Speculation: 2 Theories of Offensive Humor

The Issues With Impact Over Intent

Many on the Left, and this is in their own words here, prize impact over intent. For others, impact is conflated with intent. I'm going to consider both in the context of a neutral comment, and we'll get to the offensive jokes later in this post.

Let's start with those who think impact is what matters regardless of good intentions. Reasonable example of this: if you didn't MEAN to hurt someone's feelings and you did, you should apologize for hurting their feelings. Nobody wants someone who apologizes by saying, "I'm sorry you were offended," after being rude. In the context of a neutral comment, people who get offended here only really have one other option: to ask the person before thinking anything about them.

Now this might sound good to some people, but I'm really not a fan. Why? Let's consider an example of a neutral comment where, with somewhat ambiguous language, someone insults me to my face. I look rather young for my age. I'm not exactly a fan about the fact that I look so young, and even though I make a lot of jokes about that with my friends, it's an insecurity. And objectively, it's not exactly the most flattering for an adult woman to be mistaken for a 16-year-old on a regular basis. (I wish this were an exaggeration.) So, if someone comes up to me and then asks me where I'm planning to go to college, are they insulting me? If I correct them and tell them that I'm a senior in college instead of high school, and they say "You look so young!" or something similar, are they insulting me? If we went with the mere impact of that statement, then yeah, they would be. This is, just due to the amount of times it's happened and the fact that some people think I'm attractive BECAUSE I look like a kid, a bit of a sore spot. It's also a bit of a scary spot because of that last group of people.

How would you avoid situations like this? Well, it seems like these people on the Left would argue that you should ask someone about all information when him/her/them/xir, including things which might seem initially obvious to you. This keeps you from avoiding accidental assumptions which could hurt their feelings. Someone might make the counterargument that you should just have all conversations with all people in the exact same manner even if you know nothing. But that's pretty easy to counter (and this is more of a conservative counterpoint, and I would hope the conservative objects to this theory in other areas where it's obviously more vulnerable). For example, you approach someone differently depending on whether they're a kid or an adult. If someone wants to ask me to sign a petition, it would be unethical for them to ask a child because children can't enter into contracts. If someone wanted to ask me out on a date, it would be unethical for them to ask me out if they thought I was a child because children cannot consent to adult relationships. So no, you should not approach children and adults the same way, and that means the person trying to avoid offending me would have to ask if he was unsure.

So, someone who's confused about how old I am (and many people are... sadly) should ask me how old I am. However, this doesn't solve the initial problem of hurting my feelings since I'm still reminded of how much I look like a kid, so the impact is still bad (AKA: the leftie solution doesn't solve the problem).
The person COULD assume that I'm a kid and therefore not ask me out or ask me to sign the petition, but I think we can all see the pretty obvious, terrible implications of making the "I'll just err on the side of caution" assumption when we think about offering someone an opportunity which we can only offer if they have a quality like being over 18 (or being of a marginalized group... basically this would mean that people who look ambiguous wouldn't be able to access support resources ,and I don't think the far Left would support that?)
And so we're left with... me divulging the information on my own when I meet the person? I.e. if the person looks at me kinda sideways I just say how old I am before there's an opportunity to ask or assume.

I don't know if many people on the far Left would have a problem with a culture where people divulge information at the moment of meeting people. There's some observational evidence of this: Twitter bios with pronouns and bizarrely personal health information, introduction circles with pronouns and bizarrely personal health information, and re-fashioning everything and it's grandmother-thing as an identity. This isn't causal information, and I don't have any sociological theories extolling the virtues of just blasting information about yourself into the world, so correct me if I'm wrong. But regardless of whether there's a unifying position on the matter, we know that a lot of people on the hard Left seem to be cool with or actively encourage this kind of culture.

However, this asks a lot of the person with the assumed characteristic, me in this example. It's fine if many people on the far Left are comfortable with public vulnerability, but that's not exactly a common personality trait. People shouldn't be expected to tell strangers a bunch of information about themselves, and I don't think they should be expected to tell people what weird little things make them upset so that those topics can be avoided. And it WOULD seem like some communities on the Left advocate for safeguarding your private information (i.e. "you don't need to prove your diagnosis" people and "you don't owe someone emotional labor" people), but it's not possible to have it both ways. Either we can't get offended when people make comments about things which aren't widely known as offensive, or we expect them to learn everything about us before saying anything. I prefer the first world. I like my privacy, thanks.

