Edgy Jokes Don't Scale

Edginess and Scalability

Some people make edgy jokes sometimes. Note the focus on jokes here – it’s a lot easier to wrangle than the general theory of edgy ideas, although there is overlap between the two. The difference is the general acceptance of ‘obeying the room’ as being a definitely good thing with respect to humour. Replace the word humour with ideas and you have an insoluble debate on your hands. These are a difficult thing to scale to different collections of people, both with respect to group size and composition. Think about it for a second – even if you’re not partial to making them yourself, you’ve probably got a friend who is; consider how they’d make the jokes and where you’d feel comfortable with them. If their jokes land more often than not, you’ll likely notice that they make them frequently when you’re talking one-on-one, and hold back as group sizes grow bigger. Similarly, they probably say more outrageous things in these more intimate contexts.

This behaviour is fairly intuitive, but it’s still worth putting what’s going on into words. I’m intending to describe the phenomena underlying the scaling – the key takeaway being that playing edgy humour successfully in one context won’t translate to success in every context.

The basic idea is fairly simple. More people lead to more complexity in a situation. However, an over explanation can cover some interesting ground, and gets us a model to play with in the process. This provides some justification for the following denser introduction.

Everyone has a comfort zone, which changes from moment to moment, in particular in response to events. They aggregate in a group context, forming a metaphorical room (which is to be read, or obeyed, depending which word you like the most). Aggregation is not necessarily a simple sum of or minimum of its parts, and the views of individuals don’t necessarily vanish into the new mass. The combination of change over time, aggregation, and residual personal boundaries creates a field that is hard to maintain an awareness of. At some point, complexity will bite.

Some Mathematics

Let’s start with some fuzzy definitions. I don’t think my taxonomy here is complete, most things are a lot greyer than an attempt to neatly divide into two suffices for. The first is that of a comfort zone. These are the topics, and treatments of them, which a group will accept. The idea is slightly more elaborate, and will get its own section because it’s the most critical bit of spading this all out. A topic may be entirely outside the comfort zone of a group, regardless of treatment: a mothers’ meeting at a conservative church is unlikely to be happy discussing pornography. More typically, a topic will be inside, but treatments of it will not be. At the same meeting, it is likely to be OK to laugh about Mary’s son falling off their bike the other week (unharmed), but not to make similar cracks about Elizabeth’s comatose father.

Edginess, as I’ll be using it, is humour that plays around the edges of these zones. It is necessarily context sensitive as defined – these things will shift from person to person, group to group, and critically, moment to moment.

The last term to be introduced here is finesse. I’ll use this as a measure of humour’s success.

A high finesse approach to edginess will stay just within the border. Even higher finesse approaches can dance with these, pushing them out a little bit, carefully retreating when things look like they’re going too far. Here, targeting is required – a knowledge of what you’re working with is necessary to play with its edges without getting burned. When applied in a targeted way, high finesse edginess is usually quite fun for the people involved.

Examples which haven’t aged and won’t age are hard to find, I'd shrug and say Ali G Indahouse if there was a gun to my head, but my confidence in this aging well (as opposed to just slowly), is low. precisely due to how contextually dependent humour is, and how comfort changes across populations over time. Something that sits just inside acceptability is going to quickly pass over the line as change takes place.

It is unsurprising, then, that there are timeless examples of a maximally low finesse approaches. For a very blunt reference point, picture a nineteen-year-old making jokes about dead babies I'd put one here, but they're all pretty dire no matter what your measure of good is. at a job interview.

Comfort Zones

I’ll start with a very crude drawing of a comfort zone, Until I started looking for drawings of one, I didn’t realise that the general cultural view of a comfort zone is an idea of a space in which everything is routine, with a subtext of nothing getting done there. The concept should be seen as more neutral here. It’s why I’ve drawn my own. captured at a single point in time.

Individual topics emanate as lines from the centre, the distance from this point representing an increasing tactlessness. Beyond the border, we have treatments of topics which are no longer comfortable with the zone’s owner.

There’s a bit more to say about what ‘no longer comfortable’ means. The reason for not discussing something in this context also needs to come from an (at least somewhat) visceral negative emotion – the fear, anger and disgust adjacent areas of the menagerie – rather than something closer to irritation. A topic that isn’t welcome because it’s too arcane (financial derivatives in a primary school), or too boring (derivatives in most other contexts), is outside of this definition. It’s still a failure of humour, and will still have the scalability issues that’re going to be mentioned later, but has less of the edginess specific features which I’d like to look at. It's likely that the model could transplant for these situations, but I've not thought much about it.

