Does humor need to be serious to be taken seriously?

Abstract

This commentary engages with Gerlofs’ (2022) article on the humor and politics of aesthetic transgression. It is intended not as a critique of Gerlofs’ work but rather to generate additional discussion about his approach to examining humor and aesthetics, and with the hope of additional discussion and debate about how to study humor in human geography. I also ask, does humor need to be serious to be taken seriously as a category of analysis? Can we view humor's dynamism and incongruities as an opportunity to push against and beyond binaries and categorizations? Does humor in its enactment challenge the very idea of categorization or congruent analyses and shouldn’t that be something we celebrate rather than attempt to control and contain?