PREVIEW-Episode 57: Henri Bergson on Humor

0:00 Jennifer: This show is going to be an hour and a half wearing a toga, talking about selling her eggs for money. They are my people.

0:14 Mark: You're listening to Partially Examined Life. Actually, Bergson thinks that apparently robots are the funniest goddamn thing in the world. So I. You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who at one point set out to do philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 57 is what is humor? And Henri Bergson's An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic from 1900. You can join the discussion, get the text, and read loads of supplemental material@harshlyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer talking to you from Madison, Wisconsin.

0:46 Seth: This is Seth Paskin in Austin, Texas.

0:49 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Boston, Massachusetts.

0:51 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:55 Jennifer: And that's a catch. This is Jennifer Desura in New York,

1:00 Wes: New York City, New York, New York.

1:03 Jennifer: New York, New York. It goes without saying, I am in my 25th floor aerie, overlooking the stock

1:08 Mark: exchange, the capital of the goddamn world.

1:10 Wes: Oh, really?

1:11 Seth: Yeah.

1:11 Wes: What street are you on?

1:12 Jennifer: I'm on exchange. Oh, yeah.

1:14 Wes: I used to work down there in that area of town and live in New York.

1:17 Jennifer: All right.

1:18 Mark: Did you also use it as a home base for your standup comedy outings, Wes?

1:23 Wes: Absolutely. Yeah. That was a different life. No one came to see me.

1:27 Seth: But, oh, Jennifer, how do you say your last name?

1:30 Jennifer: It's Desura. That is not how the Poles say it, but my family has long since Anglicized.

1:34 Mark: Okay, now I was thinking that we need to have some custom rules for this episode. Discussion rules. And one of them I was thinking that. So last time we had a guy named Philosophy Bro, and that is not his real name, but he wanted to be Anonymous. So I was thinking we should make the pronunciation of your name anonymous. So I'll edit out whenever we actually pronounce your name.

1:54 Jennifer: Wow.

1:55 Mark: So it's D Z I, U R A. But no one will ever hear it except for that first time when you said it. And I'm sure the listeners all go back and forget that.

2:04 Jennifer: It's like I'm the Hebrew God. Essentially, yes.

2:10 Mark: Is that a good rule?

2:11 Jennifer: Oh, sure, absolutely.

2:13 Mark: We can call you Jen. We can call you Jennifer. Jenny, she who could not be named any of those.

2:18 Jennifer: Sure, sure. No, that works for me. That's fine. I do have a rule for spelling it. People mess that up a lot, so I like to remind them that the classic rule, it's U before I Except after Z. Oh, good,

2:32 Wes: that'll be useful.

2:33 Mark: All right, the other rules that I had come up with, see if you think these are workable. No references to 70s commercials. I know that's a humor staple, but if we ask you questions, you can't just say, like butter repeatedly or something like that. That is out.

2:46 Dylan: No Oscar Mayer jokes.

2:48 Seth: Wait, are these rules for all of us?

2:50 Mark: There are rules for all of us. If we disobey, then there will be consequences.

2:54 Jennifer: There won't be consequences. Actually, there will be no consequences. I feel fairly convinced of that.

2:59 Mark: The second one is no mouth drums. So if you say something that you think is funny, you can't then go ba doom cha or something like that. You can't none of that. Maybe you could do mouth drums if someone else is rapping, but not otherwise.

3:10 Jennifer: I don't think they call it mouth drums in that case. But that's cool.

3:13 Mark: I would agree.

3:15 Jennifer: That would be beatboxing. Just saying.

3:17 Mark: Mouth drums.

3:18 Jennifer: So mouth drums are no good, but beatboxing is acceptable with accompaniment?

3:22 Mark: Yes, if it is relevant to the context of what you're saying.

3:26 Jennifer: Beatboxing is relevant to the context. I will do only apropos beatboxing.

3:33 Mark: The third one, which actually I was in danger of violating, but then I changed my mind, is no puppets. So they don't work on audio.

3:41 Seth: Probably.

3:41 Mark: You'll just end up putting the puppet next to the mic, and then your mouth will be like two feet to the left. And it does not bode well.

3:47 Wes: We will be talking about serious puppetry, though, so don't worry.

3:49 Dylan: Yes, Marionettes.

3:52 Mark: All right.

3:52 Jennifer: Bergson said there's no such thing as low puppetry. It's all high puppetry.

3:59 Mark: And that's all I had. So, any questions? Have you ever listened to the podcast? Do you know what this is? I'm asking you, Wes. No, I'm.

4:08 Wes: What's the name of it again?

4:09 Dylan: What about the regular rules?

4:11 Mark: We don't need the regular rules. The regular rules are for sucks. There are no sucks on the podcast tonight.

4:16 Wes: We've become too cool for the rules.

4:18 Dylan: Okay.

4:18 Wes: Which means we should be laughed at.

4:20 Mark: Yes. So our. Did the announcement work? Did the intro work? Are robots in fact the funniest goddamn thing on earth? And actually talking like a robot. Not actual robots, people sounding like robots. That would, according to Henri Bergson's theory that we are going to spend the entire time discussing robots would be the funniest fucking thing you've ever heard in your life.

4:40 Dylan: That's because they're mechanical.

4:42 Mark: Yes, right there.

4:43 Seth: Truly Is nothing funnier than a mime,

4:46 Mark: A robot mime, shields in your.

4:49 Dylan: Now, the mimes are interesting because I've seen mimes that were actually kind of tragic. But that might be a totally separate discuss.

4:57 Mark: Don't you think instead of giving a nice overview of his theory, we should just refer to it kind of in passing and rip it down for an hour?

5:04 Wes: I actually love this reading, by the way, So Mark, I'm getting a different sentiment from you.

5:09 Mark: Oh, no, I actually enjoyed it plenty. Although I heard that Seth did not really. So why don't you start, Seth?

5:15 Seth: I mean, why don't I start?

5:16 Wes: Let's give the overview.

5:18 Dylan: Let's start and give the summary.

5:20 Mark: Well, maybe Jen wants to start. She's the guest.

5:23 Seth: Why don't we do what we do with all of our guests, which is get a little information about them.

5:27 Wes: That would be polite.

5:28 Seth: Why don't we stop talking about Jen in the third person and using them and they to refer to her.

5:33 Jennifer: We're having an I and thou situation.

5:36 Mark: I thought that that was the rule, is that we're not actually allowed to address the guest. I thought that was the.

5:41 Seth: Jen, welcome to the podcast. Tell us about yourself and why you're here.

5:45 Jennifer: Thank you. As to why I'm here, you'll have to enlighten everyone as to what the internal process was that led to my invitation. I'm not sure what I've done that merits it, but my story starts when I decided to major in philosophy at Dartmouth. And I think that my idea of philosophy up to that point had been sort of combative. I had been a high school debate champion, so philosophy was something you would do in 30 second increments as a weapon. And then I got to Dartmouth. I did four years of philosophy mostly because it was the easiest thing for me to do.

It was just sort of a no brainer. I said, my God, I can just read these books and write papers about them, no problem. And so four years later, you know, I graduate and I'm running a dot com. And I discovered that whenever I would talk to, for instance, my accountant, people would say things like, wow, philosophy. And they would assume that I knew the meaning of life or had spent a lot of time talking about the meaning of life. They would then often bring up sort of new age authors that they had read who had some things to say about the meaning of life.

And I thought it was really interesting because I felt like what I sort of brought to the table from philosophy, if anything, was just a sort of ability to arrange my Thoughts in a linear manner and realize that other people's thoughts are almost never arranged in a linear manner and to proceed accordingly. After my company failed, I started doing comedy as you do. And I have a show now called what Philosophy Majors Do After College. And it's a show where I do the history of philosophy melded with my personal story of having a lot of very strange jobs.

After majoring in philosophy and that show, I take it around to colleges around the country and book festivals, librarian parties,

7:22 Mark: things like that, and perform at the pit.

7:25 Jennifer: Sure, I occasionally do some shows.

7:26 Mark: I'm looking at your nest.

7:27 Jennifer: Yeah, I occasionally do some shows in New York, but I also go around to again, libraries, book festivals, colleges, things like that. And, you know, try to convince the young people that education is hilarious. That's pretty much it. It's basically I just share Wikipedia from the stage with punchlines while wearing a costume.

7:45 Seth: You actually do wear the toga.

7:46 Jennifer: I do wear a toga, Yep, pretty much. And that's a silence. That's silence right there.

7:53 Mark: No, no. Silences mean we're waiting for each other to be able to talk. We're being polite. That's what silences mean.

8:00 Jennifer: Gorjon, you mentioned being polite. And I think that one of the things that I get out of doing philosophy based comedy is that everyone who shows up to a show about philosophy or my other shows, I have a show about punctuation as well. Everyone who comes to educational comedy show or sort of a nerdy comedy extravaganza is very polite. No one ever heckles me. And afterwards there's a sort of a polite golf clap. And then people go out to the bar and they drink moderately and they discuss things briefly and then they go home also quietly. So that's. That's my people. That's what I'm saying.

8:36 Dylan: Do you crave hecklers, Jennifer?

8:38 Jennifer: No. And actually I think that the idea that, like, stand up comedy is only valid if you can stand up to hecklers. And that part of the value of comedy is this combativeness and sort of shutting people down. You know, I don't go to your job and knock the dicks out of your mouth. I don't like that stuff and I don't see the point. And there's no other art form where you feel like the art is only valuable if it is produced under duress. No one ever says that painting's no good because no one was yelling at the guy while he painted it. That's ridiculous. So I think that standing on stage and talking and saying Things that are funny is not made inherently more valuable by having a hostile audience in front of it. I like polite comedy. I believe in it.

9:16 Mark: I think the hostile audience is supposed to be the inner voice. For most artists, you're constantly berating yourself as you're doing art.

