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makes it easy for us to understand that she believes many professors deserve to “flag and sink.” Although she does not say so explicitly, we can infer that she would take pleasure in a “hotshot” professor’s failure to receive academic tenure (which is a permanent contract of employment that may follow six years of hard work as a junior faculty member and at least as many years as a graduate student). It is safe to conclude on the basis of this lengthy essay that Paglia takes a harsh view of what “hotshot” professors deserve.
    Anger or jealousy can lead to self-deception and complicate the work of assessing what others deserve. Self-interest generates self-deception remarkably well. Jealousy is especially likely to generate false beliefs about its objects and, consequently, to provide motives for concluding that the suffering of another is condign (such rationalizations abound in war). Schadenfreude , like admiration, pride, and shame, is an emotion properly thought of in terms of the apportioning of credit and debt. The most slippery component of Schadenfreude is the value judgment regarding the suffering of another person.  Schadenfreude ’s moral status will not be solved simply by reference to desert, for questionable values shape what people think we deserve.
    4.        The import of the object of  Schadenfreude
    Unlike pain, emotions have objects; we are afraid  of  something, angry  with  someone, ashamed  that  we have acted improperly. We can always point to  some  instance of suffering or misfortune as the source of  Schadenfreude . Reflecting on the just deserts of someone who supposedly needed to “learn a lesson,” we try to classify the kind of suffering that has beset him—not just the extent to which he suffers, but the way in which he suffers. Suffering because we failed to make the Olympic team differs from suffering because a parent has been murdered.
    The psychological portrait he offers us of himself in  Brief an den Vater  allows us to infer that Kafka’s pleasure at Elli’s suffering would have turned to pain at the moment he judged that suffering excessive or inappropriate. His Schadenfreude is a reaction to what he considers minor suffering. Though any attempt to distinguish terrible from minor suffering definitively would doubtless be futile, we may reasonably expect consensus about some particular instances of suffering. An understanding of Schadenfreude which fails to take into account the variability of suffering will only confuse moral discourse.
    A sense of lesser and greater pervades our moral deliberations. The particular belief which evaluates this greater or lesser is conceptually necessary, that is to say constitutive of, the resultant emotion. At the same time, it is construed as causally effective in the production of the emotion itself. Moral evaluation should compel us to look not only to the disposition of the person who delights in the suffering of another but also to the kind of suffering he enjoys.
    The disposition of Kafka’s father, if Kafka is to be trusted here, merits blame. That said, it can hardly be denied that a good deal of comedy deserves just as much blame. Twenty years after his influential work  Jokes   and Their Relation to the Unconscious  (1905) appeared, Freud published a short essay entitled “Humor” (1927), in which he differentiated jokes from humor. The aim of jokes, he argued, was sheer gratification, a kind of mental victory. In jokes the mind manages to find or appreciate the hidden similarity among dissimilar things. The aim of humor, on the other hand, was to evade or lessen suffering. The Kafka family suffered from a lack of harmony, to put it nicely. Elli the scapegoat brought them closer together, albeit against her will. Humor in the Kafka family came at too high a price. That is not to say that all humor does, though.
    We can tell a lot about a person from what he or she finds funny. Kafka did not try to