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Humor

The Philosophy of a Controversial Joke

Isadora Mosch considers why we laugh at things that aren’t funny.

“Why can’t Helen Keller drive?
Because she’s a woman.”

I admit that laughing out loud when I heard this joke about the famous blind and deaf writer was not my finest moment – as a woman or as a decent human being. As soon as I stopped laughing, I came to a rather disturbing conclusion: either I was sexist against my own sex, or something else was going on that I was not fully aware of. I chose to investigate the latter option before spiraling downward. As a person whose career is centered around overanalyzing the details of my underwhelming life, an analysis of this joke was bound to happen eventually.

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