Everyone tells jokes as a way to check temperature¶

Everyone tells jokes as a way to check temperature. It's generally not sinister or even conscious, but the role humor plays in social bonding is to simultaneously probe for and reinforce shared values, sensibilities, and backgrounds. https://t.co/5Nw5lzIExV When someone says something intended to be funny, everyone in earshot begins rapidly making a complicated series of subconscious mental checks. Parsing the joke may take a fraction of a second, but it draws on everything from experiential memory to linguistic biases. Nothing is "objectively" funny; it's all context-dependant. The same statement said to the same group of people can be funny in one setting and serious in another. Tone matters, timing matters, body language matters. All of these things add cues that may or may not be picked up. After zipping through a branching mental flowchart of experiences and values and immediate social cues, the depth and shape of which scientists still don't fully understand, the parts of your brain responsible for social reasoning make a final determination -- funny or not. A huge factor in this decision is observing the reactions of others around you. Laughter is an easy way to communicate each individual's decision and establish consensus. Every fraction of a second that you don't detect laughter, your brain nudges down the urge to do so yourself. Similarly, mere exposure to others' expression of humor -- even fabricated others, like a canned laugh track -- ticks that urge up, whether the initial response was humor or not. The immediate social cue actively breeds a sensation of humor and colors the interaction. As a group consensus is reached, the original speaker gets feedback. The speaker might feel pride or shame, inclusion or exclusion, depending on whether or not that consensus matched their intent. They may have had a joke fall flat, or have had a serious comment laughed off. They may even have just been mocked, by a group coming to a consensus that the comment was funny to them, at the speaker's expense. Or, simply, they may feel closer to a group of people they just brought joy through a demonstration of shared social language. Now again, this entire process can be more or less conscious. You can fake laughter, for example, to try and fit in with an emerging consensus, to intentionally establish a social connection even if you didn't "naturally" find something funny. (Think of how someone may be primed to laugh more readily or intensely with someone they find attractive.)

A person can also tell a joke that is specifically constructed to select for a particular set of values: it's only funny if you agree with very explicit preconditions. This is likely what's being referenced in the phrase "men don't tell jokes, they check temperature." The implication being that men are more likely to construct a statement that ensures laughter from an audience with certain (presumably sinister) values. Or, failing that, to probe for passive acceptance of those values in those present who don't genuinely share them. Whether you find it funny or not, simply not reacting with anger is a form of assent.

Let's be clear: this use of humor is not any gender's exclusive domain. However, this does point us toward a crucial element of humor's role in cultural hegemony and moderating class interactions. Higher social status allows more leeway for the use of humor to compel assent, to ostracize the subaltern, or to prime subjects to reify hegemonic ideals. For example, in a given social context, someone may make a joke that relies on a social understanding of a particular oppressed class as having certain moral failings (think "black people are lazy" or "trans women are perverts"). Members of the audience may genuinely find it funny, because they share that conception. They may have previously not held that belief, but gained a new "clarity" through the social interaction: "My peers/betters find this funny, so I guess it makes sense. Ha ha!" Or they may find it outright objectionable, and continue to do so no matter the social priming, but they don't want to risk the consequences of expressing dissent. So they keep their objections to themselves, and the joke passes group consensus, reinforcing its "acceptability." There is truly so much more to be said on this topic, including the dynamics of subaltern humor, the broader social trends of how comedy is mainstreamed, the intricacies of sarcasm, irony, and pastiche, comedic trends across cultures in history and globally, neurodivergence, etc. Suffice to say, humor is deceptively complicated. And it's only one of a million pathways through which the superstructure of a society disseminates, reinforces itself, adapts, and faces challenges. In the war of position, don't discount the comedic line.