Comedians Jimmy Carr and Dave Chappelle have been getting into trouble lately over their Netflix shows. Critics say their incendiary jokes don’t even count as comedy, or that only racists, misogynists and homophobes would laugh at them. But neither of those claims are true or capture what’s wrong with jokes that make light of other people’s suffering, argues Zoe Walker.

In recent months, a couple of Netflix’s comedy specials have given rise to a great deal of controversy and backlash. In October last year, the release of Dave Chappelle’s latest Netflix special The Closer prompted a walkout from Netflix employees protesting its mockery of trans people, as well as drawing criticism that it was misogynistic, homophobic and anti-Semitic. And now Jimmy Carr has sparked widespread outrage for a joke in his Netflix special His Dark Material, in which he suggests that the genocide of Roma and Sinti people by the Nazis was one of ‘the positives’ of the Holocaust.

But what exactly is it that these comedians are doing that is so objectionable? I think that some attempts to capture what it is – their jokes aren’t funny, they only appeal to deeply immoral people – get it wrong. Rather, it is the uncritical use of others’ pain for our pleasure, and making light of something that is already not taken as seriously as it should, which justifies the outrage.

One way that people sometimes criticise this sort of comedy is to argue that it fails on its own terms – they argue that it is unfunny, or even, as UK culture secretary Nadine Dorries said of Carr’s joke, that it is not actually comedy at all. The philosopher Berys Gaut takes a version of this line about immoral comedy (though not the full Dorries view), claiming that jokes are less funny to the extent that they are immoral. If this were right, it would be a particularly powerful sort of criticism, as it would speak to even the edgiest and most nihilistic of comedians – they may not care about being moral, but they certainly care about being funny.

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Against the view that this sort of content is not comedy, we can point to the fact that Carr’s joke, for example, has a clear set-up and punchline.

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However, I think that unfortunately, the case against this sort of edgy comedy is not so easy to make as this. Against the view that this sort of content is not comedy, we can point to the fact that Carr’s joke, for example, has a clear set-up and punchline, making us think that he is invoking our sympathies for Roma and Sinti people and the fact that their plight is never talked about, and then subverting our expectations with the punchline that ‘no one ever wants to talk about the positives’. Shocking one’s audience with an expectation-defying taboo may not be a particularly original or sophisticated trick, but it is undeniably a form of comedy.

And as for the funniness of the comedy, in both specials, the audience greets the offending jokes with uproarious laughter. Not all laughter stems from genuine amusement, of course, and perhaps some people laughing at these jokes are laughing from nervousness or discomfort. But given that both Carr and Chappelle have been doing the same sort of comedy for many years and have retained a large and loyal fanbase, it is clear that there are a lot of people who are genuinely amused by their comedy.