Poet Andrew Hudgins, talking about his new book, Joker.
There’s clearly humor that goes too far and humor that is violative, and we are engaged in our humor in a complex call-and-response with one another. I’m telling you a joke to see if you think that it’s funny … but if one of us violates some principle or touches on a particularly tender spot of the other, normally we adjust to that and move on. But sometimes we feel that that violation is so strong that we have to register a complaint about it. … I have called people for telling racist or homophobic jokes, and people have called me on that too when I thought that I was saying this is a joke that demonstrates a certain kind of misogyny or racism and they did not understand that I wasn’t endorsing those ways of thinking. Any kind of human communication is quite complicated.