This is an interesting problem. Most sarcasm and jokes revolve around calling out our humanness, our fallibility, and seek to make light of our limitations. Only, humor today seems to also involve putting someone down as inferior to the joke teller’s superior world view. And therein lies the challenge: historically all “tribes” of humans have had preferences for their tribe with a strong bias against all other tribes.

When we attempt to undo this bias, often a form of a subconscious bias… it tends to trend our interactions towards very neutral tones towards one another. That can be useful for being inclusive. It feels very unhuman and as you say “dull”, though.

I wonder if there is a lesson here waiting to emerge about neutral language, emotional safety, and human experience/emotion? 🤔