The Lies of Humor

I want to make an interesting observation about sarcastic humor - mainly its subtle capacity to reinforce the beliefs of the people it is directed at.

Lets take an example of someone who brings you a stale sandwich.

Let say the person isn't very thoughtful and doesn't care they brought you such an old sandwich.
You can respond by saying 'thanks, this is real fresh.' reinforcing the belief the person has about themselves that they're not a very thoughtful/kind person.

On the alternate scenario lets say the person is too thoughtful and feeling overly worried about the stale sandwich they brought you. You can sarcastically act like you are offended; "Oh god, it's so old it stinks!" which would reinforce the belief the person has about themselves that they are a thoughtful/kind person.

It's interesting to analyze the responses of people to such jokes to see what you can tell about their inner beliefs.

I would argue that the more they laugh about it, the more strongly they hold the belief opposite to the joke. e.g. When you bring out a stale sandwich and someone sarcastically jokes about how fresh it is -laughing heartily would be a way of coping with (and at the same time reinforcing)the belief that you're not a very kind and thoughtful person. An insulted or antagonistic reaction would entail that the you don't hold the belief that your an unkind person (in which case you probably didn't notice or don't think the sandwich is stale).

Whats powerful about this technique is that you can use it to determine peoples beliefs about themselves, but always say your joking as a means to defend your comment (I can always say I'm sorry, I was just joking about the sandwich being stale) in which case you identify that the person identifies as a kind person.

Furthermore, it would be interesting to test how effective it is manipulating a person's beliefs about themselves. If you thought a person was unkind, and you wanted to bring this to their attention, the course of action would be to exploit opportunities where they displayed unkind behavior, and make sarcastic jokes about how kind they are. The clearer the act of unkindness, the more likely a sarcastic joke about how kind they are will be to reinforce the belief that they are not very kind (and hence come to terms with their unkindness).