{"id":102852,"date":"2026-06-07T03:00:19","date_gmt":"2026-06-07T07:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=102852"},"modified":"2026-06-04T10:53:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-04T14:53:09","slug":"morality-and-humour","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2026\/06\/07\/morality-and-humour\/","title":{"rendered":"Morality and humour"},"content":{"rendered":"

Devon Eriksen<\/a> suggests that there’s a correlation between a person’s morality and their sense of humour (or lack thereof):<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

There is probably a correlation between morality and sense of humor.<\/p>\n

Larry Niven once theorized that humor is associated with an interrupted defense mechanism. <\/p>\n

The idea is that you have a situation presented to you which would normally trigger a defensive response, but when you realize it is actually harmless, the response that you experience as laughter or amusement is your brain’s way of derailing that inappropriate defense mechanism. <\/p>\n

Because it isn’t appropriate to fight or run away from harmless things. <\/p>\n

This mechanism become easy to see when you look at very simple or developing senses of humor. To a baby, unexpected + safe = comedy gold. <\/p>\n

And my cat Dante’s favorite joke is “I BITE your toes! … but actually, I don’t bite them! I just lick them by surprise, watch you jump, then run away mewing and looking pleased with myself!”<\/p>\n

Humor can become quite sophisticated, but I’ve never yet seen anything funny that couldn’t be understood this way. <\/p>\n

But there’s a certain type of evil person who is evil precisely because they don’t interrupt defense mechanisms. <\/p>\n

They fight harmless things. Even beneficial ones. And they give you long lectures about how the harmless or even the wonderful thing is ackshually super-problematic. <\/p>\n

This is the visible symptom of a form of neurotic hypervigilance which can, and often does, progress to the point of simply lashing out, figuratively or even literally, at random parts of the environment, because the brain has constructed some narrative whereby it’s a threat. <\/p>\n

The humor response is our natural way of not doing this.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Devon Eriksen suggests that there’s a correlation between a person’s morality and their sense of humour (or lack thereof): There is probably a correlation between morality and sense of humor. Larry Niven once theorized that humor is associated with an interrupted defense mechanism. The idea is that you have a situation presented to you which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[66,57],"tags":[262,424,139],"class_list":["post-102852","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health-science","category-humour","tag-culture","tag-morality","tag-psychology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-qKU","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102852","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102852"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102852\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":102854,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102852\/revisions\/102854"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}