Now, before someone objects and says that the scenario I'm describing is so rare it would never happen, and that the really offensive comments are the ones you see in edgy jokes, etc., let's revisit the leftie concept of a microaggression. These are comments which aren't clearly offensive and which are either said as a backhanded compliment or because of the SAME RATIONALE as my young girl example above. (Backhanded compliment example covered right after this.) My young girl example does actually qualify as a microaggression. If someone is a bad person for making a microaggression for these reasons (again, backhanded compliment will be discussed later), then their real crime is just not having enough information. And unless you want to put the onus on everyone else to give people information all the time, you can't call it a sin when someone works off of incomplete information. Also, under what moral code is not knowing something a sin?

Even the HARD Left says it's not, ostensibly at least. That's what the statement, "having privilege doesn't mean you're a bad person," MEANS. Privilege, by their definition, is not knowing or understanding the bad things a person goes through because you don't have the same experiences they do. So either having privilege DOES make you a bad person because lack of knowledge makes you a bad person... or it doesn't and people need to stop demonizing everyone who ever made a "microagression" and simply correct them so they don't make the assumption again. I wonder if the far Left actually does actually believe that ignorance = sin, since they use it as an insult to describe people they hate, but that's another topic for another day. Basically, if impact > intent, then you've got to be cool with encouraging a culture where everyone just reveals all their personal info all the time. Feel free to explain how that obviously won't be used to hurt someone.

The Issues of Intent = Impact

Other people on the Left will say that the theory of intent > impact is incorrect, and that really impact is EVIDENCE of intent. These are the people who criticize microaggressions as evidence that someone actually holds racist beliefs rather than evidence of incorrect/incomplete information. Or, less extreme, these people might just think that all microaggressions are just backhanded compliments. But both of these opinions derive the intention only from the action rather than from the wider context of the person.

If you're someone who's happy disclosing to your friends that you have an insecurity about something, and then said friend gives you shit relentlessly or weeks, said friend is (newsflash) not your friend. Sorry. And I don't think it's unreasonable to say those people are dicks.

But if you haven't disclosed that something bugs you, there is literally no way a person could know that something which isn't widely understood to be offensive is offending you at a given moment in time. So equating intent and impact is just inaccurate. If you want to figure out whether the intent is actually bad from a particular action, you look at the tone and the wider context of the person who said it. And then you judge it on the intent.

Clearly, we should evaluate things based on intent, at least in part. I think it's just as fallacious to evaluate things ONLY based on intent ("Road to Hell is paved with good intentions," anyone?), but intent should be part of the conversation. It's pretty easy to determine where someone's coming from with neutral comments based on the context of the statement, but what about a joke which is widely-regarded to be offensive by everybody and was intended to be 3dgy? See below.

Two Ways To Mean a Mean Joke

Based on the accusations made and the defenses given by people hearing and making mean jokes, it appears that there are two possible intentions for any given joke:
1. I would like to say something rude to you in a way which is socially acceptable
2. We are so beyond *insert offensive stereotype or marginalized state of particular group here* and the mere fact that we're SO far beyond it is what makes the joke funny now
As an example, let's go with a man telling the greatest joke ever told: Women's Rights. *insert laughter here* (I actually do think this one is rather hilarious.) The person who makes it for the first reason is a misogynist. Plain and simple. But the second person isn't. The second person is saying that this is funny BECAUSE women have rights. And to be fair, I don't think that joke would be told to women with the expectation that it would get laughs unless the person really did think that women had rights. If someone said that to a woman who didn't have rights or with the intention of taking them away, she'd likely be upset. So the mere expectation that this woman would laugh is an indication of two things: women have rights, and that they should (i.e. wasn't it absurd when we didn't?)

If the person was in this first group, and his intent was to make you feel lousy, and because you know that he actually believes this you DO feel kinda lousy, then we should discourage him from making jokes in the future. Every society encourages certain values over others (and it's pretty ludicrous to pretend otherwise... also what binds people together if not shared values?), and I think it's pretty reasonable to encourage jokes which aren't based on picking on people and discourage jokes which are.
NOTE: THIS IS NOT AN ENCOURAGEMENT TO FIRE SOMEONE WHO MAKES A SHITTY JOKE IN HIS PERSONAL LIFE IF HE HAS NO EVIDENCE OF DOING SO IN THE WORKPLACE, YES, EVEN IF HE MEANS THE JOKE. That's the social suppression of free speech, and that's not the purpose of this argument.
I'm talking about buying tickets to see a different comedian if there's evidence that your (now former) favorite comedian who makes a lot of rape jokes actually believes that rape is morally fine if a woman was physically turned on during it because that meant she wanted it. Those kind of jokes become unfunny... really quickly.

EDIT to add a more extreme example: the Bill Cosby BBQ sauce clip (easily found on Youtube) is a creepy reference to drugging the BBQ sauce to get people to stop fighting and loosen up a bit. And then he says that he's got a bottle of it up on the nightstand to his wife. Pretty funny joke since nobody who took it on the show passed out, and it seemed to have the effect of like 2 drinks. Gets a Hell of a lot less funny when you learn that Cosby drugged a bunch of women.

