Robin Barrett is a Ph.D. candidate at Faulkner University, and an online faculty member with Likewise College. Robin is currently focusing his research on divine revelation as it relates to epistemology for his upcoming dissertation. Other areas of interest are metaethics and philosophy of religion. Robin resides in the Pacific Northwest with his wife and three children, and they are all Superfans of da Seattle Seahawks.

Erich Christiansen is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Georgia. He is writing a dissertation on the ethical and political problems with military drones. His article “Wicked world: the politics of the supernatural in Black Sabbath” was included in Black Sabbath and Philosophy: Mastering Reality. He has covered jazz for A Gathering of the Tribes and jazz and comics for Pulse: Berlin. His poetry has appeared in Bad Newz and Maintenant. Erich’s other research interests include Greek diners with extremely limited menus, sibling blues musicians, and “French immigrants” with questionable craniums.

Gerald J. Erion is Professor of Philosophy at Medaille College in Buffalo, New York. His research interests include ethics, philosophy of mind, communication theory, and cities; he also writes on critical thinking and the teaching of philosophy. Buffalo’s hottest club is Erion’s office. This place has everything: books, stacks of paper, Fisher‐Price toys, a Labrador retriever, X Day cards, and temporary tattoos. And if you ask about utilitarianism, you might get to see photographs of Jeremy Bentham’s body.

Kimberly S. Engels is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Molloy College. Her research focuses on existentialism as a contemporary living philosophy, applicable to all domains of modern life. She is co‐editor of Westworld and Philosophy: If You Go Looking for the Truth, Get the Whole Thing, and has published articles relating existentialism to issues in environmental ethics, medical ethics, and public policy. Though she hates to be a Debbie Downer, she feels obligated to remind the reader that feline AIDS is the # 1 killer of domestic cats.

Jeremy Fried is a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at the University of Oklahoma and also received his J.D. from UC‐Berkeley. His current research focuses on the intersection between aesthetics and legal rights, particularly regarding intellectual property. He also does work in philosophy of sport and philosophy of race. Jeremy’s favorite SNL sketch is The Polar Bear Cage and he can objectively claim that his cat Risky Biscuits is the best cat in the whole entire world even if she isn’t quite the driver Toonces was.

Erik Garrett is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Duquesne University. He received a dual doctorate in philosophy and communication from Purdue University. His books and monographs include Why Do We Go to The Zoo? Communication, Animals, and the Cultural‐historical Experience of Zoos and El barrio de la colina: Dos estudios de fenomenologia urbana. He currently is working on a book about urban phenomenology and communication. He is chair of the Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences and the North American Levinas Society. No Really!?! This has been Really with Erik and Kati.

Theodore Gracyk is Professor of Philosophy at Minnesota State University Moorhead and (since 2013) the co‐editor of The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. He is the author of several philosophical books on music, including Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock Music (Duke University Press, 1996); Listening to Popular Music (University of Michigan Press, 2007); On Music (Routledge, 2013); and co‐author of Jazz and the Philosophy of Art (Routledge, 2018). He has authored numerous articles on the aesthetics of music and the history of aesthetics. He was co‐recipient of the 2002 Woody Guthrie Award (the 2002 IASPM/US Book Award). With Andrew Kania, he co‐edited The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music (2011).

John Scott Gray is Distinguished Teacher and Professor of Philosophy at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, MI. He earned degrees at Furman University (B.A.), Baylor University (M.A.), and Southern Illinois University, Carbondale (Ph.D.). His research interests focus on areas of applied philosophy, including the Philosophy of Sports, Sex and Love, Bioethics, and numerous publications in the Philosophy of Popular Culture. Dr. Gray co‐authored Introduction to Popular Culture: Theories, Applications, and Global Perspectives (2013). He is currently working on his next book, An Atheist’s Guide to Sacred Space. His hobbies include playing hockey and collecting vintage sports cards. He and his wife, Jo, and his son, Oscar, live in Canadian Lakes, MI.

Jason Holt is Professor in the School of Kinesiology at Acadia University. His current research areas are aesthetics, philosophy of sport, and philosophy and popular culture. His books include Meanings of Art: Essays in Aesthetics and Blindsight and the Nature of Consciousness, which was shortlisted for the Canadian Philosophical Association Book Prize, and as editor, Leonard Cohen and Philosophy: Various Positions, Philosophy of Sport: Core Readings, and The Daily Show and Philosophy: Moments of Zen in the Art of Fake News. His literary work includes the recent Up Against Beyond: Selected Poems, 1994–2017. He aspires one day to affirm that he’s good enough, he’s smart enough, and doggone it, people like him.

