I argue that an indirect and imaginative route through subversive humor offers a means to
raise consciousness about covert oppression and the mechanisms underlying it, reveal the errors
of those with power who complacently sustain systematic oppression, and even open those people
up to changing their minds. Subversive humor confronts serious matters, but in a playful manner
that fosters creative and critical thinking, and cultivates a desire and skill for recognizing
incongruities between our professed ideals and a reality that does not meet those standards.
Successful subversive wits create fictional scenarios that highlight such moral incongruities, but,
like philosophical thought experiments, they reveal a moral truth that also holds in the real world.
Such humor offers offers a means for those with privilege to see from the perspectives of marginalized people who, because they inhabit ambiguous spaces in between the dominant and subordinate spheres, are in an epistemically privileged position with
respect to matters of oppression. Subversive humorists open their audiences to the lived
experiences of others, uncover the absurdities of otherwise covert oppression, and appeal to our
desire to be truthful and just.