2025/09/26 by Michael Haugh, Rosina Márquez Reiter
Psychology · Social Sciences · #Crime, Deviance, and Social Control #Gender, Feminism, and Media #Humor Studies and Applications
paper · doi:10.1075/pc.24019.hau
openalex publication_date 2025/09/26 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Abstract A frequent response to someone taking offence in response to conversational humour is to claim the utterances in question were ‘not serious’, ‘taken out of context’, or that any offence taken was ‘unintended’. Yet in some instances such claims are construed as inadequate or irrelevant. In this paper we consider why that is the case. Building on a detailed analysis of incidents in which ostensibly joking utterances are construed as offensive, we propose that offence is a fundamentally scalar phenomenon: not simply in the sense of the joking in question being open to evaluation as more or less offensive, but with respect to the morally ordered scope of that offence. The degree to which perceived offences become impervious to claims that any offence caused or taken was ‘unintended’ is a function of the scope of the spatiotemporal scales invoked through the joking itself and subsequent responses to it.