The phrase ‘single point in time’ is critical to this first diagram, as it doesn’t stay still in reality, neither between or within conversations. Over the course of time, all kinds of perturbation take place, as a result of changes in opinion, changes in mood, and general levels of comfort within and without a social interaction. The most interesting things are how these movements occur within a conversation. In the vast majority of interactions, movements in response to behaviours and remarks are going to be the main things driving this change. Another diagram is a good starting point to pick out what’s going on.

As we move further from the centre, any joke has a greater chance of leading to a shift in the recipient’s comfort zone in direct response. Whether a movement will occur can’t necessarily be predicted by the joke teller. The direction of travel, either to greater or lesser security in the situation, is also unpredictable. The emphasis here is less on prediction and more just making it clear that the uncertainty exists. There's definitely a lot more possible depth to add here which I'm not considering in this.

The diagram above shows the rough odds of some movement occurring (without considering direction). In someone’s comfort zone about books, the flat area could be occupied by jokes about the writing in Ready Player One and Twilight, the area of initial uplift by some non-specific cracks at their favourite book, and the area around the cliff edge by cruel jokes about the kind of person who reads the books they like. So not just them, but also likely their friends. The more the merrier, after all.

In the first of these scenarios, there’s very little chance of something this emotionally uninvolved generating any kind of large shift in tone. In the middle case, there’s a higher chance for offence to be taken and the comfort zone to contract, or, alternatively, for the level of familiarity required to do this to be recognised and for levels of comfort to increase (there’s a still a perfectly good chance that no major moves occur). The latter scenario multiplies the intensity of the middle, and hence cranks up the odds of some movement occurring.

In reality, things don’t move just on the single issue. Comfort zones are a matter of familiarity with another person – in practice, an overreach in one topic is going to reduce their general level of ease, contracting the entire area. Things are likely to move similarly in the converse case, For an example, Dave Chapelle’s Sticks and Stones provides a sense of how an experienced comedian can ease an audience into deeper waters. where growing familiarity allows increasing levels of directness and explicitness in many other areas.

Putting this idea together with the two diagrams gives a 3D model that looks something like the melted cup below, but constantly warping, expanding and contracting as time passes and interactions develop.

Aggregation I – A Blob of Comfort Zones

The above treatment was happy to treat them as if they belonged to individuals. However, in the original definition, they were framed as things owned by a group. A group of one is just a person, so it works as an introductory case. An extension, which maps individual views into a collective comfort zone, is more interesting, and will be the key to the failure of edginess to scale to these situations.

A mathematically inclined first step would be to see the bundled comfort zone as the minimum of the two, as given in the diagram below. In words, this would set the group at a level which, for every topic, sensitivity to it is set at the level of the most central member. Shift odds would be the greatest amongst the individuals’ shift odds, and the edge the closest of the individuals’ to the centre.

We’ll set out from here. The most useful thing illustrated is that, under a larger group size, the kinds of things which sit beyond the pale are going to potentially be more mundane than in a one-on-one context. Everyone will have their own topical sore spots. However, it misses a key aspect of the aggregation process – changes in the way people want to be perceived by other people.

This is fleshed out a lot more elsewhere. Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler’s ‘The Elephant in the Brain’ gives this a good, if cynical treatment. For what I’m looking to say here, the idea is that in a one-on-one situation, people will tend to be a little freer for a variety of reasons. There’s plausible deniability about anything said and fewer people are forming an opinion of them. In a group situation, you then have issues with a growth in size reducing comfort of members, due to a lower level of information about the people around them. In the context of edgy jokes however, an illustration and a sidenote will hopefully suffice. A contraction below a minimum can occur when you consider individuals who don’t want to be seen as the kind of person who enjoys ‘unacceptable’ humour by peers (possibly just specific people). There can be a variety of driving reasons: the two most common are people preserving their own face, or in them not being OK with the potential violation of other people’s comfort zones as a bystander. Note also that in the context of aggregation, we’re considering the movement from individual interaction to small groups, and the effects of increasing from small to medium sized ones – once there are too many people to stand in a circle and comfortably talk to one another, I’d argue that we’re dealing with a crowd. The distinction here is that the residual people become much less important, and complexity starts reducing once again, but with very different dynamics now being at play. A simple example of the latter is the use of offensive in-jokes by a fixed set of friends. This is something which is going to be fine amongst themselves, but would likely be viewed uncomfortably in the presence of an outsider (where they’re on better behaviour).

