The virtue nobody puts on a poster: Aristotle on wit, and what a comic owes the room

I tell jokes for money on the northern circuit, and for less money in a call centre during the day. When people find out I read philosophy, they assume I read it for material. Mostly I read it because comedy keeps asking me ethical questions I can't answer at two in the morning on the last train back from Leeds.

The most useful answer I've found so far is also one of the oldest. In Book IV of the Nicomachean Ethics, in among generosity, good temper and truthfulness, Aristotle includes a virtue for conversation and play. He calls the person who has it eutrapelos, which translators give as witty or ready-witted. The word suggests someone who turns nimbly, the way a good dancer does.

Between the buffoon and the boor

Like the other virtues in the book, wit is a mean between two vices. On one side is the buffoon, who will do anything for a laugh and cares more about getting it than about saying what is fitting or sparing the feelings of the person he mocks. On the other side is the boor, who never makes a joke himself and is annoyed by people who do. Aristotle is unusually sharp about the boor. He thinks rest and amusement are a genuine part of a good life, so the person who refuses them is not being serious. He is being deficient.

I have met both. The buffoon is the open-mic act who keeps going at the woman in the front row because the room laughed the first time. The boor is the man at the back with folded arms who came, apparently, to be offended by everything, including the chairs.

What interests me is the middle. Aristotle says the witty person has tact: he says, and listens to, the kind of things that suit a decent and free person. Then he adds something every comedian knows in their stomach. A joke, he says, is a kind of abuse. Lawgivers forbid some kinds of abuse, and perhaps they should forbid some kinds of jokes. But the refined person doesn't need the law, because he is, as it were, a law to himself.

A virtue, not a rule

That last phrase is why I trust Aristotle more than most modern arguments about offence. The modern arguments look for a rule: punch up, never down; anything goes if it's funny; nothing about religion; everything about religion. Every one of those rules breaks within a week on the circuit, because the same line lands differently in different rooms.

Aristotle doesn't give me a rule. He gives me a trained perception. The virtuous person sees what a situation calls for, the way a good cook knows when a sauce is right. For a comedian the situation is the room: who is in it, what they've had to drink, whether the person the joke is about is sitting there, whether the laugh is turning from surprise into something nastier. Tact is noticing that turn and changing direction before it finishes.

He also offers a test I've started using. He notices that the old comedies used open obscenity, while the newer ones used innuendo, and he treats the change as a gain in decency. What matters is not the subject but the manner. The same subject, my mother's internet habits, my own body, the call centre, can be handled by a buffoon or by a witty person. The difference is whether the joke still treats the people in it as people.

Where the old theories help

The three classic theories of laughter each catch part of this. Hobbes, in Leviathan, called laughter a sudden glory at our own superiority over someone else. Kant said it comes from an expectation that is strained and then suddenly turns into nothing. Bergson thought we laugh at something mechanical where we expected something alive, and that laughter needs a momentary anaesthesia of the heart.

Put Aristotle beside them and you can see what tact is for. Most jokes contain a little of each. There is an incongruity, Kant's collapse of expectation, and that part is innocent. There is usually a target, which is Hobbes's part. And there is that brief switching-off of sympathy that Bergson describes. The buffoon takes the anaesthetic and keeps it running. The witty person switches sympathy off for the length of a punchline and then switches it back on, so the room can laugh and then look at the person again.

That, I think, is the difference between a joke at someone's expense and a joke about someone. Both have a target. Only one leaves the target in the room as a person when the laugh is over.

What Aristotle can't tell me

I don't think Aristotle solves everything. His witty man is a free citizen joking among equals, and comedy has always been one of the few places where people with less power get to mock people with more. A court jester was not a gentleman exercising tact. He was licensed to say what the gentlemen couldn't. When a cleaner does twenty minutes about her managers, Aristotle's question of what suits a decent person is the wrong one. The right one is whether she is telling the truth.

And the trained perception Aristotle relies on is learned in a community, which means it carries that community's blind spots. The room's sense of what is fitting is not always right. Sometimes the best joke of the night is the one the room didn't want to hear.

Still, of all the philosophers I've read, he is the only one who treats being funny as part of being good, rather than a holiday from it. The boor and the buffoon are both failures of character. That is a standard I can work with: not a list of forbidden subjects, but a question to ask at the end of every set. Did I make them laugh, and did I leave everyone in the room still a person?