William Irwin is Hervé A. LeBlanc Distinguished Service Professor and Chair of Philosophy at King’s College in Pennsylvania. He is the general editor of the Blackwell and Philosophy Pop Culture Series in addition to being the volume editor for Metallica and Philosophy and Black Sabbath and Philosophy. Irwin’s most recent books include God Is a Question, Not an Answer: Finding Common Ground in Our Uncertainty and the novel Little Siddhartha. Bill has always thought that philosophy needs more cowbell.

David Kyle Johnson is Professor of Philosophy at King’s College, in Wilkes‐Barre. Pennsylvania. His specializations include metaphysics, logic, and philosophy of religion. His recording for “The Great Courses” include Sci‐Phi: Science Fiction as Philosophy, The Big Questions of Philosophy, and Exploring Metaphysics. Kyle is the editor‐in‐chief of The Palgrave Handbook of Popular Culture as Philosophy (forthcoming) and has also edited Black Mirror and Philosophy: Dark Reflections and Inception and Philosophy: Because It’s Never Just a Dream. A fan of SNL since his youth, Kyle grew up in an evangelical household and coined the phrase “SNL Hangover.” It’s the exhaustion and frustration a person feels when they have to get up early go to church after having secretly stayed up to watch SNL the night before.

J.R. Lombardo is a social worker and addictions specialist in private practice in White Plains NY. He teaches classes on various mental health and addictions topics and presents workshops to both helping professionals as well as the general public. He has a particular interest in the correlation between early attachment patterns and addictive behaviors. J.R. is a caring nurturer, a member of several 12‐step programs, and a licensed therapist.

Michael McGowan is Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Florida Southwestern State College. He earned graduate degrees from Yale University, University of South Florida, Claremont Graduate University, and Malone University. He is the editor of David Foster Wallace and Religion: Essays on Faith and Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2019) and author of The Bridge: Revelation and its Implications (Pickwick, 2015). He has written for the Journal of Human Rights, Teaching Ethics, Christianity Today, Journal of Religion and Film, Christian Scholar’s Review, Theological Book Review, International Journal of Systematic Theology, and the Journal of Religion and Film. Find him online at www.loveofwisdom.org.

Edwardo Pérez spent his formative, middle‐school years, staying up late at friends’ houses during sleep‐overs to watch SNL, feeling like the little brother of Yortuk and Georg Festrunk (absolutely clueless when it came to dating). Inspired by the Blues Brothers (and Tom “Bones” Malone), Edwardo spent many years playing trombone and trumpet in jazz venues across the country before becoming a professor of English, contributing essays to 1984 and Philosophy, Doctor Strange and Philosophy, The Handmaid’s Tale and Philosophy, Disney and Philosophy, and Black Mirror and Philosophy. He is currently co‐editing Black Panther and Philosophy with Timothy Brown, writing philosophical blogs on andphilosophy.com, and managing the website lightsabertoss.com. Edwardo’s wife, whom he lovingly refers to as his "Wild‐American Fox," keeps him grounded in reality.

Joshua J. Reynolds is an unaffiliated guy who lives somewhere in the United States. He’s got a Ph.D. from Princeton (framed and propping up a stack of articles on the metaphysics of fidget spinning), as well as a B.A. from Arizona State. The author of several soporific masterpieces on Plato, Thucydides, and Aeschylus, this guy eventually abandoned the life of library research and education to offer a more fitting response to existence: smartassery. His book, In the Beginning: A Serious Satire on Myth, Philosophy, and Belief, is available on Amazon and selling like hotcakes (well, maybe more like gluten‐free porridge). Joshua dislikes leaf blowers, Harleys, and HID headlights. He enjoys breathing, sounds of nature, and vision.

Tadd Ruetenik is Professor of Philosophy at St. Ambrose University. He is the author of The Demons of William James: Religious Pragmatism Explores Unusual Mental States, and has published articles on a wide variety of subjects, including psychical research, religious philosophy, animal ethics, and non‐violence. As a child, he was sometimes allowed to watch SNL with his parents and pretended he didn’t already know the meaning of the raunchy jokes that they were explaining to him.

Jason Southworth is an adjunct philosopher at a number of schools. He no longer feels it’s appropriate to give them free advertising if they’re unwilling to pay a living wage and provide health insurance. He has contributed to many Popular Culture and Philosophy volumes, including House of Cards and Philosophy, Green Lantern and Philosophy, and Stephen Colbert and Philosophy. And that’s the way it is.

Kati Sudnick is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Duquesne University. Her research interests include the media ecological foundations of social media, applied communication and philosophy, and communication ethics and popular culture. She currently serves as editorial assistant for the Journal of Communication and Religion and has previously published in In Media Res with her contribution “Harry Potter, World War II, and the Banality of Evil.” She gives special thanks to the philosophy department at King’s College in Wilkes‐Barre, PA for cultivating a love of all things philosophy and popular culture during her undergraduate studies. Really!?!