9:24 Seth: I listen to some comedy podcasts, and the comics are always complaining, not so much about the hecklers, but about getting their audience, that when you go into a show someplace where the people are just showing up because it's Friday night and this is the comedy show, so they don't get what I'm about. The comedians get excited when they build up enough so that the people that show up to their show actually already know their shtick and. Right.

9:45 Jennifer: And I've avoided that entirely, and I've solved that problem for myself by just being really clear that this is gonna be nerdy as hell. And for instance, if you come to a show that I do about punctuation and you do not already know how semicolons work, you're not even gonna enjoy it. There's sort of a pre qualification stage.

10:01 Seth: Would you do something like that in an open mic? Never.

10:04 Wes: Never.

10:05 Jennifer: In 2007, I actually went to the Middle east to entertain the troops. And I discovered while I was there, you know, the troops, they don't care about comedy. They just want women to visit them. Really. Just any women they would like to be visited. It was true. I was told before I left the Armed Forces Entertainment, which is a division of the Pentagon, said, no politics, no sex jokes. They were really specific. So I came up with all these ways to get around it. I had all these jokes like, what do you guys think about the surge? And then there'd be an awkward silence.

And I would say, that drink's better than Mountain Dew. No, I had tons of stuff like that, right? And I get to the Middle east, you know, I'm on some military base in the middle of Kuwait, and there's just sand being blown in your face. It's 120 degrees. I'm aging before everyone's eyes in the heat. And the first thing that somebody says to me, you know, somebody walks out, shakes our hands, and the first thing that somebody says to me is, we hope you got some sex jokes, because that's all these guys care about. And I remember being at one point, I'm on a stage in Kuwait.

Kuwait is a dry country. And that includes on our military bases, there are several hundred armed men, almost all men. They are sitting at picnic tables on folding chairs in the desert. I'M on an outdoor stage, there's no alcohol, and they all have to hold their guns on a lot of a sort of transitional basis. There's nowhere to put your gun. You're only there for a few days. You have to keep it on your person at all times. So I've got this audience of sober, armed people. And, you know, it went fine. They were happy to be visited, but. But I kind of felt like, all right, I'm gonna dredge up every sex joke I have and maybe some jokes that make me look dumb.

Those are seeming to go over pretty well. You know, any joke about, oh, look, I got my eyebrow makeup wrong, and it looks like I'm quizzical all the time. That's a hilarious joke. It's not really. So I felt that I was really kind of dredging to get some material that would work. And after that was done, I said, you know, this isn't serving anyone. Me trying to do stand up, stand up. Just some straight up jokes for people who don't want to see specifically what I have to offer. It's not serving them, it's not serving me. And I was glad that I did the job and I was happy to support the troops, but there are other people who are better at that.

And I like to just say, this show is going to be an hour and a half of a woman wearing a toga and showing slides about philosophy and then talking about selling her eggs for money. And it's all going to work together somehow, but you'll just have to show up. And the people who bother to show up to that. I'm not saying it's a large number of people, but they are my people and that's what I do.

12:27 Wes: Awesome.

12:28 Mark: I might have to cut that out and use that as the permanent intro to our show. This is an hour and a half and a toga selling egg to our people.

12:37 Jennifer: That's it. Just a few ellipses. That's all anyone needs.

12:40 Mark: Exactly. That's the power of editing. And I can make that into one sentence. So now you are a celebrity introducer forevermore.

12:47 Jennifer: Wonderful.

12:48 Mark: Until we get Lucy Lawless to record something and then we'll erase it.

12:51 Jennifer: Until then, I understand

12:54 Mark: you were recommended to us by somebody on our Facebook page, one of our listeners. I had been detailing some of my attempts to contact celebrities to get them to come on the show. So actually, I did want to do this episode for a long time. But as soon as we figured out that we were having guests sometimes, then this became one of those that yes, let's try to get somebody famous to come on and talk with us. And then I saw when this person recommended you not only that you had this philosophy specific shtick, which is awesome, but that your website is actually called jennisfamous.com so, you know, that was a

13:26 Jennifer: youthful moment of hubris. It was.

13:30 Mark: No, it's self fulfilling prophecy.

13:32 Jennifer: Okay, all right. Well, I'm a little embarrassed by that now, but Desura is really hard to spell, so it stuck.

13:38 Mark: It's too bad the audience couldn't hear you say. You said smegma is pretty hard to spell. Why would you say that? I don't understand that. I've lately been lording my editing powers over the other guys.

13:55 Seth: Yes, he has.

13:57 Mark: It's a Nietzsche slave morality thing.

13:59 Seth: It's the latest in a long line of lording things that Mark has been doing.

14:04 Dylan: I can tell that Mark has been craving the comedy podcast for a long time. He's been building up material for months and months.

14:14 Mark: I had planned for a while just to surprise you all with the chicky pupp. And just after the last person would introduce themselves, then I would say hello, just hi, chicky. And then I would use the puppet as an alternate ego through the whole thing. But you are saved that embarrassment because I didn't want to upstage Jen.

14:29 Jennifer: I appreciate that.

14:30 Seth: We also had a pretty strident conversation about the use of funny voices after the last.

14:36 Mark: That was what I was thinking about that.

14:37 Seth: Yes.

14:39 Mark: Would somebody like to give the short summary of what Mr. Bergson had to say?

14:46 Seth: Actually, the first thing I'd like to get clear on is what exactly are we talking about tonight? Are we talking about laughter? Are we talking about what's funny? Are we talking about the philosophical anatomy of jokes?

15:00 Dylan: Well, should we talk about his book and then see where that goes from there? I mean, he calls it laughter and the meaning of the comic. And I think it's not clear that it's about any of those things.

15:10 Wes: I have a very short summary and then someone can add to that if they like. The basic idea is that laughter is a reaction to the perception that there's something mechanical or rigid encrusted upon the living. To quote it directly. I like that word encrusted there. So life is something elastic or plastic and continuous. And occasionally you get these eruptions of rigidity. And that's where Bergson thinks the comic comes in. And that's important because society requires this sort of adaptability and elasticity in us. We have to conform to some extent to the rules.

And the comic character is the one who's kind of clueless to those rules and to themselves. And laughter is a kind of corrective that's aimed at this comic character. Basically you're humiliating someone into conformity, which is an interesting part of the theory. But so this idea of rigidity or something mechanical, foisting itself upon life and society, which when they're functioning best, are adapt and elastic, that's where things become funny. And so then he goes through all the different areas, so form and gesture, situations and words. And then finally character in the last chapter sort of spelling out how that rigidity plays out.

So that's my short summary.

16:32 Dylan: We should probably say a little bit about Bergson himself. He's not exactly a household name anymore, but he was back in the day, early 20th century.

16:40 Seth: Yes.

16:41 Dylan: He was a big friend of James, later in James life.

16:45 Wes: James comma William.

16:47 Dylan: James comma William, yeah. Not James comma Henry or James comma Jesse. And he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was also had a fan in Whitehead and uncertain critic in Russell. And there are lots of prominent 20th century philosophers who might not have agreed with him, but took the time to disagree with him. And the list is pretty long.

17:10 Mark: Well, and he was a direct influence on Husserl and Heidegger and Sartre. In his book the Imagination that I'd read like a good chunk of it is him responding to Bergson. But his whole take on experience as non atomic, that time is this continuous thing that you can't really cut up without falsifying it. That was a direct influence on Husserl's examination of experience and Heidegger's notion of sort of subjective time versus objective time. That what time is is not this thing that you're measuring on a clock that you're cutting into pieces, but is this, you know, durations differ depending on who you are and what you're doing and just this overall organic take on life.

He did also lecture on Heraclitus, I read that was where his process philosophy thing came from. And he was direct influence on Whitehead as far as that goes. Right. And we see that in here, that just what Wes was saying about the natural state of the human being, this flexible organic thing and not mechanized, and that being the key to survival. And in fact, one of his famous books was called Creative Evolution, which was a take on Darwin, but emphasized the dynamism of our adaptability.

18:22 Dylan: So maybe a good place for me at least to try to talk about is understanding this business about mechanism and rigidity and what he's contrasting it with, he includes an analysis of tragedy in this. And the issue of this rigidity has to do with a kind of averaging that comedy does. He talks at the end about comedy being like the natural sciences because of this.

18:45 Wes: Well, we start out with this kind of counterintuitive talk of there being an absence of feeling or emotion, that you're in the position of a disinterested spectator when you're laughing.

18:54 Dylan: In fact, you can't have any emotion at all in comedy. Comedy is not about emotion at all. In fact, sentiment will destroy comedy.

19:01 Wes: Right. It immediately turns it to the dramatic and the tragic. When you get sentiment involved or when you get empathy, let's say, with the character on stage and you start feeling what they're feeling, then it's over, there's no more laughing.

19:13 Dylan: Any kind of fellow feeling at all.

19:14 Jennifer: Yeah, that's sort of a strange thing to say in the sense that, well, the classic rule of thumb of any type of stand up is that, you know, if you're trying to say something that's too weird, you know, the funny story you tell at a party, that something strange that happened to you doesn't work on stage because in comedy you need to talk about things that everyone relates to and that is a feeling. I think we're sometimes really biased when we say what's a feeling and what's not a feeling. Feeling. No, like the sort of feeling of being simpatico. Affinity. Affinity is a feeling. I wouldn't call it, you know, maybe empathy's a little too severe. But this feeling of you've had that experience before, we're all fellow humans, that's absolutely a feeling. And it underlies, I think most comedy.

19:52 Wes: Yeah, he actually talks about that at the end. You're right. There's that idea that we actually sympathize in some way with the comic character. And then he makes this weird comment that we do it more with our body than with our mind. That's in the very last part of the last chapter. But he sort of makes it out to be this two part process where we sort of in the first moment we enter into the sympathy with the comic character and we get very relaxed. We relax ourselves from any obedience to common sense. Right. We sort of enter into their little absurd dream world and then we immediately react against that with laughter, which is almost like a kind of rejection saying, haha, you know, so under Bergson's theory, it's we're always laughing at someone.

