A topic on my list of things to cover in this blog are statements of “just kidding” and “I’m joking.” I started on this in my analysis of Mike Birbiglia’s Thank God for Jokes, but I’ve pulled it out here for ease of reference/hyperlink, and I’ll expand on it soon[-ish].
In the aforementioned special, Birbiglia says:
Like if you think about jokes…. you can’t tell jokes in life almost ever, like at work, or school or the airport is a great example. I read a story where a guy sneezed on a plane, looks around and he goes, “I have ebola.”
Here’s why that’s not a good joke: they landed the plane. They landed the plane, and they’re met by the guys in hazmat suits, and his defense was “I’m joking!” Which is always this catchall defense when people say dumb things. Like, you can’t tell jokes at work, because at some point in history, some idiot showed up at work and was like, “Nice tits, Betsy!” And Betsy’s like, “What?!” And that guy’s like, “I’m joking!” And the boss is like, “Uuuuuuh, no more jokes!” Jokes have been ruined by people who aren’t good at telling jokes. A joke should never end with, “I’m joking!” or “Git’r done!”
He later includes Fozzie Bear’s catchphrase, “Waka Waka,” in this mix. The message seems to be that if you have to defend it by labeling it a joke – which catchphrases can also do – then it either wasn’t, at base, a joke, or it really wasn’t funny. As I’ve pointed out, that seemed to be Bill Maher’s biggest problem with his N-word incident.
“I’m joking” and “just kidding” are often abused ways of “taking back” a statement, but nothing that is said or done can truly be taken back. It’s at most placed under erasure, which Jacques Derrida talks so much about [He borrows it from Martin Heidegger; REALLY looking forward to revisiting that author *sarcasm*]. In a nutshell, all you do is strike-through; in Birbiglia’s example, the coworker has (now) said (back then) “Nice tits, Betsy!” It’s still there, he just added a line about not meaning it, or meaning something different by it (if it were ironical). The original statement can still be read underneath.