In addition, not everyone within a group will have equal weight when setting a collective comfort zone. Given that it’s the set of topics that a group will accept, it’s very likely that in any given circle, the members making it up won’t all have the same influence on its norms. The reasons behind this are less important than the practical implications.

The first of these is that an understanding of a group’s individual comfort zones isn’t sufficient to describe the group’s. Effects of peer observation and the differing level of importance of people’s views warp the combined surface of our melted cup even more. This gives rise to exponentially increasing Faster than straight line. social complexity as size increases. All of a sudden, there isn’t just a single interaction axis to make sense of, but an entire web of social dynamics based on all of the interpersonal relations present, and the effects these then have.

The webbing will still be shifting throughout a given interaction. Although the pace of movement may not necessarily be quicker than in a one-on-one interaction, there are now more moving parts to track; multiple individuals and a group atmosphere generated by them. There are now relative weights to assign to people’s influence, interpersonal interactions which don’t directly involve you to track, and the potential for any slippages around the edges to be a lot harder to make right. What is a one-to-one apology in a direct interaction can be a much trickier social situation when multiple people - each experiencing the violation differently - are involved.

The second distinct implication is the addition of a new potential failure mode. If group size isn’t sufficiently large, individuals are still going to be important. Due to the non-uniform weighting of member opinions, it is entirely possible for someone to take part whilst having something deeply outside of their comfort zone sitting inside the group’s. Assuming that they’re not just in a gathering by mistake, they’re probably weak members. Assuming further that the goal of humour is to enjoy yourself, and that you don’t actually want to genuinely hurt anyone, being only aware of the wider comfort zone and treading actively on an individual’s is a new potential source of slips. Even if this isn't something that's considered to be a fail case by the person making the jokes, it's probably not nice, and leads to volatility anyway - if you push too far the person may become agitated enough to gain a high level of influence on the comfort level of the group e.g. actively clapping back and getting the support of others. Even in the most cynical interpretation of humour’s utility, this is then a failure mode.

Aggregation II – The Rest of the Owl

I’ve implicitly answered the question of why edginess fails to scale, but there’s something satisfying about making these things explicit. Let’s start from our understanding of successful edginess. Why even do it in the first place?

We can ask what high finesse edginess is doing in any situation. In our model, it’s playing around the edges of the comfort zones. When it works, where is the joy coming from? The article here gives a nice high level overview - https://theconversation.com/science-deconstructs-humor-what-makes-some-things-funny-64414 There’s a sense of familiarity which comes with someone knowing where your boundaries are and staying just within them. There’s also the potential novelty of playing around in space that you don’t get to explore too often - the fun that comes with doing things that feel ‘forbidden.’ Or at least close to it, in a personal sense. These are things which require mutual security to be maintained for everyone to gain from them – the loss of safety when a border is breached takes away all of these benefits.

Sensitivity is key. The humour’s not edginess by definition if it’s not playing around the boundaries, and it’s not scaling if it’s violating comfort zones in big ways. As settings grow, we now have:

• A surface with more component parts and more internal interaction amongst the participants, requiring keener observation to gauge it.

• A lack of familiarity that’s likely to be present between anyone making jokes and at least some people, leading to lower base levels of trust with them, and likely harsher reactions to any violations of their comfort. In turn, this can pass into the group’s view.

• The ability to read the group surface correctly, but still potentially bully (accidentally or otherwise) individuals.

• In the medium term (beyond a single period of interaction), the potential for norms to shift in ways that are hard to track. This can be driven by away from group interactions between members, and entirely personal changes in people’s beliefs about the world. These things are likely to be made more explicit in smaller interactions, while being left as exercises for the reader in more crowded contexts.

Feeding complexity further is the fact that edginess is typically not a singular joke, but an ongoing style of humour that seeks to iteratively play around the margins of permissibility. Careful room-readings aren’t just required when something is said, but after the fact as well, in order to keep moving. This comes with the risk of misjudgement, which in turn requires a careful, genuine response and the ability to dial back appropriately. This dialling back isn’t just down to the person in violation; re-acceptance requires a level of trust Not necessarily universally from its members, but a sufficiently large number of people must accept the apology, and continue to accept it. from the aggregate group - as it grows in size, the odds of the balance of needed trust lying outside of the people you are most familiar with rises.

The end outcome: scaling increases in the ease of comfort zone violation, and drives greater difficulty in reconciliation.