If you take a joke apart, what do you have left?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/25/joke-readers-editor-investigating-satire-parody-news

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Those elegant sages of laughter, EB and Katharine S White, offered this advice in the foreword to their 1941 collection of American humorous writing: “Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the purely scientific mind.” I recall it when readers, often angry or offended, want me to investigate satire and parody under the Guardian editorial standards. Attempts at humour can succeed, stumble or fail, but those judgments are almost always best left to the sense of readers.

One of the most precious aspects of freedom of speech is the space we reserve for humour, especially satire. It is like a fenced playground within which the activity is understood by almost all participants to be for release, for delight, being teased or just being silly. Usual rules mostly stop at the gate. “Mostly” matters here. The privileged spaces for humour are damaged when hate speech masquerades there, so it is rightly ejected.

Any society that values free speech operates on the assumption that there is no general right not to be offended

Generally, the distinguishing feature of play is that it is inconsequential. And that is why it is usually unwise to do a “category shift” and move a piece of satire into the framework designed to assess accuracy or fairness or opportunity to reply in relation to news items and other types of journalism designed to be relied on and to which, for that reason of reliance, editorial standards are routinely applied.

When a satirist is sued and a court attempts to “dissect the frog”, everyone tends to look foolish except the satirist. I remember a defamation action against a cartoonist over the way he had satirised a noted architect, Harry Seidler. A sparse drawing depicted forlorn elderly people alone inside postbox-shaped structures. They looked out through slots, through which they were fed. A dustman attended at the rear. Caption: “Harry Seidler retirement park.”

Furrow-browed counsel argued over how the cartoon related to the architect’s building designs and had or had not damaged his reputation. Artist was examined and cross-examined. Newspapers gleefully reprinted the cartoon. Judge, heroically solemn, presided. Architect lost. A Monty Python sketch could not have been funnier.

Some readers sincerely complain about satire because they miss the joke. The exaggerations, distortions, inventions, the edginess that we permit the satirist, seem to these complainants fabrications or worse. They have not suspended belief. It can be very difficult to respond to such complainants because, no matter how tactfully approached, when it dawns they then feel foolish and may become angrier. Clear labelling helps to avoid these cases. A different kind of complainant about satire is aware it is humour but definitely does not find it funny and may be offended. They declined to suspend disbelief.

The complaint is sometimes mounted in defence of the satirist’s target, who will often be well known and may be a political figure who evokes strong feelings, pro and con.

Individuals’ thresholds for offence vary greatly, and any society that values free speech operates on the assumption that there is no general right not to be offended. Sorry about the frog.