When we talk about propriety, there are a lot of “gray” areas, largely because propriety demands that we conform to conventional rules of speech or behavior… and “conventional rules” are often more the product of “convention” than they are actual “rules.” Propriety requires that we develop prudence and discretion, our capacities of judgment, sagacity, and interpersonal awareness, which are arguably quite different from our capacity to apply a rule or logically reason from premise to conclusion.

Comics (perhaps the least interested in “propriety” among us)  call this “timing,” and they spend years perfecting optimal joke delivery. When their timing fails, or when they can’t “read the room,” they bomb. Sometimes that’s the consequence of a deficit in their delivery– their  rhythm, cadence, tempo, or pausing– but sometimes the joke itself fails. For example, in the months immediately following 9/11, most comics who joked about the attacks of that day were met with gasps and groans from their audience. “Too soon,” the audience would heckle with the bad taste of “bad taste” in their mouths, too soon.

Today we’re going to try to unpack what “too soon” means, how we determine how soon is “too soon,” and whether or not there are, in fact, some “rules” of propriety.

In this episode, we discuss the following thinkers/ideas/texts/etc.:

• Brendan Ballou, Plunder: Private Equity’s Plan to Pillage America (2023)
• This American Life (podcast), “The Florida Experiment”
• Aristotle on phronesis (prudence or practical wisdom)
• Comedian Gilbert Gottfried bombing, featured in “Too Soon?: Comedy After 9/11” (Vice documentary, 2021) 
• The Aristocrats (Documentary film, 2005) about “The Aristocrats” joke
• Comedian Stephen Colbert at the 2006 White House Correspondent’s dinner
• Oedipus! the musical theater comedy
• Ben H. Winters, Underground Airlines (2017)
• Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Lost Cause Rides Again” (The Atlantic, 2017)
• Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle (1962)
• The Man in the High Castle (Amazon Prime series)
• Former President George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech
• Orcas attacking boats!
• Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790)
• The story of “How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life” (The New York Times Magazine, 2015)
• Comedian Dave Chapelle and transphobia
• Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905)

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