Perhaps in discussions of Louis C.K.’s half-baked material that leaked online in the past week, some self-appointed guardian of the rules has reminded you of the new standard for determining which jokes are acceptable: only those that “punch up,” not “punch down.”
Meaning? Well, the diktat to punch up is two words long and it intends to imply two things. First, that telling jokes is like hitting.
Not all jokes are offensive and edgy, and not all jokes even have a target to “punch” at. But the temptation to equate words with violence is very strong (see also: “weaponize” and “safe spaces”). Hypocritically, those who invoke the metaphor of verbal violence tend to downplay the gravity of a physical attack. For instance, when “Doonesbury” cartoonist Garry Trudeau took the measure of the terrorist massacre of his fellow satirists that took place on this week in 2015 at the offices of the comedy weekly Charlie Hebdo in Paris, he said this:
This slippery passage encapsulates the problem with seeing verbal “strikes” as the moral equivalent of actual acts of violence. The gunmen who stormed into the Charlie Hebdo offices were hardly victims.
The other intended implication in the admonishment not to “punch down” is that we can definitively locate everyone along an up-down axis, that there’s a meaningful and clearly discernible hierarchy of privilege or power or authority (pick your preferred catchword) and that we can all agree on it.
But it’s not true that human society and relations can be graphed cleanly along a line. It’s a wildly subjective, complex, and three-dimensional thing to plot who is above whom at any moment, place, and context. There is no objective standard we could invent to decide, even in theory.
The inherent subjectivity of “up” and “down” exposes a third, unintended implication of the punch up/punch down phraseology. People who tell us to punch up and not to punch down assume they’re the ones who set the standards, determining the hierarchy and doling out punishments. When it comes to cultural power, they see themselves at the top and see themselves staying there.