Ruth Tallman teaches philosophy at Hillsborough Community College. Her research area is biomedical ethics, with a particular focus, of late, on moral issues arising within the physician‐patient relationship. Her safe word is “popcorn.”

J. Jeremy Wisnewski earns his keep as a Professor of Philosophy at Hartwick College. He has authored or edited twelve allegedly non‐fiction books, all of which seem suspicious in retrospect. These include: Wittgenstein and Ethical Inquiry (Continuum, 2007), Understanding Torture (Edinburgh University Press, 2010), Heidegger: An Introduction (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), and The Politics of Agency: Toward a Pragmatic Philosophical Anthropology (Routledge, 2016). He has also edited six books in Blackwell's Philosophy and Pop Culture series. His delusions include the belief that telling you about these books will help get him on SNL's Celebrity Jeopardy (he really wants to meet Sean Connery).

Most of us can identify television programs that shaped and defined us as we grew up. They were the backdrop of our experiences of first loves, first apartments, minimum wage jobs, and bad break ups. In addition to being personally meaningful, pop cultural artworks such as TV shows often contribute to the collective consciousness of a generation, helping us understand our peers as set apart from those older and younger than ourselves. Owing to its exceptional longevity, Saturday Night Live (SNL) has helped define not a generation, but multiple generations of viewers. The young fans who stayed up late to see the Land Shark and the Killer Bees went on to share the joys of the Spartan Cheerleaders and the Ambiguously Gay Duo with their own children. Now, those same fans are watching Morning Joe and Eric and Donald Trump Jr. with their grandkids. We can date ourselves based on who we consider “our” Update hosts, and most of us see the decade of our own adolescence as the golden age of the show. Despite our disagreements, we’re unified in that none of us can recall the major news events of our lives without also thinking about the ways we saw them lampooned on Saturday nights.

We sit down to watch (and keep coming back) for the laughs, but SNL has done more than just entertain us for the past four and a half decades. Like philosophy itself, SNL has challenged us to view our world with a critical and questioning eye. Kids can laugh long before they’re capable of engaging in critical analysis. Thanks to SNL’s use of parody and satire, those of us who grew up watching the show were wired to think philosophically by the time our brains caught up to the task. This book takes us further down that road with a careful, deliberate look at the philosophy that is laced throughout four and a half decades of SNL sketches, impressions, and fake news. Happy reading, and have a pleasant tomorrow!

Since its inception, SNL has displayed a willingness – even eagerness – to take comedic shots at public figures – and it seems no status is so exalted as to earn someone a pass. No sitting president has been immune from SNL’s mockery – and in recent election cycles all major contenders for the White House have been lampooned as well. Supreme Court justices have taken their turns, as have senators and congress people. Popes – heck, even Jesus Christ himself – have been the subject of SNL’s playful mirth. The question we’ll consider in this chapter is – why do we find this acceptable? Why does no one mind that irreverent young comedians don funny wigs and make up to poke fun at political and religious leaders on national television? Where’s the respect? We’ll also consider how it could be that sometimes, a joke that targets people who aren’t that powerful at all seems to violate moral norms in a way that jokes targeting the most powerful among us do not.

Radical Autonomism

Ethical comedy might sound like an oxymoron – many people hold the belief that, if it’s part of a comedic act, it’s somehow immune to moral criticism. This view has deep roots in aesthetics, or the philosophy of art. Radical autonomism is the position that moral categories simply do not apply to works of art – and that only aesthetic categories are appropriate. The British art critic Clive Bell (1881–1964) was a strong proponent of autonomism. On this view, the purpose of a work of art is to stimulate aesthetic responses in the audience. Aesthetic emotions are necessarily good, on this view, so a work of art is good or bad to the extent that it does or does not produce aesthetic emotions in the audience. Generally, the aesthetic emotion a work of comedic art is aimed at producing is humor. Thus, the grounds by which it would be appropriate to judge the work would simply be, “is it funny?” On the other hand, “is it mean, hurtful, or disrespectful?” are inappropriate questions to ask about a work of art. Autonomism sees art as set apart from ordinary life, and its rules. What might be negatively judged in the real world due to moral considerations gets a pass when it’s presented as part of a work of art. While this may sound a bit strange, consider how different our reaction might have been if, in an interview, Chevy Chase described sitting president Gerald Ford as a bumbling idiot who couldn’t walk across a room without tripping over his own feet. This sounds harsh and disrespectful, particularly when said of a president while in office. Yet, isn’t that exactly the sentiment Chase conveyed each Saturday night as he stumbled across the stage in the character of President Ford?

