Enforced joking punishes serious position-taking, especially among women.

Evidence

Anyone who appeared to be taking a stand was ripe for a pruning down to size, and the pruning had to be a quip of no more than one or two lines. … Trying to speak seriously was called ‘‘getting on a high horse’’; that is, pedantically reciting facts and opinions in a monologue. People — again, women especially — who did this violated the rule of enforced joking and were not very popular. — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics, 826

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘enforced joking’ norm parallels gender analysis of who gets to speak seriously — connects to the immodesty moral-panic article’s theme of norms policing who may claim public voice. — connects to: Joking sequences deliberately extinguish any serious topic raised in working-class groups — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 1932
• BMF: Women silenced for ‘lecturing’ when men joke echoes how women’s serious speech is policed in Jane Eyre’s world when Jane asserts herself against Rochester’s playful authority — though the match is thematic rather than a specific oblique device.