Maybe not in the case of stand up comedy at the comedian in particular. But there's always someone or something that's being laughed at, which is a sort of rejection of the sympathetic moment when

20:41 Jennifer: Bergson starts talking about the idea of relaxation. In the end, there was this idea that, yes, there's sympathy, but that the sympathy is necessarily fleeting. Which, to me, that's the sort of thing where maybe that's a question for neuroscience rather than for philosophy. We could see what parts of people's brains light up and for how long. But I did think that that was an interesting take on, yes, there's this flash of genuine emotion, but only a flash, and then the humor actually happens.

21:05 Mark: What he's trying to do is sort of look at the internal logic of what is funny. And you could say, well, maybe there is no internal logic. Maybe there are lots of different kinds of things that are funny. And there's no unifying theory that you could put forth that will cover all the cases. What unifies it is something biological, laughter itself. There has to be some affinity between humor and tickling. Say they both use laughter. There must be some common source there. Now, that doesn't mean there's just nothing at all to say about sort of what the surface level logic of humor is, but that we're not going to get the whole thing.

In fact, that he uses throughout the book to reject other theories, he says, like, you might think humor is just discordant ideas, but think about these couple discordant ideas. That's not funny at all. But yet I had the same reaction when looking at his. You know, he says that when a person imitates something mechanical, like my robot voice, that's gonna be goddamn funny. And I'm like, well, it'll be funny if it's delivered properly. And if it, you know, if all these other things are in a row, the idea in itself is not funny. I want to take his same rhetorical thing he uses against every other theory and use it against him and say, maybe there is no unifying theory that will capture all the comic at all.

22:21 Dylan: But the reason why the robot would be funny is never in itself because the rigidity that he's talking about, the mechanism, is always in contrast to activity and a specific kind of activity, the activity of life, as loosey goosey as that is, that's the contrast he's talking about. And ultimately, that's a kind of individuality, that the rigidity of things that are funny for Bergson has to do with them repeating and forgetting what the actual living thing is. And it's not Clear to me exactly why that's funny. I mean it seemed like more an observation on his part, an analysis of the phenomena, kind of phenomenology. The rigidity is in contrast to something. It's not like the robot is in itself funny because there's probably. For Bergson. There's nothing in itself for Bergson.

23:08 Wes: Yeah. And it's not like anything mechanical is funny. And he does give a lot of different rules, you know, for what makes something funny. I mean, I think he tries to refine it. He's not just saying, yes, anything that's mechanical is going to be funny.

23:20 Mark: Well, no, but if a person acts mechanical, that's supposed to be funny. Now I can immediately think of some context like if you're actually making a joke about the task you're doing being so mechanical. So let's say everybody that works at a bank decides that their jobs are so dehumanizing that they're just going to talk to the customers like robots, like their ATMs. Maybe that could be funny for a little bit. But that's a comment.

23:43 Wes: Yeah, but it's not just that you are imitating something mechanical or that you're talking about the mechanics or anything like that. It's that basically there's that element of absentmindedness where there's some sort of rule, especially a social rule. I mean ultimately this all comes down to the social. The more primal stuff that he's talking about with gestures and forms which we'll talk about really in the end will all come back to the social. So the idea is that there's these rules that we know we ought to be obeying and the comic character lacks the awareness of himself and others and societal rules to actually obey them. And that rigidity and the mechanical part of it is a byproduct of that.

24:23 Dylan: And interestingly it's that the comic character would be both a misunderstanding in sort of misapplying the rules or kind of have a rigidity with respect to the living nature of the social. But also they would have an over application of the rule. So you have both those cases going on in which they weren't responding, they were acting like a robot, the way Mark is talking about that they were being themselves rigid and not lifelike. But both those things are going on

24:51 Wes: for like the example of the customs officer who in going out to save people who are drowning from a ship and asking them do they have anything to declare. Right. So where the ceremonial and rule based element of society takes over to the point where it becomes a cookie cutter mechanical application.

25:08 Dylan: Just as a contrast, there is a time when this kind of rigidity is actually the sign of nobility, where you are actually preserving something in the face of nature. And the perfect example would be the guys playing the music on the Titanic until it goes down with a ship. And that's not funny. That's noble, right?

25:28 Wes: And actually he talks a lot about Don Quixote, right? Who is sort of a borderline case. You're meant to wonder whether he's simply laughably rigid or a noble rebel.

25:37 Dylan: And you end up laughing and crying with him at the same time. At the very end of this book, he talks about the way in which there's a kind of root of evil in comedy. And this would go back to the humiliation and the treating people not as individuals, but as averages and aggregates and having the dissociation from them as individuals. And Bergson mentions this scene from Don Quixote, which, if you've. In the middle of it, he has this big adventure where he is a guest of these nobles and they take him in and talk to him, treating him as sort of playing his game, but wink, wink, nudge, nudging with themselves.

So they bring him in and knowing that he's sort of crazy and thinking of him as crazy, but treat him superficially as if he's this great knight. And in the book, he sort of buys it, but they do this in order to constantly humiliate him and give him tasks to prove his knighthood in order to make fun of him. And the whole section of that book is incredibly painful. If you have any kind of sympathy at all for Don Quixote and the fact that he's being utterly humiliated over and over and over again, it's not at all clear that if, as a reader, you're supposed to find it funny or why they are finding it funny.

And there's a clearly a kind of cruelty going on in it.

26:58 Jennifer: So this story about Don Quixote and whether he is supposed to be a comic figure, this just strikes me as one of those things where that's just highly dependent on time and culture. And I think that might be a nice place to seg into talking about Bergson, discussions of disabled people and all kinds of other things that we don't really find that funny.

27:16 Wes: Now, unless you're watching Ricky Gervais or

27:20 Dylan: is it the Coen Brothers movie?

27:21 Wes: Farrelly Brothers, maybe.

27:22 Dylan: Farrelly Brothers, they have the whole co Joined Twins movie, right?

27:27 Mark: Yes.

27:27 Jennifer: Okay.

27:27 Mark: Stuck on you or something.

27:29 Dylan: Yeah, it's very funny.

27:31 Jennifer: I Missed that.

27:32 Wes: I like the title.

27:33 Dylan: It's very funny and very endearing. It's a brother movie. Greg Kinnear and Matt Damon are co joined twins who work in a diner. And they have this special way of being incredibly fast with flipping hamburgers.

27:45 Jennifer: Well, it's also sort of funny that they would be conjoined twins who aren't identical. I'm not sure that that's a disability that we're laughing at, such as a physical impossibility. I saw a martial arts movie that had male, female conjoined twins, which also cannot exist. That's not a thing. You have to just stitch some children together at birth to make that it's not an act of nature. And so that's sort of funny, but I just don't think it's the same kind of thing as laughing at a deformity. And so to get back to Don Quixote, I mean, this idea that you're.

It's not even clear whether we're supposed to laugh at that story. And I think that's very culturally bound in the same way that when Bergson talks about why we laugh at some deformities and not others. I thought this was actually a little bit bizarre, this idea that obviously hunchbacks are hilarious. And I mean, that's. I don't know. I've never thought a hunchback was funny in real life. I mean, I'm aware that they exist in cartoons, but every hunchback I've seen in life, it just made me a little sad. A lot of them have been old ladies. And so in trying to develop an overarching theory of what kind of deformity is funny, I'm becoming more and more convinced that this theory of rigidity explains a lot more of comedy than when I first started reading.

When I started reading, I kind of said, wow, this is a stretch. And I'm getting a little more convinced. But on the issue of what kind of deformity is funny, what Bergson says is deformities that a normally built person could successfully, successfully imitate. You know, like, because we can pretend to limp, limping is funny. And because we can fake a hunchback, hunchbacks are hilarious. Which is kind of strange. I mean, I think that a penis growing out of your forehead is much funnier than a limp or a hunchback. Well, it's true.

29:14 Wes: And the reason. The reason why being able to be imitated is important is because it's as if it's a choice. So then that element of it being Due to something in the character. Rigidity or absentmindedness is important to finding it funny. At some level, we have to be able to blame the person. And so a deformity, of course, or a certain kind of deformity, like being a hunchback, isn't really in and of itself funny to a reasonable person who's thinking, yes, it's not a person's choice, but the idea is that at some unconscious level, through this strange logic of dreams that he talks about, we find things funny through this attribution of intention.

Even where there's not intention, it's unreasonable, it's unjustified, it's not just. But it happens. And that's the idea. And I think, of course, people have laughed at hunchbacks and they've laughed at all kinds of horrible things. You know, comedy is not always nice.

30:04 Dylan: It's exactly that business of choice. Why in Young Frankenstein, the fact that his hunchback moves.

30:10 Wes: I was going to mention that, too.

30:11 Dylan: The reason why that's funny is because. Well, it's, in Bergson's view, it's why it's funny is because it highlights this notion of he's pretending to be hunchback. At least that's what the implication is.

30:22 Wes: And it's also because it's sort of a. It's playing with the type, with the stereotype of Frankenstein's servant and Igor and all that. Bergson talks a little about this, about when something becomes a social meme like that, you get an added layer of comedy there. You're also making a reference to all those past uses of that comic type.

30:44 Dylan: So, Jennifer, would you say that due to cultural norms or something like that? When would deformity be funny?

30:53 Jennifer: You know, I have a hard time thinking of a deformity that would be funny. And I'm sure that if I'd been born 100 years earlier, I would feel different.

31:00 Dylan: Well, you said a penis growing on your forehead, that would be funny.

31:03 Jennifer: That's not a real deformity. A penis growing out of a forehead is a hilarious idea in a movie. I think if someone really had a penis growing out of their forehead, that's tragic. And I'm sure, I mean, we're laughing now, but their life would be ruined or they would just have it removed immediately. So it's a very fictional version of a deformity. Real life deformities are not that funny. Bergson also talks in several places about Negroes, as he says, or as the translator decided to say, and why people in Bergson's time like, to laugh at them, which obviously is terrible.