But what about the person in this second group, with the good intentions? Like I said, we can't JUST look at intent; we have to look at both intent and impact. So either this guy is a good person or he's a person who's trying to be a good person.

What's the Impact of the 3dgy Joke?

Frankly, we're not sure, and answering why we're not sure requires some brief science. See below:

Human perception demonstrably works on heuristics, which are unconscious assumptions which give someone a baseline framework from which to approach a new situation. (Comment if you want me to provide research on heuristics-based cognition next week, but this is at least established-enough that they're putting it in introductory-level psychology textbooks.) In new situations, we acknowledge that we're out of our element. And so we take a small amount of "obvious information" to make conclusions that act as a baseline for interacting with the unknown parts of that situation. In my above example the "obvious information" is the young hips and short stature.

I hope the word "obvious" raised a red flag: heuristics are fallible because they run on association-relationships rather than causation-relationships. "Obvious information" is really just highly-associated with a particular conclusions enough times that your brain has latched onto it. For example, adult women are very often associated with having broader hips than girls and with being taller than girls. Therefore, if you meet a woman for the first time who has very narrow hips who is quite short, you would note that the highly-associated-to-woman characteristics are absent and conclude that you are meeting a younger girl rather than a woman. 

Okay, science over. We can see how heuristics form the basis of neutral assumptions, but what about offensive ones? It becomes pretty obvious that we should discourage people from having negative heuristics about people.
Example: Let's say that some guy has the heuristic that women are bad at math, or at least that they're worse at it than men are.

First, these heuristics are often inaccurate, like this one. Recent IQ tests have revealed that women actually perform at the same level as men in mathematical reasoning. (Again, I can do an article on this if requested, but this is midterms week and I'm putting this in the causal section. Sue me.) Based on what I've seen, it seems like older IQ tests conflated spatial reasoning and mathematical logical reasoning in their maths section, so guys often scored higher. (Men still do statistically outperform women at spatial reasoning, but this is a separate skill to mathematics. It helps with certain forms of math, but it also helps with other types of tasks which are unrelated to math, so it's more accurate to call it a separate skill.)

Secondly, even if this heuristic WERE accurate, it's contrary to our values in a meritocracy to promote people having this heuristic. Meritocratic societies are founded on the premise that we value people's work and their character, not their social class or their family or their race or their gender or any other characteristic aside from their actions and the work that they do. Therefore, if we practice what we preach, then we should discourage the types of heuristics like "bad at x skill"; It's not meritocratic to expect only some people to disprove your assumptions. If we're supposed to be about really evaluating performance, then we should discourage the idea that facts about how good or bad someone is at a particular task are obvious upon appearance.

BUT, THIS DOES NOT TRANSLATE TO DITCHING THE JOKES. Why?
There's two theories of what jokes like these might do to heuristic-based cognition:

HYPOTHESIS FAVORING OUR MEME-OVERLORDS: If these jokes encourage people to think of stereotypes AS JOKES, they also encourage people to think of these negative heuristics as reductive and untrue. In other words, offensive jokes of the second type are an advertising system for the unconscious mind with the message: DO NOT MAKE THIS THE BASIS OF A HEURISTIC! IT IS INACCURATE! If that message shows up often enough, someone could abandon a negative heuristic, or at least have it with a "but this is inaccurate" caveat in their heads. And that's a good thing. It helps us to look at the person beyond the stereotype first rather than the stereotype. We should be judging the world based on neutral heuristics, not offensive ones, and messaging that offensive heuristics are inaccurate is a good thing because people will be influenced to use the more neutral ones over time.

HYPOTHESIS FAVORING DAS POLITICAL CORRECTNESS: These jokes bring these heuristics to the forefront of people's minds every time they hear them. Repeated use of heuristics reinforces those heuristics, so people will actually be more likely to think of those offensive and inaccurate "bad at math" stereotypes as the kind of "obvious information" that they use when entering into a situation with a person they haven't met before.

There's arguments for both sides, and unless we figure out exactly how jokes about offensive heuristics strengthen or weaken those heuristics, we can't assess the impact of the 3dgy-bo1's jokes. 

Here's a sample experiment which could allow us to make conclusions about this: Introduce a new theory like "ice cream is carcinogenic," and then make a bunch of commercials which feature comedians making fun of the stupid theory. You introduce the actual theory to one neighborhood, and you introduce the theory to another neighborhood only through a bunch of ads featuring comedians making fun of the theory. At the end, you assess people's behavior regarding ice cream. If sales go down in both neighborhoods and people start selling "cancer-safe ice cream," then the jokes reinforced a negative heuristic about ice cream. If people are buying less in the serious neighborhood and have no change in behavior in the joke neighborhood, then the jokes do nothing. And lastly, if people in the joke neighborhood buy more ice cream than before and people in the theory neighborhood buy less, then we have evidence that jokes about something being unhealthy actually reinforces the impression that it's not all that unhealthy at all. (This is why it's good to pick a food which is already a "junk food," since we want to work with existing heuristics.)

