The Virtue of Wit

In The Virtue of Wit: Humor, Social Connection, and Flourishing, Clair Morrissey argues that wit is a form of social ingenuity, an aptitude for building and maintaining human connection. Her novel account of wit understands it as the capacity for joining people in feeling through playful, amusing creativity with words and behaviors. In animating and enlivening our everyday shared social landscape, exercising wit is partially constitutive of living a good human life. Through analysis of the history of philosophical treatments of wit and related concepts, contemporary empirical and theoretical research on humor, and examples drawn from across the narrative arts and standup comedy, Morrissey argues that wit should be considered a proper moral virtue. Her analysis illuminates how virtue ethicists can embrace a non-ideal ethical framework that centers the joy and flourishing of marginalized or oppressed people. The exercise of wit can play an important role in asserting and celebrating one's humanity in everyday resistance to oppression.

Clair Morrissey is professor of philosophy at Occidental College.