And so I think that this idea of rigidity, it just kind of breaks down in this example in the sense that people do just like to laugh at things that are different and surprising. And it's obviously very culturally bound. I'm reminded of a woman I know went to rural China. She's riding her bicycle through rural China in a place where a lot of people had not met a Caucasian person in person. Also, it's just sort of more acceptable to make fun of people on the street than it is in America. Like, if you just fall down off your bicycle, people will point and laugh in a way that we would try to hide, maybe.

And so this woman is telling me that on our trip through rural China, people would regularly just point at her and make this sort of beak gesture, like, look at this hilarious person's nose. Look at the white woman's nose, essentially. And sometimes they would actually make this sort of like, expanding their eyes gesture, you know, with their fingers, kind of look at your giant, stupid, big eyes. And you can see there are a lot of paintings in China from the era when Europeans were colonizing. Paint Europeans as quite hideous and beaked noses and huge, hideous bird eyes and very.

A lot of hair, like disgusting, big, stabby facial hair. Europeans come off looking like these gross, pale, veiny vultures. Things that are different are funny. And then as they become less different and less surprising, they're not funny anymore. Maybe it's the case that someone who didn't have the benefit of mass media when they saw a certain disability for the first time, they might think it's funny because it's just brand new. But once you've seen one hunchback, you've seen them all, and it's more sad than amusing.

33:02 Dylan: So in Bergson's theory, it turns from being comedy to being tragic. When you recognize the individual, when you begin to have sympathy or feeling for it. And what I hear you describing is exactly that happening. And so that when you turn that corner, it's no longer funny. That might be a cultural norm about when you can turn that corner and go from the aggregate to the individual, go from the other to the sympathetic. But it seems to be right in line, what he's saying.

33:30 Jennifer: No, I do agree with that. I mean, I think that when that moment of empathy or recognition happens and the comedy sort of dissipates, or you feel guilty at having laughed in the first place, since some of these examples would be appropriate. But I think that just in the Initial discussion of what makes it funny in the first place before that empathy happens and the comedy dissipates. What makes it funny in the first place? I think that there's a little bit of a stretch for the rigidity thesis here.

33:53 Dylan: So, being a professional comedienne, what makes something funny when you're thinking through your

33:58 Mark: show, or better yet, were the things you were reading about here, did some of them ring true or not?

34:02 Jennifer: Absolutely. I mean, of course some things rang true. And when I first started reading, my initial thought was, okay, you know, sometimes things are funny because they are too rigid. But that does not explain a lot of things like wordplay. As I continued to read, I think that I became a little more convinced that the rigidity thesis explained a lot more of comedy than I had initially thought. But I'm just not really sure that the reason that, you know, you would laugh at someone with a different facial structure than you is. I mean, I think that traditional notions of what makes something funny have to do with the element of surprise.

And that might be a better description in some cases than this idea about rigidity. I mean, there are cases in which the rigidity, this rigidity idea describes things very well in terms of how I would make a joke or why something's funny. I think that in a lot of cases, the element of surprise is, of course, important. Saying something unexpected is important. But also, I want to kind of go back to the rigidity idea here in the sense that sometimes I think that what really makes a joke funny, what really takes a funny idea and makes it into an actual funny joke, has a lot to do with this word by word phrasing.

And a lot of comedians will write a joke and then test it out. You know, some comedians do just get drunk and go on stage and have a blast. And then, you know, sometimes it's good and sometimes it's bad. But some comedians are really incredibly meticulous in changing one word in a joke and then testing it and tracking how well some of them have spreadsheets for this to actually test one variable at a time in a joke. There was actually an article about this recently in the New York Times about the comedian Myq Kaplan and his working of a joke. I think it was called the Anatomy of a Joke.

And it talks about this one joke and its sort of life cycle, from an idea and a long monologue to eventually just this little one liner. And one of the things they mentioned in the early incarnation of the joke, the joke, was about the old chivalrous idea that when there was a mud puddle that you would take your coat off and put it down on the mud puddle for a lady to walk across. And how ridiculous that was, you know, that you would ruin your whole coat so this lady doesn't have to walk in a mud puddle, and then you're stuck with a muddy coat.

So he's exploring that idea, which is sort of a funny idea, but it wasn't funny when I just said it. You know, I was just explaining a premise. And so he's developing this joke, and he comes up with this expression that really adds to the humor. And the expression was something about, oh, really, my whole coat is less important than your lady feet bottoms. And that was the expression, lady feet bottoms. It's these little counterintuitive expressions that really push the idea over the edge in making it funny. And a lot of that has to do with specifically breaking grammatical conventions or saying something we have a word for, but using an unexpected word for it.

I don't know how that idea fits in. Bergson does get around to talking about wordplay and puns, and I'm just not sure that I agree with what he has to say about that. I think that in a lot of cases, it's not over rigidity that's funny. It is the reverse. It's violating grammatical norms.

36:51 Mark: Yeah, he does try to cover himself. I know I was characterizing him as giving this simplistic theory and trying to apply it to everything, but sort of at the beginning of every section, he says something like, looking at the beginning of chapter one, Section five, as we hinted at the outset of this study, it would be idle to attempt to derive every comic effect from one simple formula. The formula exists well enough in a certain sense, but its development does not follow a straightforward course. What I mean is that the process of deduction ought from time to time to stop and study certain culminating effects.

37:17 Wes: And.

37:17 Mark: And that these effects appear as models round which new effects resembling them take their places in a circle. The latter are not deductions from the formula, but are comic through their relationship with those that are. In other words. Yeah, there are going to be a lot of examples that don't sound like they go with my theory at all. But I'm going to lay out a series of associations that. Yeah, you can sort of. It's funny because it looks like something that's actually funny that really invites you to then come up with a theory that takes those what he would consider borderline cases like wordplay, and makes that the central thing and makes his comic characters the sort of borderline case.

37:52 Wes: He does give a very detailed account of wordplay, though. It's not like he's.

37:56 Mark: Yeah, no, I mean, he justifies all this stuff. I don't know. After a while, I just sort of decided I would just forgive him. And I don't really care if the theory works. I will revisit that consideration from time to time to figure out whether the theory actually does apply to everything the way he thinks it does. It's more just fun going through the exercise of trying and looking at all these different cases and seeing if you can come up with, you know, that they are some variation on this formula he's given. Although I gathered from talking to Seth that he did not find that so fun. And I have yet to hear why.

38:26 Seth: A challenge.

38:27 Mark: I want you to talk, for Christ's sake. Everybody out there loves you, man. They want you to fucking talk.

38:35 Seth: I guess when I started to read this, I expected there to be. I thought he was going to do more of an analysis of what makes something comic. And so, you know, initially there were a couple things. So he says, you know, comedy or laughter is something that's necessarily human. And that it has a social function. Right? That laughter. Laughter somehow serves a social function that I found interesting. And the idea that laughter requires some kind of emotional distance. That in a certain sense you have to be able to distance yourself from the empathetic in order to find something comical.

I found that interesting. What I had to generalize when he was talking about the mechanical in Something Living. I sort of had to abstract a little bit from that and see it as that the comic somehow, on Bergson's theory, is trying to think of how to phrase this. It makes of something. I don't want to try to define in terms of the thing we're trying to define. So I don't want to say it makes a parody. But somehow comedy represents something as almost like what it is, but not quite. And it's the way in which the representation takes place or the way in which the characterization takes place that either makes it funny or not funny.

And that what tragic or the dramatic does is actually try to represent something as it is or more so as it is, so that you then lose that barrier and you do empathize with the character. I suppose there's probably something to that. And we're talking about comparing Stand Up. He's talking a lot about some of these comedic plays for the listeners. He makes a lot of references in the text to these French comedies, which apparently all featured Doctors. So, you know, I would ask Jen this. There's a danger, right, when you're crafting a joke or when you're doing a bit of being too sympathetic or of having the audience identify too much with whatever it is you're trying to build up, that you do have to maintain this space.

That idea makes sense to me.

40:48 Jennifer: It really depends on what you're making a joke about. When we were talking about empathy, I was reminded of this comedian who I heard about who was shot in the head by her husband and survived, obviously, and developed a comedy act about this.

41:02 Mark: That's not funny.

41:03 Jennifer: And no, it's horrifying. And when I heard that, I said, oh, my God, I will do anything to avoid watching that. That is horrific. And so I have all the sympathy in the world. You know, like, my sympathy is complete, but it's not funny. I don't want to see anyone try to be funny about that. Just the whole idea is horrifying. That's a place where empathy or sympathy absolutely hurts the comedy. Whereas when you're talking about something that is just not that touchy, I mean, there's nothing wrong with total identification with the audience. I mean, there are some comedians where audience members feel that, like maybe Dane Cook, who's not my favorite comedian in the world, but I think that's someone where there are a lot of bros out there who think that they are Dane Cook. You know, there's a total identification there, and that doesn't hamper comedy necessarily.

41:45 Dylan: Well, Sarah Silverman has this famous bit where she tries her best. She decided, I'm gonna try to make. I'm gonna make rape funny.

41:52 Seth: Okay, that's an excellent example to bring up because she's somebody who I can find funny and horrifying within the same, like, three minute span.

42:00 Jennifer: I'm glad that you mentioned that example because I've done a lot of all women in comedy events, and I put a lot of thought into just what happens when you have a comedy event that's mostly women or dominated by women and how things kind of change. And, you know, Sarah Silverman absolutely is an example of someone who's funny and sort of horrifying at the same time. But it's also the case that there are some people who are really turned off in terms of comedy. If there's something that would. There definitely are people who don't like Sarah Silverman, of course.

