J is for jokes. Don’t tell them. It’s too risky. Rape jokes, Holocaust jokes, sexist jokes, banter-based jokes — you might find them funny but others will experience them as a threat to their mental safety. Learn from the Dapper Laughs debacle: a wicked joke can hurt thousands and end your career.

On an NPR radio show called Q, Hugh Laurie put forward the idea that "humor is how people test the reasonableness of a proposition."

I think this is true.

- Type 1 humor - Sometimes something is funny because the proposition is mismatched with reality, and is therefore unreasonable, and therefore is funny.

- Type 2 humor - Sometimes something is funny because the proposition is in alignment with a real situation (usually social), but that the real situation exists is in itself unreasonable, and therefore is funny.

- Example -

When I first heard that on 9 November 2016 Yale students were in safe spaces with puppies and Play-Doh to recover from the "trauma" of Trump's win, I thought it was satire from the Onion because it was so ridiculous that it was hilarious.

- I initially assumed it was Type 1 humor. The very idea that high performing college students playing with toys to cope was not reasonable, and therefore must be false. That unreasonableness is why the proposition was funny.

When I found out the reports were true, it became Type 2 humor, because it demonstrated how unreasonable reality is on such campuses. The humor showed that the following propositions are unreasonable.

- Proposition under test - People were severely traumatized by the election result.

It is unreasonable to think that the result was all that bad. Otherwise, it could not be fixed with Play-Doh. This shows that the students were PRETENDING to be traumatized because it is unreasonable to think real trauma can be addressed by a child's toy.

- Proposition under test - The students in the safe spaces are mature enough to have moved out of their parent's houses.

This sort of behavior is appropriate for kindergarten students (for whom Play-Doh is an age-appropriate toy) but not for people on the boundary between childhood and adulthood. It is unreasonable to think that the students in safe spaces have any more emotional or intellectual maturity than a small child.

- Proposition under test - Yale students (and other Ivy League students) are among our best and brightest.

It is unreasonable to conclude that the people admitted to Yale are competent thinkers if they are so illogical and immature that they cannot process a basic reality of a republic (that sometimes a candidate you dislike wins an election) with ideas and logic, and instead opt for Play-Doh.

- Proposition under test - Yale is a rigorous and valuable educational institution.

It is unreasonable to conclude that Yale has high standards for intellectual and academic performance if it caters to the students by providing puppies and Play-Doh instead of engaging in a rigorous examination of the political situation, and applying various political and historical analysis techniques, facts, and rigorous logic.

Conclusion

It seems to me that the persecution of people who joke about sensitive topics (e.g., race, sex, persecution) has the effect (and possibly the intent) of preventing people from examining whether many of the propositions and assumptions about these topics are reasonable.