Autonomism stems from the belief that there is something very valuable – even sacred – about art and its role in our lives. Works of art provide us with a space where we can play imaginatively with ideas that might be better shied away from in real life. Placing art in a realm in which it may remain immune from moral criticism allows artists to fully develop their creativity. Art thereby creates a safe space in which both artist and audience can explore radical ideas without causing harm in the real world. We can engage in imaginative exploration in fiction without carrying those ideas into reality, where they might cause harm. Because art is, by its very nature, not reality, we can allow what would be morally reprehensible in real life to simply be awesome aesthetic fun in a work of art. It’s a mindset of radical autonomism that allows us to evaluate, for instance, Debbie as a great comedic character, while recognizing that were she to exist in real life she would be, well, a downer.

Radical Moralism

The flip side of radical autonomism is known as radical moralism. The Russian author Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) was a proponent of this view, which holds that art is good insofar as it promotes good values, and bad to the extent that it promotes bad values. Unlike autonomism, which says aesthetic evaluations are entirely distinct from moral evaluations, radical moralism holds that it’s impossible to separate the two. So, an artwork that promotes immoral beliefs would necessarily be a bad work of art – there’s no way for its aesthetic qualities to redeem it, because radical moralists hold that moral values supersede aesthetic ones. An obvious complication of this view is that we don’t all agree about what constitutes a moral or an immoral belief. Tolstoy had some ideas about this – he saw social inclusivity as good, and elitism and social division as bad. To the extent that high presidential approval ratings promote social unity, then, depictions of the two Presidents Bush by Dana Carvey and Will Ferrell – by most accounts far more lovable in their comedic hands than in real life – would arguably receive high moralist marks from Tolstoy.

Radical moralism traces its roots back to Plato, who was all too aware of art’s power to sway the hearts of its audience. It was the very power of art that scared Plato silly, as he saw art working through emotion (paving the way for Bell and Tolstoy), rather than reason, making it much less controllable or dependable than Plato would like. Plato worried that a rousing work of art could prompt a riot, or give credence to a view or a leader not worthy of rational endorsement (an accusation that has been leveled against the role of Ferrell’s Bush character in the reelection of George W. Bush).¹ Tolstoy seemed to share this worry with Plato, although he was happy to use the emotional efficacy of art to noble advantage, seeing art as having great power to bring about social good.

Moderate Moralism

Splitting the difference between radical autonomism and radical moralism is the view known as moderate moralism, endorsed by contemporary aesthetician Noël Carrol. On this view, moral considerations ought to be applied when evaluating a work of art, but so too should aesthetic considerations, and the significant weight of either could override the other. For instance, a work with troubling moral implications could be so aesthetically captivating that it causes us to forgive, or look past, its moral failings. A work with particularly weighty moral sins might be unable to muster the aesthetic wherewithal to overcome its morally complicating elements. Moderate moralistic considerations are probably in the background when we allow ourselves to snicker at morally questionable jokes on the grounds that they are, in fact, quite funny, while being unwilling to extend the same generosity to a morally questionable joke that is hack or otherwise unfunny.

Who is the Butt of the Joke?

Although there are plenty of radical autonomists in the world today, it’s hard for many people to engage with a work of art such as Saturday Night Live without considering the moral dimensions of its sketches, particularly when those sketches portray characters who have real life counterparts (who are, presumably, subject to moral evaluation, even if the art that portrays them might not be, according to an autonomist). How would a moralist, particularly a moderate moralist, go about evaluating the aesthetic and moral elements of a work of art – in this case, in an SNL sketch? A good starting point is to ask, is there a butt of the joke? Not all jokes have butts. Sketches such as Toonces the Driving Cat do not obviously target anyone; they’re just absurd. To determine if the joke has a butt, ask, is there someone we’re laughing at? Let’s think about some examples. The butt of an impressionist’s joke is usually, pretty straightforwardly, whoever they are doing an impression of. So, the butt of a typical Chase‐as‐Ford pratfall is Gerald Ford, and the butt of Carvey’s famous “read my lips” antics is George H.W. Bush.

When we talk about “punching up” and “punching down,” the person who’s being “punched” is the butt of the joke. So, who is it OK to punch? To answer this question, we need to think about the various individuals and groups involved. We need to ask not just, who is the butt, but also, who is the butt in relation to the audience and to society. And, as we learned on the playground as kids, we should pick on someone our own size. Only bullies (who are actually weak cowards) pick on people who are smaller than them. This is what it means to punch down. But this isn’t about physical size (otherwise way more people would be fair game for Jane Curtin’s jokes (as she’s only 5′ 4″), than would be for Chevy Chase (who comes in at 6′ 4″). No, the real issue is something more like social status. Let’s think about this first in terms of individuals and their social status (generally, celebrities versus the rest of us), and then in terms of members of groups that hold varying levels of social status.