Sex and the Married Philosopher...

 ...something's alway's intruding... :(

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Philosophy asks the Question, "Is there a version of virtuous humor that survives?"

The acceleration of contemporary life also plays a role in this lack of being. The society of laboring and achievement is not a free society. It generates new constraints. Ultimately, the dialectic of master and slave does not yield a society where everyone is free and capable of leisure, too. Rather, it leads to a society of work in which the master himself has become a laboring slave. In this society of compulsion, everyone carries a work camp inside. This labor camp is defined by the fact that one is simultaneously prisoner and guard, victim and perpetrator. One exploits oneself. It means that exploitation is possible even without domination.

― Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society

Now there is a concept of Punching up and Punching down in comedy. As someone who buys the conclusion of The Burnout Society will notice there is an immediate threat to humor. Suddenly anyone can be offended! You are punching yourself in both directions up and down at the same time with practically any joke that tackles the issues of the society of laboring and achievement. Someone is bound to say you are "punching down" while another will retort he's "punching up" and lead to a sort of polarization which is an unintended consequence.

Is there a version of virtuous humor that survives under this premise? And is there a way to take "the joke"?

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Byung-Chul Han, "In the Swarm: Digital prospects" (an abstract)

No respect -- Outrage society -- In the swarm -- Demediatization -- Clever Hans -- Flight into the image -- From the hand to the finger -- From farming to hunting -- From subject to project -- The Nomos of the earth -- Digital ghosts -- Information fatigue -- The crisis of representation -- From citizen to consumer -- The recorded life -- Psychopolitics.

"Digital communication and social media have taken over our lives. In this contrarian reflection on digitized life, Byung-Chul Han counters the cheerleaders for Twitter revolutions and Facebook activism by arguing that digital communication is in fact responsible for the disintegration of community and public space and is slowly eroding any possibility for real political action and meaningful political discourse. In the predigital, analog era, by the time an angry letter to the editor had been composed, mailed, and received, the immediate agitation had passed. Today, digital communication enables instantaneous, impulsive reaction, meant to express and stir up outrage on the spot. Meanwhile, the public, the senders and receivers of these communications have become a digital swarm -- not a mass, or a crowd, or Negri and Hardt's antiquated notion of a "multitude," but a set of isolated individuals incapable of forming a "we," incapable of calling dominant power relations into question, incapable of formulating a future because of an obsession with the present. The digital swarm is a fragmented entity that can focus on individual persons only in order to make them an object of scandal. Han, one of the most widely read philosophers in Europe today, describes a society in which information has overrun thought, in which the same algorithms are employed by Facebook, the stock market, and the intelligence services. Democracy is under threat because digital communication has made freedom and control indistinguishable. Big Brother has been succeeded by Big Data."