Here's a crappy sample experiment: find a bunch of evidence that more racist people watch a show like Louder with Crowder than a show like the Tonight Show. Racist people are in that first group with the mal-intent, so they often seek out ways to validate their shitty opinions of others. But that doesn't mean that these jokes promote those opinions or that Crowder is a racist for making jokes.

What do I think would come of an investigation? Based on my gut and the fact that the unconscious-bias test found no association between unconscious associations and behavior (this was based on a heuristic-like theory of cognition where the unconscious association represents a heuristic or part of a heuristic), I'd say that the jokes probably do nothing and might be beneficial. But we don't know, and we'd need actual evidence to know.

So what of the B4nts?

In the case where there's demonstrably good intent and unknown impact, I'd say it's up to whether you personally find the jokes funny whether you should support it. And in terms of what a society should encourage or discourage, it shouldn't have an opinion on things which don't have an impact either way. And it SHOULD encourage those shows which discourage racism in more serious segments or who have hosts who are advocates for treating people well but which also have offensive jokes.

So, how do you defend your favorite b4nts? Basically present the argument for analyzing BOTH intent and impact, establish that it's impossible to know the impact at this time but that it appears to be neutral based on the info we have at our disposal, and then assess the intent and impact of your particular fav.

As a representative sample of how to do this, consider Youtube Restriction Mode's posterboy, Steven Crowder:
Obviously-offensive comment or neutral comment? I don't think anyone, including Mr. Crowder himself, would argue that he's doing anything other than being blatantly offensive in... about 85% of his comedy bits.
Good intentions or bad intentions? He continually has guests on his show who are PoC, women, LGBT, etc. Furthermore, he explicitly tells people to please not insult his guests in the comments, and he's very upfront about the fact that these individuals are very often stepping into the Lion's Den. Do I think guests on his talkshow are sufficient? Frankly, no, because people can put up a front for work. BUT there's evidence that he doesn't have discriminatory hiring practices in his business, that he has friends who come from different cultures and occasionally have different value systems, and that he provides accommodations for his employees with disabilities which don't make them feel belittled. (Why else would Not-Gay-Jared feel comfortable working there AND talking about having Crohn's for years?) If this is untrue, then I'll rescind my statement, but I think Crowder's a good example of someone who makes offensive jokes but who doesn't hold those opinions.
Good impact or bad impact? No evidence that offensive jokes have good or bad impact. HOWEVER, Crowder's show routinely features articulate representatives from groups which he parodies in comedy sketches, and he routinely stands against racism in serious segments. Also, he cuts to shots of his employees during his program, and it would be pretty hard to argue that he isn't showing that anyone can work for him regardless of where they're from or what they look like. So based on the info at our disposal, good impact.
Good intent + (from what we know) Good impact + funny b4nts? Sounds like a great guy to me. 10/10 would watch show.

Okay This Post is #CaptainObvious Thing I've Ever Read

It's admittedly quite an obvious line of reasoning for people who are generally in favor of free speech. However, most free speech arguments against the "ban hate speech!!" position tend to focus on 1. the detrimental effects of living in a society which doesn't have free speech and 2. how people just need to grow up and stop being #triggered all the time.

Those are both points you can make, but what people don't realize is that we're not often getting to the heart of the objection being made: do jokes and speech about offensive stereotypes weaken or reinforce those stereotypes? If this kind of speech does reinforce those stereotypes, I wouldn't support banning it and I wouldn't fire someone if there wasn't any evidence that the person treated colleagues or customers/clients unfairly in the workplace. But I wouldn't spend money to see someone who makes jokes about those stereotypes, or buy products with funny slogans which are offensive, etc. I don't think it's a good thing for a society to be be based on negative assumptions about people, and I wouldn't support it if I had evidence of that. And this is the thing many "ban hate speech!!" people are claiming. The more radical ones claim that stereotype reinforcement is a justification for firing someone, which... no, but the less radical ones would just support private boycotts of products which would make unequal power relationships worse over time.

But the thing is, there is no evidence that these jokes reinforce negative stereotypes. AND because many comedians like Crowder who make these jokes also are also advocates for equal treatment of everyone, the overall impact of these comedy shows might actually be to weaken negative stereotypes.

If someone tells you that you need to ban hate speech, or he/she/them/xir gives you the weaker premise that supporting someone who makes offensive content is offensive and supports belittling people, this is how you push back.