It most certainly isn't a universal argument against all humour. It's an argument against laughing at people (in case it isn't clear, btw, what's mostly in view here is laughing at people in their presence) but that's very far from being all humour.
Well look at the effect of the campus PC on campus comedy.
I cannot recall a single instance in which I, or anyone else known to me, formed a bad opinion of a corporate representative because they didn't laugh at someone else.
Can you recall all the exact reasons for your exact opinion level about any corporate representative, or anyone for that matter? Or, as seems likely, is that statement pure bullshit in Frankfut's sense?
look at the effect of the campus PC on campus comedy
So you've completely changed the subject: originally you claimed that "we should generally not laugh at other people in their presence because they'll dislike it more than we like it" is a universal argument against all humour, and now you're saying that "campus PC" has made some comedians not want to perform at universities.
Can you recall all the exact reasons [...]
Nope. But I can, e.g., be pretty confident that my opinions about corporate representatives were never the result ...
There are some long lists of false beliefs that programmers hold. isn't because programmers are especially likely to be more wrong than anyone else, it's just that programming offers a better opportunity than most people get to find out how incomplete their model of the world is.
I'm posting about this here, not just because this information has a decent chance of being both entertaining and useful, but because LWers try to figure things out from relatively simple principles-- who knows what simplifying assumptions might be tripping us up?
The classic (and I think the first) was about names. There have been a few more lists created since then.
Time. And time zones. Crowd-sourced time errors.
Addresses. Possibly more about addresses. I haven't compared the lists.
Gender. This is so short I assume it's seriously incomplete.
Networks. Weirdly, there is no list of falsehoods programmers believe about html (or at least a fast search didn't turn anything up). Don't trust the words in the url.
Distributed computing Build systems.
Poem about character conversion.
I got started on the subject because of this about testing your code, which was posted by Andrew Ducker.