Cindy quoted:
Dicentra (about the distinction between which characters' injuries are funny and which are not)...
Oh, wait!
Wait, wait, wait. Is that what this conversation is really about? It's about when a fictional character getting hurt is FUNNY?
Oh, but hold up, now. Just hold up. Surely humor is subjective, isn't it? There are a lot of different types of humor that involve people getting hurt or injured, and all of them follow different rules. So is this really something that we want to be arguing over? Surely we're not saying that some types of humor are morally superior to others, are we?
It almost looks to me as if this is becoming a debate about whether or not people ought to find certain things funny, and I don't know if I'm at all comfortable with that. Humour is pretty instinctive, isn't it? And it is hardly ever "moral."
I've just gone back and read Dicey's original Toon post, and I think that perhaps we need to draw a distinction here between two completely different things:
(a) when it makes sense to consider a fictional character's behavior a reflection of his character
(b) when it is morally acceptable to laugh at something you read in a book
My own answers to these two questions are as follows:
(a) always
(b) always
—Elkins
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