Originally a comment by Der Durchwanderer on Waaz ya sensa yuma?

Humour is a funny thing. Any subject can in principle be fit for a joke…or, rather, a joke can be fashioned out of any subject, even the ones which common decency insists there is no acceptable joke. Larry David has made jokes about the Holocaust, and Hannibal Burress has made jokes about rape, which many people have found hilarious and inoffensive (or at least inoffensive to human decency, rather than the social mores that many if not most jokes are crafted to offend).

In the former case the speaker is a Jewish man with a penchant for cynicism and self-deprecation, and in the latter case the speaker put his own career on the line to give credibility to Bill Cosby’s accusers, and can be given a non-trivial amount of credit for the latter’s fall from grace. And these jokes were well-crafted besides, targeted at least as much at the audience’s moral hypocrisy and lack of rhetorical sophistication, in effect aiming to get the audience to laugh not at victims of the Holocaust or of rape, but rather at themselves.

This, much more than the simplistic “punching up” or “punching down” framing of comedy, is what moves a large part of comedy as an art form; holding up a mirror to an audience, playing with their taboos and their presuppositions of their own morals, and subtly guiding them to realise that much of the mental world in which they live is kind of a ridiculous and laughable sham. When it is done well, it is a transcendent experience of a piece with losing oneself in a painting or a song.

Richard Spencer is no Larry David. He is a brute, promoting a brutal philosophy, and the only thing funny in this situation is how transparent his lies about it are. Like all brutes, he deserves some measure of pity and guarded sympathy for the circumstances which led him to his brutality, but he also deserves a good measure of scorn and ridicule for his inability to see how laughably ridiculous his own mental world has become.