THE WHIPSAW OF HUMOR: Why Offense Makes Us More Honest
In a low-ceilinged comedy club, a comedian tells a joke about American Indians that leans on a stereotype everyone in the room already recognizes, and the laugh comes fast—not because the audience believes the caricature, but because they recognize it as a cliché—then the whipsaw snaps back, and in the quiet half-second after the laugh, minds start correcting the record, recalling Native soldiers, engineers, artists, leaders, and neighbors, noticing the absurdity of the stereotype more clearly precisely because it was spoken aloud, reduced to a cartoon and exposed, doing what suppression never does by dragging a lazy idea into the light where it shrinks, destabilizes, and collapses under the weight of lived reality rather than being preserved intact by silence.