, then it is intrinsically the case that the joke can be misunderstood. Unless it is genuinely and successfully ambiguous to begin with, it cannot be a good joke. But the line between a good joke and a bad joke is often very fine.

This structure of humor and play predetermines the inevitability of play going wrong sooner or later. And as soon as the joke goes wrong, as soon as someone doesn't get the joke, doesn't take it in fun, then an injury has been committed, to which there may be a response in kind, then a further reaction, then reprisals, then revenge, then recriminations, then yet crueler revenge... and by then anything can happen, even evil. And it all started because of a joke. "I really didn't mean to hurt you," one protests. "It was only a joke...." But the seeds of evil have already been sown.

Finding the origin of evil in the play of innocents is bad news because it means we can never eradicate evil once and for all. The seeds of evil lie ready to sprout in every discourse, in every set of symbolic relationships that allows itself to reach outside the narrowly literal.

Literalism seemed appropriate in an industrial-material order of things rather than signs. Not all that glitters is gold, and it pays to determine the difference between 14-karat and 18-karat purity. In the symbolic order things are not always so definitive. But as soon as literalism allows an inch to allegory, metaphor, irony or any of the other rhetorical tropes, evil can arise when someone fails to appreciate the playfulness of a literary device. If you don't get the joke, if the second level of a double meaning never occurs to you and you go ahead blindly accepting the first as the entirety of my intention, then you fail to understand my true intentions. And the consequence of your failure to understand my true intention means that you will attribute to me some intention that changes the meaning of my acts in your eyes.

This entire dynamic can be laid at the doorstep of the Semiotic Gambler. It's his doing, it's his fault. The moment you enter the semiotic realm, the moment material things become signs and sprout another level of meanings that have nothing to do with their physical shapes as things, then you've given the Semiotic Gambler an opportunity to fiddle around with those meanings in ways that have little to do with the innocent ways of physical necessity.

What can we do to keep play from turning evil? Turn play into games with rules. Don't just challenge their gang to see whether your gang can get the coconut between the palm trees, no holds barred. Create some rules - like the rules of soccer and football - so that you don't kill each other in the course of having fun. That way we sublimate play into a more structured environment. In a game, the range of possible intentions is sufficiently circumscribed so that, even where duplicity remains crucial - the athlete's feint in one direction before going in another - the range of possible interpretations does not include defamation, torture, heartbreak or murder of the other competitor.