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The question this study set out to answer was: if reputation is the interest to be protected by defamation law then what should be the test(s) for what is defamatory? The stated aim was to fill a gap in the common law by providing a principled, theoretically coherent statement of law regarding what is defamatory. This chapter proposes a new legal framework that aims to meet that goal. Only the principal test for what is defamatory should be retained because it is the only one that meaningfully protects reputation. However, the common law should dispose of the traditional, exclusive presumptions that form the content of ‘the right-thinking person’ and instead use inclusive presumptions that are premised upon an acceptance of equal moral worth. Any displacement of these presumptions should be controversial. A departure from the commitment to equal moral worth should be made only with great care and caution.

This chapter examines traditions that depict rabbis as sensitive to the fact that their statements appear, or might appear, to nonrabbis to fly in the face of common sense or to contradict the everyday functioning of the world or the meaning of scripture. It addresses the questions: what happens when rabbinic sources acknowledge that a rabbi says or does something that was or might be construed as ludicrous or far-fetched? Is the rabbi ridiculed, and if so, what is his reaction? Does the ridicule provoke anxiety, defensiveness, and/or a desire for revenge? It is shown that Palestinian rabbinic sources tended to be more attuned than Babylonian rabbinic sources to the reactions, whether real or anticipated, of nonrabbis to their statements. Palestinian rabbis tended to be more aware than Babylonian rabbis that their actions and opinions could or did provoke ridicule among nonrabbis. In a significant number of cases — all having to do with the rabbis' worries about their status in the eyes of nonrabbis, and/or rabbinic self-consciousness about nonrabbinic reaction to their statements — Palestinian rabbis revealed their insecurity and discomfort and attempted to demonstrate the reliability of their opinions and interpretations in the face of nonrabbinic ridicule. As a result, Palestinian rabbis, more than their Babylonian counterparts, told stories that vindicated rabbis who were the objects of nonrabbinic ridicule and depicted their antagonists receiving their just desserts.

Justices have complete power over the content of the oral argument. They can—and do—interrupt advocates only a few words into advocates’ opening statements. They can—and do—ask questions ranging from the trivial (and even irrelevant) to the wildly hypothetical. Their questions and comments may be hostile, sympathetic, or neither. This chapter presents a classification, with examples from recent oral arguments, of eight motivations underlying the questions asked by justices.

Humor, like ritual, may sometimes license otherwise offensive insults. When and why? The special genre of insult humor, including roasts, is considered along with Freud's account of the role of collusion in tendentious humor broadly conceived. When is it wrong to laugh? Satire, teasing, and bullying sometimes take the ridicule in insult humor to the extremes of aggression.

This chapter reviews a spate of physical assaults on one of London's most venerable civic monuments, the Cheapside Cross. It combines satiric and religious pamphlets from the early 1640s with earlier accounts of iconoclasm to explore a variety of sensitivities and passions. When the Cross was finally dismantled in 1643, with public ceremony, it was treated as heathen idol and as a sentient being that could also suffer pain and dishonour. The discussion shows how an agitated popular press brought life and death to an inanimate historical monument, until the structure was reduced to rubble. It follows the invective launched against the Cross, commentary on its condition, and arguments used in its defence, situating Cheapside Cross in the turbulent discourse of the early 1640s.

This introductory chapter outlines the current legal framework and its shortcomings, and explains how the book uses reputation as the point of reference for analysing, evaluating, and proposing a revision of the law that governs determinations of what is defamatory. In spite of the axiom that defamation law aims to protect reputation, the common law has no principled, theoretically coherent statement of law regarding what is defamatory. This is so because there has not been sufficient attention paid to the nature of reputation or to the relationship between reputation and defamation. Without a satisfactory account of reputation, the law that seeks to protect it is bound to be inadequately conceived. The question posed takes a very particular form, with the premise itself being a critical issue: if reputation is the interest to be protected by defamation law, then what should be the test(s) for what is defamatory?

This chapter evaluates the manner and extent to which reputation is protected under modern common law. Section I looks at the place moral judgment has occupied in the principal test for what is defamatory. By examining the actionability of particular imputations and general statements of legal principle, it is possible to see how the legal standard of judgment gradually acquired a particular content, that being the traditional values of Christian morality. Section II addresses the quantitative dimension of diversity and it is suggested that the American ‘sectional standards’ test is to be preferred to the Anglo-Australian law that looks to the ‘general standards’ of the community. Section III moves to the substance of the views held in a jurisdiction. It looks at how qualitative distinctions have been drawn between different moral taxonomies to limit the legal protection of reputation in particular ways. Here, it is suggested that determinations of defamatory capacity depend upon processes of ‘ethical recognition’ of criteria for moral judgment.

This chapter examines how a publication is actionable under the ridicule test, and the extent to which the test protects reputation. The formation of the test from 1680-1936 shows no clear sense of why or in what circumstances ridicule could be the basis for a defamation action, even as the test came to have a wide scope and much room for flexibility in its application. In 1936, the American courts attempted to discern and articulate some rationale for the test Burton v Crowell. This marked an expansion of the law as publications would be actionable when they damaged a plaintiff's sense of self-worth regardless of whether their reputation was affected, and this became a settled part of the law in the later 20th century. The chapter argues that the flaws, exhibited most markedly where satire is concerned, require that the test be disposed of.

