Making fun of things is actually really easy if you try even a little bit. Nearly anything can be made fun of, and in practice nearly anything is made fun of. This is concerning for several reasons.
First, if you are trying to do something, whether or not people are making fun of it is not necessarily a good signal as to whether or not it's actually good. A lot of good things get made fun of. A lot of bad things get made fun of. Thus, whether or not something gets made fun of is not necessarily a good indicator of whether or not it's actually good.[1] Optimally, only bad things would get made fun of, making it easy to determine what is good and bad - but this doesn't appear to be the case.
Second, if you want to make something sound bad, it's really easy. If you don't believe this, just take a politician or organization that you like and search for some criticism of it. It should generally be trivial to find people that are making fun of it for reasons that would sound compelling to a casual observer - even if those reasons aren't actually good. But a casual observer doesn't know that and thus can easily be fooled.[2]
Further, the fact that it's easy to make fun of things makes it so that a clever person can find themselves unnecessarily contemptuous of anything and everything. This sort of premature cynicism tends to be a failure mode I've noticed in many otherwise very intelligent people. Finding faults with things is pretty trivial, but you can quickly go from "it's easy to find faults with everything" to "everything is bad." This tends to be an undesirable mode of thinking - even if true, it's not particularly helpful.
[1] Whether or not something gets made fun of by the right people is a better indicator. That said, if you know who the right people are you usually have access to much more reliable methods.
[2] If you're still not convinced, take a politician or organization that you do like and really truly try to write an argument against that politician or organization. Note that this might actually change your opinion, so be warned.
This example pushed me into formulating Crowe's Law of Sarcastic Dismissal: Any explanation that is subtle enough to be correct is turbid enough to make its sarcastic dismissal genuinely funny.
Skinner had a subtle point to make, that the important objection to mentalism is of a very different sort. The world of the mind steals the show. Behaviour is not recognized as a subject in its own right.
I think I grasped Skinner's point after reading something Feynman wrote on explanations in science. You can explain why green paint is green by explaining that paint consists of a binder (oil for an oil paint) and a pigment. Green paint is green because the pigment is green. But why is the pigment green? Eventually the concept of green must ground in something non-green, wavelengths of light, properties of molecules.
It is similar with people. One sophisticated way of having an inner man without an infinite regress is exhibited by Minsky's Society of Mind. One can explain the outer man in terms of a committee of inner men provided that the inner men, sitting on the committee, are simpler than the outer man they purport to explain. And the inner men can be explained in terms of interior-inner-men, who are simpler still and whom we explain in terms of component-interior-inner-men,... We had better have remember that 1+1/2+1/3+1/4+1/5+1/6+... diverges. It is not quite enough that the inner men be simpler. They have to get simpler fast enough. Then our explanatory framework is philosophically admissible.
But notice the anachronism that I am committing. Skinner retired in 1974. Society of Mind was published in 1988. Worse yet, the perspective of Society of Mind comes from functional programming, where tree structured data is processed by recursive functions. Does your recursive function terminate? Programmers learn that an infinite regress is avoided if all the recursive calls are on sub-structures of the original structure, smaller by a measure which makes the structures well-founded. In the 1930's and 1940's Skinner was trying to rescue psychology from the infinite regress of man explained by an inner man, himself a man. It is not reasonable to ask him to anticipate Minsky by 50 years.
Skinner is trying to wake psychology from its complacent slumber. The inner man explains the outer man. The explanation does indeed account for the outer man. The flaw is that inner man is no easier to explain than the outer man.
We could instead look at behaviour. The outer man has behaved before. What happened last time? If the outer man does something unexpected we could look back. If the usual behaviour worked out badly the time before, that offers an explanation of sorts for the change. There is much to be done. For example, if some behaviour works ten times in a row, how many more times will it be repeated after it has stopped working? We already know that the inner man is complicated and hence under-determined by our experimental observations. This argues for caution and delay in admitting him to our explanations. We cannot hope to deduce his character until we have observed a great deal of his behaviour.
But let us return to humour and the tragedy of Sidney Morgenbesser's sarcastic dismissal
The tragedy lies in the acuteness of Morgenbesser's insight. He grasped Skinner's subtle point. Skinner argues that anthropomorphizing people is a trap; do that an your are stuck with folk psychology and have no way to move beyond it. But Morgenbesser makes a joke out of it.
I accept that the joke is genuinely funny. It is surely a mistake for biologists to anthropomorphize cats and dogs and other animals, precisely because they are not people. So there is a template to fill in. "It is surely a mistake for psychologists to anthropomorphize men and women and other humans, precisely because they are not people." Hilarity ensues.
Morgenbesser understands, makes a joke, and loses his understanding somewhere in the laughter. The joke is funny and sucks every-one into the loss of understanding.
Dennett's heterophenomenology seems to offer some of the good points of Skinner's behaviorism without a lot of the bad points.
Heterophenomenology notices that people's behavior includes making descriptions of their conscious mental states: they emit sentences like "I think X" or "I notice Y". It takes these behaviors as being as worthy of explanation as other behaviors, and considers that there might actually exist meaningful mental states being described. This is just what behaviorism dismisses.