No Funny Business: The Untold Help of Harmful Visual Jokes

Much attention has been paid to the real-world consequences of visual jokes (e.g., revenge porn). But less attention has been paid to visual jokes per se—the role they play separate from the actions and attitudes they precipitate beyond their depiction. This philosophical study focuses on the harm of how a message is communicated, separate from and sometimes in contradiction to what is said. Further, this harm is the key to empowerment of those it oppresses. I show how we need not prevent the occurrence of these things in order to undermine their oppressive power—we only need the right kind of recontextualization: turning those utterances into jokes or turning those jokes against themselves. I will show that the key to empowering visual discourse lies in its disempowering qualities, i.e., the way it represents its referent and what it calls to mind in its viewership by this mode of representation.