This chapter discusses the triumph and tribulation experienced by British politician Edmund Burke related to the publication of his book Reflections on the Revolution in France. Burke was exposed to some ridicule because the book was prematurely advertised in early February when it was to be published in November 1790. Many of his opponents were ready for their criticisms and counterpoints. Thus, the immediate success of the book was both a relief and triumph for Burke. By the end of 1790, the book sold a total of 17,500 copies at five shillings each.

This chapter explores the cult and rituals of Magna Mater (or Cybele) and Attis in imperial Rome. It briefly reviews the history and festivals of the goddess and the sacrifice of the taurobolium (focusing on the controversial account by Prudentius), throwing light on some of the very processes by which we can (or cannot) access ancient rituals and festivals. But the main focus is on the eunuch priests (or galli) and the unresolved tension between the incorporation of the cult and its rejection. The paper argues that Roman reactions to these priests, the hostility and the ridicule, needs to be seen in the context of constructive debates on the nature of what is Roman in Roman religion—debates that lie at the heart of Roman religious culture.

This chapter examines how Henry Fielding makes surprise eminently visible in his novels. It shows that Fielding's fiction incorporates the gendered forms of surprise exemplified by both Robinson Crusoe and Pamela: picaresque violence and eroticized shock. It argues that surprise in Fielding's fiction became almost synonymous with what Joseph Addison called the pleasures of the imagination. It also contends that surprise is an essential element in Fielding's rationale for comic ridicule; that his ethical defense of ridicule is bound up with an aesthetic justification for surprise; that he is interested not only in the narrative mechanism of surprise but also its rhetoric; and that in representing moments of astonishment, Fielding nostalgically harks back to the instantaneity of theatrical spectacle, even as he develops techniques that anticipate the narrative innovations of Laurence Sterne's novel Tristram Shandy and gothic romance. Finally, the chapter explores how the two basic forms of surprise—the physical and the cognitive—are interrelated and inflected by differences of class and gender.

The chapter explores the important yet neglected theoretical contributions of Sojourner Truth. Because she was illiterate, Truth left behind no writings in her own hand. Yet fragmentary evidence remains from those who saw and wrote about her, including Frederick Douglass. Applying the analytical framework that emerges from previous chapters reveals that Truth’s most frequently deployed rhetorical tactic is ridicule, the weapon of choice of her contemporary Elizabeth Cady Stanton as well. Like Frances Wright and Lucretia Mott, Truth leads her audience through speech and deed to confront the persistent injustices against women and freed slaves that are deeply rooted in the American project itself. Like Mott and the Grimkés, Truth’s egalitarian political views were deeply influenced by her religious faith, which also relied on an inner voice. As a freed black woman of modest means, unhindered by race, gender, and class privilege, Truth embodies the very concept of intersectionality about which other reformers could only write and speak.

This chapter examines how people position themselves in relation to atheism in order to determine what happened to Soviet scientific atheism more generally. It explores how atheism, which had vanished from public view in the early 1990s, came to be an object of ridicule and dismissal. Soviet atheism represented an extreme instance of the “hegemony of form” that had rendered ideological content redundant. The suggestion “hegemony of form” provides an important clue for why atheism could be easily dismissed. Focusing on contradictions in the architecture of atheism, the chapter argues that the absence of a utopian dimension in Soviet atheism prevented its authentic realization and failed to incite lasting commitment and conviction in most people. In turn, atheism was swiftly removed at the end of the Soviet period.

As the Continental Congress was remaking the colonial political landscape, the Loyalist Samuel Seabury and Alexander Hamilton engaged in an important series of pamphlets and rebuttals in New York in 1774–75. The political debate over Congressional authority functioned simultaneously as a literary contest over the demonstration of—and critical mastery over—the meaning of wit. This chapter reads the paper war in Revolutionary New York as a site in which both Loyalists and Patriots were renegotiating their “English” cultural identities at a moment of political change.

Watt provides a general theory of laughter, which is examined in this chapter. Changing Bergson’s idea of the mechanical merely grafted on the human, Beckett’s comedy often relies on the slapstick offered by animals, while laughing at a more general and deeper level about issues like birth, life, and death. Freud’s theory of the comic is relayed by Ferenczi’s notion that by laughing we return to an unavailable experience of being born, which is confirmed by Adorno’s analysis of slapstick, clowning, and debased jokes in Beckett’s works. If, unlike Kafka’s sense of the comic, Beckett’s comedy seems to believe in a minimalist ethics, this is due to a comic of repetition—fundamentally to the idea that death is not an end, but that we continue it in our non-lives.

This chapter examines the use of humor by both skeptics and supporters of the official 9/11 narrative, the 2004 9/11 Commission Report. It looks at how the 9/11 skeptic movements employed humor to question the state-sponsored act of terrorism and cover-up, whereas their opponents relied on ridicule to discredit the skeptics and depict them as misguided conspiracy theorists. After considering the claim of those who support the official 9/11 narrative that any expressions of skepticism is “conspiracy theory,” the chapter discusses three examples of humor, including an episode of South Park, that address 9/11 skepticism in order to highlight apparent paradoxes and ambiguities in the official 9/11 narrative. It points out how humor failed to bridge the enormous divide between the two camps.