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Ryan D. Doerfler, A Comedy of Errors or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Sensibility-Invariantism About “Funny”, 93 Pac. Phil. Q. 493 (2012).


Abstract: In this article, I argue that sensibility-invariantism about ‘funny’ is defensible, not just as a descriptive hypothesis, but, as a normative position as well. What I aim to do is to make the realist commitments of the sensibility-invariantist out to be much more tenable than one might initially think them to be. I do so by addressing the two major sources of discontent with sensibility-invariantism: the observation that discourse about comedy exhibits significant divergence in judgment, and the fact that disagreements about comedy, unlike disagreements about, say, geography, often strike us as fundamentally intractable.