The Role of political correctness in cases involving humor in brazilian courts

Abstract

It is not rare to find on social media complaints that political correctness is killing humor. Is it, really? The article, intending to bring an empirical answer to this question, had an initial hypothesis that decisions awarding damages to parties offended by humorous expressions would rely on such reasoning. Every Brazilian State Court of Appeals website was searched for humor-related words, “political correctness” and “political incorrectness”. Cases that were not related to humorous expression and damages were disregarded. However, the findings were counter-intuitive, as very few decisions explicitly mention political correctness as a ground for restricting humor. They are thoroughly analyzed and discussed, exemplifying the different approaches each one takes on this discussion: (i) political correctness as a part of the reasoning not explicitly acknowledged by the court; (ii) political correctness as an argument used by the parties; (iii) political correctness faced as something positive; (iv) political correctness negatively labelled as a source of undue restriction on freedom of speech. The article concludes that, maybe avoiding the controversies of such debate, courts tend to overlook it, even when the issue seems to play a relevant role in it.