with an incongruity, which may be resolved by switching to another frame of reference. And in that alternative frame of reference, the butt of the joke occupies a lowly or undignified status.190 When Woody Allen says, “I’m very proud of my gold watch. My grandfather sold it to me on his deathbed,” listeners are at first surprised that an emotionally precious heirloom would be sold rather than given, particularly by someone who cannot profit from the sale. Then they realize that the Woody Allen character is unloved and comes from a family of venal oddballs. Often the first reference frame, which sets up the incongruity, consists of a prevailing relational model, and to get the joke the audience must step outside it, as in the switch from Communal Sharing to Market Pricing in the Woody Allen joke.
Humor with a political or moral agenda can stealthily challenge a relational model that is second nature to an audience by forcing them to see that it leads to consequences that the rest of their minds recognize as absurd. Rufus T. Firefly’s willingness to declare war in response to a wholly imagined insult in Duck Soup deconstructs the Authority Ranking ethos of national grandeur and was appreciated in an era in which the image of war was shifting from thrilling and glorious to wasteful and stupid. Satire also served as an accelerant to recent social changes, such as the 1960s portrayals of racists and sexists as thick-witted Neanderthals and of Vietnam hawks as bloodthirsty psychopaths. The Soviet Union and its satellites also harbored a deep underground current of satire, as in the common definition of the two Cold War ideologies: “Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man; Communism is the exact opposite.”
According to the 18th-century writer Mary Wortley Montagu, “Satire should, like a polished razor keen / Wound with a touch that’s scarcely felt or seen.” But satire is seldom polished that keenly, and the butts of a joke may be all too aware of the subversive power of humor. They may react with a rage that is stoked by the intentional insult to a sacred value, the deflation of their dignity, and a realization that laughter indicates common knowledge of both. The lethal riots in 2005 provoked by the editorial cartoons in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten (for example, one showing Muhammad in heaven greeting newly arrived suicide bombers with “Stop, we have run out of virgins!”) show that when it comes to the deliberate undermining of a sacred relational model, humor is no laughing matter.
How do the relational models that make up the moral sense license the various kinds of violence that people feel are morally legitimate? And what degree of freedom allows societies to throttle down moralistic violence or, better still, shift it into reverse? All the relational models invite moralistic punishment of the people who violate their rules of engagement. But each model licenses a distinctive kind of violence as well.191
Human beings, Fiske notes, need not relate to one another using any of the models at all, a state he calls a null or asocial relationship. People who don’t fall under a relational model are dehumanized: they are seen as lacking the essential features of human nature and are treated, in effect, like inanimate objects which may be ignored, exploited, or preyed upon at will.192 An asocial relationship thus sets the stage for the predatory violence of conquest, rape, assassination, infanticide, strategic bombing, colonial expulsions, and other crimes of convenience.
Placing other people under the aegis of a relational model imposes at least some obligation to take their interests into account. Communal Sharing has sympathy and warmth built into it—but only for members of the in-group. Fiske’s collaborator Nick Haslam has argued that Communal Sharing can lead to a second kind of dehumanization: not the mechanistic dehumanization of an asocial relationship, but an animalistic dehumanization that denies to outsiders the traits that are commonly perceived as uniquely human, such as reason, individuality, self-control, morality, and culture.193 Rather than being treated with callousness or indifference, such outsiders are treated with disgust or contempt. Communal Sharing may encourage this dehumanization because the excluded people are seen as lacking the pure and sacred essence that unites the members of the tribe, and thereby they threaten to pollute it with their animal contaminants. So Communal Sharing, for all its cuddly connotations, supports the mindset behind genocidal ideologies based on tribe, race, ethnicity, and religion.
Authority Ranking also has two sides. It brings a paternalistic responsibility to