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The sentence arrives about a second and a half after the remark, and it is always delivered lightly: I'm only joking.
Notice where it sits. It doesn't withdraw what was said — it leaves the remark exactly where it is and changes what you're allowed to do about it.
Michael Comyn on deniable aggression: why a thirteenth-century West African institution got the rules right, what a linguist in Harlem discovered about the one thing a ritual insult is never allowed to be, and why the person doing the teasing and the person being teased are not in the same joke.