And I'm reminded of this comic, and I honestly, I can't remember her name, but it was so interesting because she had a Joke about rape. But it was a joke that a bunch of feminist vlogs were saying somebody finally made a funny rape joke. You know, George Carlin had tried and Sarah Silverman and tried and this comic finally nailed it. And it was a joke about how women walk around being afraid of rape all the time. And the punchline, this is like, if you want to look it up, that's how you'd find. It is essentially the story of, you know, walking through a dark alley and so on and so forth.

And when the rape finally comes, you say, oh, you know, it's finally here. That's my rape. You know, like the one you've been expecting this whole time. That's my rape finally happened. Here it is.

43:03 Mark: That would be Ever Mainard.

43:05 Jennifer: Oh, good. I like to make sure people get credit for their jokes. So, you know, the lady blogosphere was just alight with the idea that someone finally made a funny rape joke. It had taken, you know, this much human evolution for that to happen. And so I think that that's, again, it's a case where you're not horrified by the joke. I mean, you're horrified by rape, you're horrified by the situation in society, but your identification with the comedian is complete. You know, there's no distance there. That comedian is exactly like you.

43:29 Wes: I think identification, though, is different than say, really empathizing with an emotion.

43:34 Jennifer: Well, when we say empathy, I mean, is it necessary with empathy to assume that we're talking about something bad happening? There are lots of jokes that don't necessarily depend on that sort of premise.

43:43 Wes: Right, but the idea is that there's some emotion, right, that the comic, this isn't necessarily the stand up comedian telling the joke, it's whoever is the butt of the joke. The idea is that if there's empathy with whatever emotion that they would naturally be going through in that situation, say someone being terrified of being raped, then suddenly you have to take it seriously and it kind of kills the comedy. It's really hard to hold one's actual empathy, as in, you know, I am sharing now this feeling of terror that someone would have if they were in danger of being rap with the comic moment.

I think that's a perfect example of where we actually distance ourselves from empathizing with the feeling of terror to say, you know, yeah, there's my rape. We're not thinking at all about the feeling of terror there where we have to take some sort of distance from it. I think it's a bears out Bergson's theory there.

44:32 Mark: I think personally that that kind of reaction is my default reaction to anything actually scary or dangerous that I recall driving. And, like, I lose control of the car on the ice and the car is just spinning around, and I just started laughing my ass off. That this is like. It's just a distancing thing. It's a coping mechanism. It's gallows humor.

44:51 Wes: Yeah. I mean, obviously, there's a close relationship between what is tragic and what is comic. There's always the danger of crossing the line, and one sort of spills over into the other. And as we saw in the case of deformity, that line will shift for different cultures and different times. But also, Bergson sort of prizes when he's talking about words. In the second chapter, he really goes into detail into this notion of transposition where you get the transposition of the natural expression of an idea into another key, he calls it. So his example, he uses this quote from Jean Paul Richter.

The sky was beginning to change from black to red like a lobster being boiled. And that's a transposition from the solemn to the familiar. And actually, a lot of the examples we've been giving have been of that sort of transposition, either of the solemn to the familiar or something that's inherently tragic or dangerous, or into its opposite. Even the case with the coat being laid down on the muddy puddle. It's supposed to be chivalrous. It's supposed to be. It's something that, in our empathetic moment, we would take that seriously. Is that, oh, that's so chivalrous and nice.

And we have to takes it, let's say, an ironic distance in order to see the absurdity of it, which is the. My whole coat is worth your lady feet bottom. I think that was what you said.

46:10 Jennifer: Yeah, that was it.

46:11 Wes: Right.

46:11 Mark: Anything that's become a cliche, it's hard to not have that distance from it. If you actually were going to do that. If you're actually going to lay your coat on a puddle for somebody, they're going to laugh at you, and you're going to laugh while you're doing it, because it's just freaking ridiculous.

46:24 Wes: Yeah. And there's the element of repetition, which is what transpositions through. Bergson is one of the instances of this element of repetition that he talks about. And for us, it's a cultural repetition. Right. There's nothing individual or unique anymore about the puddle thing because it's a meme in culture. It's a cliche. If no one had ever done that or no one had ever heard of it. And then they did that for someone. It has a good chance of being romantic because it's actually individual. It doesn't fall under this type where the cliche right gives us the automatism and that air of the mechanical right. I'm just doing something that's been done before. And that's where the comic element supposedly comes in.

47:01 Dylan: In this section in my book, it's on page 63. He's contrasting a little bit irony and humor. And he goes on, says that humor is emphasized the deeper we go down into an evil that actually is in order to set down its details in the most cold blooded indifference. If our analysis is correct. Several authors, Jean Paul amongst them, have noticed that humor delights in concrete terms, technical details, definite facts. If our analysis is correct, this is not an accidental trait of humor. It is its very essence. A humorist is a moralist disguised as a scientist, something like an anatomist, who practices dissection for the sole object of filling us with disgust.

So that humor, in the restricted sense in which we are here regarding the word is really a transposition from the moral to the scientific. It reminds me of the way in which I see humor working where you take something that is awful, for instance, and you bring it down to just really talking about very nitty nitty gritty tales. In fact, it wouldn't have to be awful. There's a lot of comedy, it seems to me, that just works on that kind of dissection and has us look at that individual piece all by itself. And it's not clear to me why it becomes funny when you do that, but it does.

48:14 Mark: I think he had in mind, like Mark Twain here, that kind of stuff, that caustic social commentary.

48:20 Wes: Yeah, it's a very specific subtype of what's laughable in general. So he says irony is we state what ought to be done and pretend believe that it is just what is actually being done. That's irony. And then for humor, we describe with scrupulous minuteness what is being done and pretend to believe that this is just what ought to be done. I can't think of a good example of that offhand.

48:39 Mark: Irony, it says, is emphasized the higher we allow ourselves to be uplifted by the idea of the good that ought to be. Thus irony may grow so hot within us that it becomes a kind of high pressure eloquence. On the other hand, humor is more emphasized the deeper we go into an evil that already is. In order to set down his detail. Yeah, as you were saying, I'M just trying to remember what he means by irony here. Since it's obviously not exactly what we say.

49:02 Wes: He's usually good for examples, but he breaks down at some points. And you sort of go for stretches with these categories. And we don't get a real concrete sense of what they mean.

49:11 Mark: Are all notions of irony just speaking ironically? I mean, are those just a matter of the same kind of gallows humor distance I was referring to?

49:20 Wes: Well, it's like rain on your wedding day. Right. Irony is a pop song in which you call lots of things ironic. None of which are ironic. They're just inconvenient. So rain on your wedding day is inconvenient, but it's not ironic because it's not contrary to expectation.

49:34 Mark: What would be ironic is if you had just promised your firstborn so that there would not be rain on your wedding day, and then. Oh, man.

49:41 Seth: Exactly. No, that. I believe there's a Greek tragedy that goes somewhat like that. And it's neither ironic nor comic.

49:49 Wes: But here he's saying, you know, we state what ought to be done and pretend to believe that it is just what is actually being done. Yeah, I'm unclear.

49:56 Mark: I don't know. All the examples I can come up with could be analyzed in some other way. Like if you have perfectly villainous characters while they're murdering somebody, talking about what they're gonna have for lunch or debating some fine point of the ethics of what they're doing. Of, no, I want to have the last poke with the sword or something like that. But that sounds more like just that juxtaposition of two incongruous elements there. You know, there's a serious thing going on, but it's being treated lightly or whatever.

50:22 Wes: Irony is a subtype of this incongruity, what he calls transposition, Right. So he talks of the extremes, which is where we get. It's either exaggeration of size and physical dimensions or making the best the worst of the worst the best. So those are two types of the most extreme transpositions. And then what he calls the subtle transpositions, we get real versus ideal. That's where we get irony and humor. This contrast between real and ideal. Both are satirical.

50:50 Mark: I think what's supposed to be important for the contrast is that the two things that are being contrasted. Like there's two different situations being juxtaposed. The serious situation of two people murdering somebody and then the comic situation of them, you know, well, after you do something, then you have to go have lunch. So maybe they're Talking over where they're going to go and have lunch while they're doing this horrible thing. So there's the clash. But the point is that each of them sort of has its own internal logic. And what makes it sort of like the interface between automaton and the organic is if we have these two organic things that are just stuck together really, any kind of coincidence has the potential of being funny.

And that is in general how he's going to describe why plays on words, say, are funny. Right. These are two meanings of the word. They each have their appropriate sphere. So they each sort of have a logic. But when you jam them together or you make a double entendre. There you go.

51:45 Dylan: In this vein, I'm reminded of the beginning of the conversation where Seth asks, so what are we going to talk about exactly? And among the things he was wondering about was whether something is funny or what makes it funny or laughter itself. And this part of the conversation reminds me that the book, while being called Laughter, he subtitles it about comic and comedy, but it seems to me he doesn't get to what makes us laugh as opposed to maybe what makes it funny. I guess I'm thinking a little bit about what Mark was saying about either being ticklish on the one hand and laughing at that.

And throughout the book I was thinking about delight and how we laugh in delight, but it's not exactly funny. I mean, we say, well, it was just funny, but it's not funny in the way he means comic, I guess. And so I'm wondering how the phenomena of laughing is both related to what he's talking about and overlaps with it and not related to it.

52:42 Mark: Right. I like the connection to joy that he describes laughter as a purely intellectual exercise, which means that animals are not going to find anything funny. Babies are not going to find anything funny, but don't babies pretty much as soon as they can pay attention, like you make a googly face to them and they laugh like, you know, I don't know if it's humor or delight.

52:59 Jennifer: Yeah. There was actually an article in the New York Times called I Believe is on the Morality of Babies. And it talks, you know, about experiments that were done about babies sense of fairness, which is pretty fascinating. But there were also some mentions of what sorts of things babies find funny. And the reason that scientists are doing research on what babies find funny is because babies typically laugh when something happens. A little bit older babies, newborn babies don't laugh, but babies laugh when something happens that defies what they understand as the laws of the physical world.

