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Research
Current Projects
I'm currently working on three papers building on my earlier work on the sense of humour and the ethics of comedy:
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A paper on how sexist humour can harmfully shape hearers’ attention (winner of the ASA Irene H. Chayes New Voices Award)
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A paper developing the notion of ‘comic objectification’: a form of objectification where one is wrongfully treated as a comic object
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A paper arguing for comic immoralism - the view that immorality can make humour funnier - by invoking salience perspectives
Publications
Journal Articles
‘Just Kidding? two roles for the concept of joking in political speech’, Philosophical Quarterly (2023).
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Paper on the use of the concept of joking in political speech to attain plausible deniability for one’s earlier utterances on the cheap, and to influence hearers’ thinking under the radar
‘A Sensibility of Humour’, British Journal of Aesthetics (2023).
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Paper on the sense of humour as a matter of taste
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Winner of British Society of Aesthetics Essay Prize 2022
‘Art’s Underthought: art, presupposition and immorality’, Warwick Journal of Philosophy (2022).
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Paper on art’s capacity for confirming existing evaluative commitments and conveying new ones via presupposition
Book Chapters
‘Beyond a Joke: surface joking and background sincerity’, in João Paulo Capelotti and Constantino Pereira Martins eds. Incitatus: Humor and Politics (Dialectica) (2023).
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Chapter exploring the capacity for jokes to inform and strengthen ideologies via their background assumptions
‘A Funny Taste: immoral humour and unwilling amusement’, in Viktoras Bachmetjevas and Daniel O’Shiel eds. Philosophy of Humour: New Perspectives (Brill Value Inquiry Book Series) (2023).
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Chapter developing an account of the sense of humour as a matter of taste, and exploring its moral implications
‘Upsetting the Alphabet People’, in Mark Ralkowski ed. Dave Chappelle and Philosophy (Popular Culture and Philosophy Series) (2021).
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Chapter on Dave Chappelle’s comedy about the LGBTQ community, discussing the pragmatics of slurs and the ethics of anti-trans comedy
Book Reviews
‘The Ironic State: British Comedy and the Everyday Politics of Globalisation. By James Brassett’, International Affairs (2021).
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Review of a book exploring the relationship between British comedy and Britain’s global politics
‘Communities of Respect: Grounding Responsibility, Authority, & Dignity, written by Bennett W. Helm’, Journal of Moral Philosophy (2021).
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Review of a book that tries to ground the bindingness of moral obligation in the rationality of the reactive attitudes
Public Engagement
‘Humour is No Joke’, Institute of Arts and Ideas (2022).
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Article about the controversy surrounding the holocaust joke in Jimmy Carr’s Netflix show His Dark Material, and the ethics of humour
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