Introduction

Let's start with 2 observations:

  1. Our words affect others.
  2. We can control our words.

It follows that we should control our words to have the desired effect on other people. Abstractly, we should say things that promote good and avoid harm.

Jokes

People often use jokes to express contentious or controversial ideas with less risk. Personally, I find myself more inclined to watch a stand-up embedded with political themes than read an explicitly political essay, though sometimes I will find the space for the latter.

Therefore, I believe jokes especially deserve attention for their impact. The title of this post refers to the principle I try to follow when making jokes, a common principle in comedy as a whole: “punch up, not down.”

What “punching up” entails

If our jokes have consequences, then we should aim them with these priorities:

  1. At perpetrators, not victims
  2. At the powerful, not the powerless
  3. At unjust systems, not attempts to fix them To clarify, we can still joke about the latter of each item. However, the balance should tilt more toward the earlier. Besides better optics, punching up lets us have more confidence that we improve the world around us.

Conclusion

As a final note, execution does matter. If no one understands your joke, or worse interprets your joke in the complete opposite way, it still has a potential to harm. A good joke requires effort; you have to earn it.