And so if you show a newborn baby, essentially a magic trick, they're not surprised at all because they don't know how objects are supposed to fly or what they're supposed to do. But a little bit of an older baby who knows that when you drop something, it's supposed to fall. If it doesn't fall, they either laugh or they're mesmerized. You know, they're really into it. So there's just this sort of much simpler thesis that unexpected things are funny, that, sure, we laugh when we're delighted, we laugh when we're being tickled, we laugh when things are unexpected, and then we also laugh for these reasons that Bergson is highlighting.

Why those things are all mapped to the same physiological response is an open question.

53:58 Wes: Yeah. And of course, we also can be surprised or afraid of the unexpected, too, which is one of the reasons why Bergson wants to reject that as a theory of why we laugh. Right.

54:07 Jennifer: Clearly. I mean, something being unexpected is a necessary but hardly sufficient condition.

54:11 Dylan: That also reminds me of the way in which we were already talking about things can be both horrifying and funny, even at the same time. Even things that we would agree were both those things at the same time. The gallows humor, for instance. Right.

54:23 Wes: But we have to have a certain amount of safety. Right. It's one thing for the object to defy the laws of physics or the expectation save a child, and it's another if that. That is perceived as dangerous. And there again you get the sort of necessary ironic distance.

54:38 Dylan: But delight doesn't seem to necessarily work that way. When I'm playing a game or playing with my kids, or I am delighted that something worked that I was doing, and I feel great about it and I'm laughing about it. I'm struggling a little bit to figure out how that laughter and delight as a result of a juxtaposition with expectation.

54:59 Wes: He's not saying everything is a matter of expectation.

55:01 Dylan: This is taking us off the book so we don't have to do that.

55:04 Wes: Yeah, I think you're right. Like, how does it fit into Bergson's theory of rigidity and all that? But let's get an example of laughing in delight because it's been so long for me,

55:17 Seth: It's so sad.

55:18 Mark: Your naivety is so delightful. See there, you've just given us an example.

55:23 Wes: No, no, that's not delight. That's. That's laughing at me as a. As an idiot.

55:29 Mark: Actually, I do find them hard to distinguish. Like a lot of things, my Kid do are so cute. And so you could say I'm delighted and I'm laughing at that. But I'm also laughing at them because they're acting like idiots. Because kids are stupid and that's why they're so funny.

55:42 Wes: In your case, Mark, you're definitely laughing at them because they're idiots.

55:47 Mark: Just today, all the kids in my 9 year old's class, they wrote these books and my daughter wrote this. It's like page for page. She's got a very amusing writing style but the plot goes absolutely nowhere. It's just like. And then I ate eggs and they were awesome. And then so I'm just laughing at just the lack of grasp of plot here. So it's delightful but it's mocking at the same time. I don't think these are incompatible.

56:13 Wes: Yeah, true, of course, contradictory feelings. I mean, and obviously you could alternate between the tragic and comic standpoints within a single period of time. You know, the whole we laughed, we cried type of thing, that's what I can't decide.

56:25 Mark: Is it really a matter of alternating in these moments that you were talking about earlier, that we sympathize with the comic hero and then we reject that and laugh at him? Or is it really all one thing? Because it seems most of what I find funny boils down to laughing at yourself in some way. And yeah, that could be a psychological trying to distance yourself from yourself and I'm so cooler than myself or something like that. This sort of permanent irony in which case it's incredibly psychologically fucked up. But maybe it's also that that's just the existential state, that the purest kind of comedy is not safe.

It's this stark admitting the absolute worst about yourself and that's frickin hilarious. Of course then as soon as I say it like that, that actually sounds like tragedy. No, it sounds like part of Bergson's theory. Because when you're saying that, when you're admitting that about yourself, it's like you're objectifying a part of yourself. So say your horrible habits or whatever. It's the automatism in you is part of what you're laughing at. Like the fact that I am filled with self loathing, isn't that funny? Many comedians, that's their whole shtick is laughing at themselves for that.

Well, the self loathing part is not a conscious choice. It is this fucked up psychological thing that's going round and round in them like a machine. And so they're actually kind of laughing at that. They're not laughing at the free part of them that is then taking its distance and laughing at that part of the cell.

57:44 Wes: Yeah, he talks about laughing at yourself at some point and just says, yeah, you take both positions. I mean, one part of you takes that position of disinterested laugher, and then the other part of you takes the position of the one being laughed at.

57:57 Seth: So what do you guys find funny? Who are your favorite comedians?

58:02 Mark: Well, Jen. Yeah, actually, I did have things from your website came to mind while I was writing this, because I had just been looking at it, and if I look on the writing section of your page, you have a funny essay about a letter to my new boyfriend that's written entirely in legalese. It exactly exemplifies one of the points Bergson was making about these professional characters. A lawyer that has to approach all of his personal situations using this customary legal language, or a doctor that can't break out of his treating people as a patient mode. I've actually also been watching on Netflix doc Martin, which is a British show that's exactly that. It's like this asocial character that just treats everyone, even people he's like, trying to seduce, you know, starts commenting on their medical conditions or something.

58:49 Jennifer: That's really funny to me that you mentioned that piece that I wrote as an example of this sort of rigidity problem of using the wrong kind of language to describe a situation. So the piece is called A Memo to My New Boyfriend Re Clarification of Offer Pursuant to Securities and Exchange Commission Regulations. And also My Trouble with Monogamy. That's the name of it. And it does have a lot of sort of legalese. I mean, obviously that's funny, you know, talking about sex using business language. But the other thing about that, maybe the rigidity of using the wrong form of address for the topic is sort of, you know, is part of the humor.

It's also the case that what's funnier to me is breaking that. And so sort of a lack of grammatical parallelism or, you know, you're talking in business speak and all of a sudden then you say dick. It's much funnier than if you just said dick on its own in some kind of normal sex joke. It's much funnier when you're saying something really prudish or a business speak, and then all of a sudden something like that comes out or vice versa. To me, that's where the funny happens. You know, it's that you have this premise that might be based on the idea of having the wrong kind of action for a situation, or the wrong kind of language for a situation.

But it's almost breaking that that really pushes it over the edge.

59:52 Mark: You've pointed out a phenomena that has been sort of my central take on humor. And in fact, I wrote a whole book called Trife on it, which is that if humor is the unexpected, and maybe I should take Bergson as a tonic to this notion that I have that it's like there's a dialectic to it, so you want to do what's unexpected in the language. And so you break a convention. But then once you're breaking the convention and people know you're breaking the convention, then you break that convention, you turn it back, and then you keep going and you see how far. And it becomes this thing that in no way resembles humor at all. It's not funny even slightly. It's this monstrosity that you've created.

1:00:27 Dylan: Did you laugh at yourself with delight when you were writing it?

1:00:30 Mark: Sometimes, but some of it is. I wrote it right after I had written my undergrad philosophy thesis. So I was in this mode of, like, writing about goofy shit every day and wrote it partly as an exploration of what is humor for me, that I kind of thought Dave Barry was funny, but he gets old real fast because you get his shtick. How do you out Dave Barry? Dave Barry. Maybe that's too dated a reference now for most of our listeners, but he was a very famous humor columnist who won the Pulitzer for a long time, and now he writes stories about Peter Pan. And I'm not joking.

1:01:04 Wes: Weird.

1:01:05 Jennifer: I feel like we're treading into territory that there are books written about exactly how to do this sort of thing. One classic, it's the Comedy Bible by Judy Carter. And there are really formulaic ways to start building a joke that in the end will not seem formulaic. What she says in terms of how you go about building a joke for stand up in any case, is that you begin with a premise, and the premise should have the form. You know what's really, I believe it is hard. Scary or stupid or weird. Hard, scary, stupid or weird. You don't have to say the words, but you know what's really scary about meth or something like that.

And then you say what's really scary? And then there's an act out in which you are sort of a character or a different person. There's some kind of act out that's based on the premise. So it's actually kind of a formula that a lot of jokes adhere to at Least in sort of modern day stand up culture. And you're right, if you build sort of a third level onto that or a fourth level onto that, it does lose its joke. It loses a sort of a story arc to it.

1:02:00 Dylan: How does this compare to the idea of the comic character? Seems to me that stand up and joke telling itself is different in interesting ways than the character who themselves is funny. Like sometimes characters tell jokes and they're funny because they're witty or whatever, but there's also the character that you're laughing at or along with. That's the kind of character that Bergson's often talking about.

1:02:24 Wes: Yeah, the comic character is the butt of the joke.

1:02:26 Jennifer: The butt of the joke. And I think that in a lot of stand up, you know, the situation that you're having is that the comedian is. I mean, like when you appreciate good writing, the comedian is saying something that has happened to you or that you can identify with and is saying it in such a clever way that you wish you'd said that yourself. So again, there's this idea, you know, there doesn't necessarily need to be a huge distance there. There's this idea of identifying with the comic. The comic is sort of the voice of what you felt all along, but with this little twist at the end. And so the fact that you identified with it all the way up to the twist is what makes the twist so funny.

1:02:58 Wes: Yeah, and often they're making themselves. The comic is making themselves the butt of the joke. And then it seems like there's that audience identification. And it's part of the relief is, yes, I do stupid things all the time and it's okay. It's a sort of cathartic element, I think, where you're identifying with someone who's admitting to their own stupidity. And there's a sense in which it's made to feel less tragic and part of an acceptable human foible that's common to everyone, which I think is something that Bergson's theory doesn't touch on.

1:03:29 Dylan: Well, it makes a lot of sense to me that you have this identification with the story that the comedian's telling. And so you have to have on the one hand this self identification. But then to the extent that they take it further than you would have, there's a way in which you end up laughing at them in a kind of relief that there's actually somebody who is crazier, stupider, weirder than you, than in your own life. You recognize it. But it sort of goes further in some ways it seems like it would be hard to make it funny if it was exactly just like what you had done. Unless you had done something kind of crazy.

