“Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better, but the frog dies in the process.” Truer words than these famous ones of E.B. White’s have rarely been spoken, and so requiring an explanation for jokes has long been, if not a strict taboo, then at least frowned upon for the way it ruins the fun. To not get it used to be a sign of an individual’s shortcomings, an admission of either dull-wittedness or hopeless disconnection from the zeitgeist where humour is born.
But lately, the common wisdom about letting comedy or artworks or even facts speak for themselves has been subverted by a deepening fear of what might happen if something gets lost in translation. A guy who doesn’t get the joke might instead get the wrong idea — and what then? Some sort of catastrophe, for sure, if not outright anarchy.
These anxieties were on particularly potent display amid the recent to-do surrounding the Twitter Files, which are either a groundbreaking act of corporate transparency by the tech world’s biggest disruptor — or a giant, embarrassing nothingburger, depending on who you ask. For those not in the know, the Files offer a glimpse behind the scenes at Twitter during various recent controversies, when content moderation arguably crossed the line into censorship. There have been four Files thus far, released in the form of massive tweet threads by journalists hand-picked by Elon Musk. All have offered insights into the challenges of managing speech on the microblogging site, which holds a place of outsized cultural influence owing to its status as a favourite hangout for media folks, but the adverse relationship between Twitter management and humorous content was on fullest display in Matt Taibbi’s recent thread about the site’s collaboration with government agencies to combat misinformation in the leadup to the 2020 election, which culminated in the permanent banning of Donald Trump from the site.
Among the tweets that Twitter employees had highlighted as cause for concern was a joke from October 2020. Former Arkansas governor and one-time presidential hopeful, the Republican Mike Huckabee, took a jab at the mail-in voting system: “Stood in rain for hour to early vote today,” Huckabee wrote. “When I got home I filled in my stack of mail-in ballots and then voted the ballots of my deceased parents and grandparents. They vote just like me! #Trump2020”
As dumb as this joke was, there’s a certain dark absurdity to the response it inspired behind the scenes at Twitter: “This appears to be a joke, but other people might believe it,” one anonymous employee wrote when the tweet was flagged. Trust and Safety head executive Yoel Roth wrote:
