Just kidding? Two roles for the concept of joking in political speech

Journal article

Abstract:: In this paper, I discuss two roles for the concept of joking in political speech. First, I discuss how claiming to have been joking can provide speakers with a powerful form of deniability. I argue that the aesthetic dimension of jokes makes such a denial especially well placed to undermine both a hearer's evidence for an utterance having been sincere, and, separately, their belief that it was sincere—I call the latter ‘aesthetic gaslighting’. Second, I discuss the use of jokes to influence hearers’ thinking and behaviour under the radar. I show that not only does the fact that an utterance was a joke fail to prevent it from influencing hearers, but in some cases, the fact that it was a joke actually makes it more influential than a sincere utterance would have been.

Files:: Walker_2023_Just_kidding_two.pdf

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Language:: English
Keywords:: joking

dogwhistles

salience

deniability

gaslighting

sexist humour
Pubs id:: 1577655
Local pid:: pubs:1577655
Deposit date:: 2023-12-04

Copyright holder:: Zoe Walker
Rights statement:: © The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Scots Philosophical Association and the University of St Andrews. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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