1:04:05 Wes: Well, like take a. I'm just saying the first one that comes to mind, there's a good Woody Allen one liner. So he has lots of self deprecating jokes. Obviously not all stand up humor is gonna be that way. Sometimes it might be a third party who's the butt of the joke. But you know, I think a good portion of stand up humor is going to be self directed. So Woody Allen, one of his jokes is like, his timing is so good, it's not going to be obviously funny the way I tell him. But it's like the other day I had an experience with oral contraception. I asked a girl to sleep with me and she said no.

And then from the record I heard there's a nice little pause where the audience is figuring it out and then they burst out laughing. But the element of timing, something else we could discuss because Woody Allen went through a phase where his timing was off. He really didn't want to be on stage. He was initially just a writer and it took him a while to develop the timing. And of course that makes the difference between a joke that's going to flop that and other little elements that Jen, you mentioned will make all the difference. But he's talking about his own rejection.

For Bergson, this is about we're laughing at him. But I think, Jen, what you've brought up is this identification with the comic where I think we're also laughing at ourselves through the comic, but not merely to correct ourselves, as Bergson says, not merely to humiliate ourselves into doing better or humiliate others into doing better, but to say, yeah, it's actually all right to be rejected. It happens. And it's not the dangerous, scary thing that it might seem to be on some level. It happens to everyone and that's fine. And so the laughter in some way is a release of tension, as in that's okay.

And that I think, Jen, if that's what you're saying, I think that's one point where Bergson's theory, definitely that seems to be a lacuna.

1:05:52 Seth: Is there a social context that's required for that to function properly? So let's take for example the self deprecating stand up comic whose shtick is that they're fat. Right. So I can't think of a named example, but Louis CK Louis CK is much more sophisticated, that he's out of shape. I don't want To. I'm holding off on Louis CK because,

1:06:14 Mark: okay, he's a paradigm.

1:06:17 Seth: He's very. I'm talking about the one who's going to talk about going to the Chinese buffet and you know you're not welcome here, right? That kind of comedian. There's somebody who does that and I can't remember his name.

1:06:26 Dylan: Panette can't fit on the airplane, has to buy four seats.

1:06:31 Wes: Yeah, I remember that guy. He hasn't been around for a while though. Right.

1:06:34 Seth: There's a sense in which that type of comedy is only going to function effectively in our overindulgent society. Just based on what you just said, Wes, you know, it's like there's a bunch of people who have that same kind of behavior and overeat. And by acting that out and being clownish about it, that particular type of comedian makes those types of people feel better about their own experience. Whereas if we were living in a society like that kind of humor probably wouldn't go over in Southeast Asia or maybe like the Netherlands. Right? Someplace where there's not the same food culture and the same kind of culture of consumerism and sedentary lifestyle.

1:07:14 Wes: I don't think the identification is necessary though. Right. We could just laugh at the comedian who makes himself the butt of jokes for problems that we don't share. We could just laugh at them without that element of identification. Bergson obviously isn't talking about that element of identification and doesn't see that as necessary.

1:07:32 Mark: Here's another example, and maybe this is another example where delight and laughter comes close. But I laugh sometimes during sex or during the approach during foreplay.

1:07:43 Seth: All right, I'm not sure I want to hear this. Let's take a vote. Let's take a vote on whether we want Mark to continue this.

1:07:49 Dylan: This is my sister.

1:07:52 Wes: Oh, my God.

1:07:53 Mark: I'm not gonna. No, nothing graphic. But just the point. Isn't it funny?

1:07:58 Wes: Nothing graphic. You laugh during foreflash.

1:08:03 Mark: The fact that like you can't figure out where to put that extra leg or that extra arm. That's funny. There's things about when you're physically intimate, then at least, I think a healthy way to approach it. Or at least because you have to consider your own behavior healthy by definition for self esteem reasons. Then laughing at the physicality, you know, nothing is gonna be perfect. So if anything is imperfect, if you let out a giant fart or something, then that becomes.

1:08:27 Wes: Now you're farting during foreplay.

1:08:30 Mark: You could either be uptight about it or you could just sort of mutually Laugh about it because there's such a good overall feeling that when the physical sort of gets in the way in some way, then it's just funny. And that in a way confirms Bergson's theory. He specifically says the physical part of us is the main way in which we are automatons. That there are all these things that are going on with us. Digestion. Why potty humor? It will always be funny. Why sex humor will always be funny. Why excessive lust in a character will always be funny, he thinks, is because you're asserting the primacy of the physical over the spiritual or something. And at the same time, I would say that kind of laughing in the situation that I was talking about, there's nothing corrective about it. It's more like what you're saying. It's acknowledging the humanness and that it's okay. That's all.

1:09:14 Wes: I always laugh. Not during foreplay, but right after I get undressed. Is that. Is that normal?

1:09:20 Mark: Is that her laughing? Are you anticipating the laughing?

1:09:23 Wes: It's both of

1:09:25 Jennifer: you?

1:09:26 Wes: Yeah, I think that's a good point. Yeah. The non corrective laughing.

1:09:29 Mark: Are you scarred, Dylan? Is that okay?

1:09:31 Dylan: I'll survive.

1:09:34 Wes: I guess. Bergson could make the argument that you're not always laughing at a comic character. Right. You could be laughing at nature itself. He often talks as if nature acts as if it's absent minded or language itself in the way that, you know, you can do double entendres. Language is imperfect in a way. And so he could make the argument that there's still a laughing at element there. It's just more abstract.

1:10:00 Mark: Maybe you're laughing at existence. It's existential laughter.

1:10:03 Wes: Yeah.

1:10:03 Dylan: I'm not sure I buy it. Is that laughter that we have about our bodies, anything other than laughter conditioned by social convention? Not genuinely existential.

1:10:16 Wes: Are you saying that you laugh during foreplay as well? No, no, I'm just saying. What do you mean? The laughter we have at our body. You mean when the bodily.

1:10:25 Dylan: Like why potty jokes are so funny funny.

1:10:27 Mark: It's not social convention. It's like why three year olds think that they're hilarious. It's not like their parents have been telling them that potty jokes are hilarious. They're funny in spite of the parents disapproval for little kids. It's not peer pressure.

1:10:39 Dylan: You don't think that part of why kids think potty jokes are funny is because of the disapproval of their parents?

1:10:44 Mark: That doesn't seem like a necessary. You know, there's all sorts of things you could do that are Naughty. That your parents would disapprove of that. Then don't become. Now, as of course I'm saying that, then it seems like they're. Yes, that is a primarily source of you. I'm not supposed to be doing this. Ah, how does that fit in with Bergson's theory? That's not a corrective. Like I'm laughing at the hilarity of my as a two year old touching something that I'm not supposed to touch. Look, I'm gonna touch the electric outlet. Ah, this is awesome.

1:11:09 Wes: Well, it's often, right, the tension between social norms and the transgression of those norms. He's often talking about absentmindedness. But here, you know, it's almost like the tension between those norms and unconscious desires or more primal desires, say to touch and things that we learn that we ought not to be touching or something.

1:11:27 Dylan: Isn't it working that the body is acting not as the automaton but as the living thing? And the automaton is the social convention, right? That nature is bursting out onto the social convention. Like, why wouldn't you fart?

1:11:41 Jennifer: That's funny. I think you're exactly right that when the body is acting out, I mean it's we who are trying to be rigid and enforce something on that. And what's funny is when it doesn't work. So it's sort of the more formal you make the situation. You know, the Queen of England is presiding over something and then she burps. That's really funny. And you know, the pillbox hat, that's what really does it. So it's like the more artifice, the more human society we lay on top of that, the funnier bodily functions become.

1:12:04 Wes: Yeah, exactly. And you know, he talks. It's not always the case that the body is the thing. That's an indication of automatism. Right. You know, he talks of, say, fashion at one point. He talks of, you know, our covering ourselves, covering the body. So then body becomes the symbol of the living and the vital and the elastic and fashion, you know, whatever we're using to cover the body is actually rigid and in contrast. And there's something inherently funny about it because we get used to the fashion of the day. We don't usually find fashions funny, but if someone does something unfashionable or reverts to fashion of the previous day, that can be something that's funny because it brings out the.

What was before, just the potential comic nature of covering oneself. And the same thing for society. There are all sorts of rules and ceremonies and norms by which we have to adhere, which are basically just social coverings and life, life is shitting and the things that are normally covered up and that's what. So yeah, potty humor in a way is a send up more of social norms than the other way around.

1:13:07 Jennifer: Maybe this is neither here nor there, but it does seem to tie together a couple things we've been discussing. In New York, we have a naked comedy show. The comedians are naked. And it's actually kind of fascinating to me, you know, when you have a naked comedy show. I attended this thing and a couple of the comedians, I actually knew them, so it was a little awkward. The thing that was very interesting to me in watching a naked comedy show is that a comedian can't walk out on stage naked and not talk about it. You know, you have to write completely new jokes about nudity itself because it's so distracting and strange.

You can't just walk out naked and start talking about the TSA and, you know, it doesn't make any sense. I remember just seeing these men. They were all men and there they are just sort of naked on a stage and, you know, naked people on a stage all by themselves under lighting, they just look really cold and pale and lonely. You know, naked bodies don't look good in that context. You know, they need. Anyway, I remember they don't.

1:13:59 Wes: It's why people on dance, they need lots of context.

1:14:01 Jennifer: They need a big cozy blanket. Either you need to be very attractive and have a pole and a spray tan, or you just need to wear a blanket.

1:14:10 Wes: They need several shots of whiskey and various other contexts as well.

1:14:14 Jennifer: Yeah, I mean, the things that look good in real life are not the things that look good on a stage. I will say that I was watching this comedian who's a pretty attractive guy, you know, and I'm just looking at him naked on a stage, it just looks so sad. The main thing that I was thinking is, my God, we're monkeys, we're just apes. It's like seeing naked people. There's no greater reminder of evolution than that. You know, we were talking about the body in comedy and how a lot of comedy is based on this idea of our animality kind of breaking through. And that to me, just sort of really drove it home. And distracted from any other form of humor, quite frankly.

