Spring Colloquia 2025

Colloquia  |  

The Brin Lecture

“Finding Funny”
David Shoemaker, Cornell
3:30 – 5:30
April 18, 2025
CRT 175

ABSTRACT
We’re all familiar with advertent humor, things that people say or do deliberately that aim to be funny (e.g. telling jokes, making wisecracks, engaging in pratfalls, etc.). But there’s plenty of inadvertent humor we’ve experienced as well (e.g. a dog sounding like a human, a typo in an email that alters the content hilariously). In this talk, I aim to explicate how and why to find the funny in inadvertent events like these. After beginning with a few important distinctions and then articulating the nature of the practical reasons in play, I’ll start my investigation in earnest with advertent humor, which reveals a familiar model for how to understand and find certain kinds of deliberative efforts funny, even when morally offensive (and so even when they are the apt target of angry blame). I’ll then apply a similar model to inadvertent humor, a kind of humor that is actually available all around us, were we to choose to seek it out. The “how,” in cases of advertent and inadvertent humor, will be somewhat similar, appealing to a kind of empathy (albeit with one key twist), but the “why” is very different in each case, being most fascinating and important for inadvertent humor, which, if one can find it, generates significant—and underappreciated—prudential and moral value.

April 11

Nedah Nemati, Columbia
3:30 – 5:30
MIT 361

March 28

Karl Ameriks, Notre Dame
3:30 – 5:30
CRT 175

February 21

Eric Wilkinson, UWM
“Moral Knowledge and Epistemic Self-Defeat”

Download the Philosophy Department Spring Colloquia 2025 Flyer (PDF)