1:14:44 Wes: In that case, it's the tragedy of nudity interfering with. Interfering with comedy.

1:14:50 Jennifer: Person looks good or not, it doesn't matter, it's distracting.

1:14:53 Dylan: Your comment about every one of them having to Talk about their nudity. And it would be incongruous. Made me think that the challenge and what would be actually really funny is somebody being completely naked and not talking about it, the whole elephant in the room and just not saying anything about it.

1:15:09 Mark: I saw that on when the south park guys got nominated for an Oscar and they did the Runway thing and one of them just dressed in a really high fashion dress, a guy, and they just decided that they would not mention it at all. It was just, oh, it's just a magical night. It's just a wonderful, you know, just say the kind of things that people say on the Runway.

1:15:25 Jennifer: But it's one thing if you do that and you're there for another purpose. You're there to accept an award for South Park. It's another thing if you were doing stand up. I mean, I think that things like that don't work typically unless you're saying things in a really self aware way. I mean, if I got on stage and I were, you know, I'm wearing a football uniform for no reason, giant shoulder pads, got a helmet, if I then proceeded to not talk about it, but in a way that was very self aware, you know, like, let's talk about the tsa, because I can't think of anything better to talk about.

And, you know, if it were really obvious that I were doing it, it would be funny, but otherwise I don't think it would. And I'm reminded of an anecdote. I had a comedy teacher at one point who told a story about a former student. It was specifically about this idea that if there's something really obvious about you and you don't mention it, people will hate you. They won't identify with anything you're saying because you're not with them in the moment. And specifically, this woman, this comedy student, was a little person. She was like 3 foot 6 and she didn't want to talk about it.

She did not want to tell a single joke about being a little person. She didn't want to mention it. And if you're a comedian and you walk out on stage and everyone, the first thing they notice is obviously that you're a little person. And then someone has to adjust the microphone for you. You have to take it out of the stands and you don't even mention it, then you're gonna talk about your mother or something. You've lost your audience completely. Like, those things have to be acknowledged.

1:16:37 Wes: Yeah, I hate her just thinking about it.

1:16:40 Jennifer: It's terrible.

1:16:41 Dylan: Well, it's just like it's like Chekhov's comment that if there's a gun hanging on the wall over the fireplace, the first act, it has to shoot off by the end of the third act.

1:16:50 Seth: Right.

1:16:50 Wes: What about someone, though, like Andy Kaufman, who sort of goes for that make people uncomfortable shtick.

1:16:57 Mark: That's the kind of meta humor that it's not actually funny in itself.

1:17:01 Dylan: It's not funny for the audience. It's funny watching the audience. Right?

1:17:04 Wes: That's a good point.

1:17:05 Dylan: It's funny to watch Kaufman give that act, knowing he's doing it.

1:17:09 Seth: Right.

1:17:10 Mark: Sacha Baron Cohen. The same kind of multi layered thing, like you're not sure which part to laugh at, you know?

1:17:16 Wes: Right.

1:17:17 Dylan: I find it almost unbearable watching that movie. I didn't see Bruno.

1:17:23 Wes: I really liked Borat, actually.

1:17:25 Dylan: There are parts of it that were funny.

1:17:26 Wes: Some of it seems so cruel because he's basically just fucking with people and making them look like idiots. Right.

1:17:34 Jennifer: You know, that movie, it was mean. But when Borat goes to a dinner in the south that his etiquette teacher, I think, has hooked him up with, and he's having dinner with some very proper Southern people. And the funny. You're already laughing, right? And the funny part about that, he is very mean. At one point, he says to some woman that one woman would be considered very attractive in his home country and another woman wouldn't. And the woman is on camera. It's very sad. It's like the pastor's wife or something. And he doesn't think she's attractive.

But the funny part about that scene, it's just like it's incomparable, is when Borat pretends he doesn't know how toilets work. And this woman, he's sort of pranked her into explaining how toilets work. He pretends to misunderstand. You know, he thinks that she's going to wipe his ass for him. And she has to explain. She actually. I still remember this. It was years ago. She says, nobody touches you but you. And there's this. I think that the humor of that, that you just couldn't do it any other way. The humor of it. We're talking about the body and how the body is this animalistic part that the artifice of society just can't ever tame.

And so this very idea that someone at her fancy dinner party is forced to confront this like teaching an adult to use a toilet, it's so horrifying that it's very funny. And the fact that we're in on the joke is what makes it pleasurable. And you know, later, Borat comes back to the dinner table with what appears to be a plastic bag of feces and asks where he should throw it away, which is so incredibly horrifying. You know, in the sense that I think it's the fear that we all have of sort of the body breaking loose on us. And that's something that anyone can identify with.

Like, underneath all of society, we are all really just bodies that could blow at any time.

1:19:05 Dylan: Yeah, I remember that scene very well. This sort of comedy of subterfuge or candid camera comedy. The thing that I find so disturbing is, on the one hand, I could find it funny, but it was only when I didn't pay any attention to the genuine sincerity of the people he was pranking.

1:19:25 Seth: Right.

1:19:25 Dylan: There's a way in which I would have found it utterly hilarious if it had been written as a skit. But knowing full well that that woman was participating in that utterly, sincerely, made it really not funny. And this is exactly the line Bergson would talk about it being there. If I identify her as a particular woman who is engaging in this sincere activity and doing her best with it, there's a way in which you might even laugh at it afterwards. Right. Especially if Key had been sincere in it. You could imagine the two of them if he were really engaging in that and you'd laugh at it. Oh, I was so absurd. Da, da, da, da. But the subterfuge, that was the part that I found mean spirited in a way that I found almost unwatchable.

1:20:09 Mark: It seems to make it more acceptable to me if I picture that after the shoot or they. Even if they show it like a Candid Camera thing, they show. Oh, it's just a joke, Right.

1:20:18 Jennifer: If the woman found it funny, it

1:20:19 Mark: has a good humor about it.

1:20:21 Dylan: I don't think any of them would have found it funny.

1:20:23 Jennifer: Yeah, it's troubling. It's very troubling. I mean, after that movie came out, back in the village in Kazakhstan, I believe they really filmed it in Romania. But back in what was supposed to be the Kazakhstan village, the man who had an amputated arm, who ends up wearing sort of a dildo arm in the end of the movie, he's like a giant rubber fist. He didn't know it was a sex toy. So he's filmed waving around this sex toy for an arm. And when he found out what it was, I mean, very offended. That just completely ruins it, you know, at least when the people are Americans, at least they've seen this kind of movie before. Like they got pranked, but at least they're part of our culture. Like they've seen Candid Camera.

1:20:56 Seth: At least I'm with Dylan on this one. That that type of humor I don't enjoy at all. I have a hard time finding things funny that I would find embarrassing. I get embarrassed by things and it creates a situation where I'm not able to enjoy whatever comedic element my might be there. Maybe that's just because I'm extremely middle class or bourgeois or something like that.

1:21:17 Jennifer: Do you think you're especially empathetic? Do you think that's the connection?

1:21:20 Seth: You know, it might be. I think these guys would tell you that I'm kind of sensitive.

1:21:26 Mark: I can fucking out compassion you into the ground.

1:21:28 Seth: I don't think. I don't think you could. There are television shows and I just see situations that I find painful to watch because I'm just embarrassed for the people that are in them. I can't get any humor out of it.

1:21:39 Mark: Saved by the Bell. There's a show that I cannot watch a minute of without getting so embarrassed for everyone involved. It is just so bad. And a friend of mine in college used to watch it sort of as an ironic goof. And I just could not understand it a bit. It was horrifying to me.

1:21:58 Seth: Which one was Saved by the Bell?

1:21:59 Mark: It's like this teen sitcom. It was like on Saturday morning tv, like way after we were kids. And has the woman that was in Showgirls screech and Screech. Yes. Is the famous actor, the nerdy kid. You can YouTube it, you know, I like that we're getting at this kind of contrast between senses of humor and things, which points at a deficit in Bergson's theory, because part of what he's trying to do is kind of like the objection. Back in our first Aesthetics episode, Arthur Danto objected to calling aesthetics, actually to calling it aesthetics at all, because aesthetics has to do with beauty.

And all the old style estheticians were all like, what is the beautiful? And treating that question very comparably to what is the good in ethics? And so what is the funny in this way? I think he's treating it sort of the same way. Whereas if you take a larger view of art and say, no, there are actually kinds of art that are not supposed to be beautiful at all. They're kind of scary and they're challenging in a different way. And there's really just no end of the purposes that you could pursue in art. I think humor, well, it's gonna be a little More restricted because there's supposed to be some potential actual laughter.

You know, maybe it's just so subtle and dry that you're not gonna actually laugh at it at all. But I think that is certainly something built into the purpose of it. But still, there are all these different kinds of humor. There's just warm and cuddly humor, and there's dark, stark, gazing at the abyss kind of humor. And you're gonna have different ideological objections to these things depending on who you are and what you're used to and things about your personality.

1:23:28 Seth: Well, that's true. You know, I asked earlier who people thought were funny, and I could put on two ends of the spectrum. For me, one end of the spectrum would be Arrested Development, the smartest, funniest television show that ever was, and on the other end would be Jackass. I know there are a lot of people that are amused by Jackass, but I can't sit through like a skit, Jen. Maybe it's not so much about being empathetic as maybe there's. I've got some issues about the body or something that, that I'm repressed. I like Chris Rock, I like Louis ck, I like smart comedians.

I like comedy that's used to make a point about society or politics. And I like character based humor where a character is established and then you can enjoy the way in which that character plays against other characters in the scene. You learn maybe they have some quirks or some unique character traits that get played out over and over again and then you get to see them in different contexts and how that plays out. That's the kind of humor that I like.

1:24:26 Dylan: Not nails being driven through a scrotum.

1:24:29 Seth: Not nails being driven through a scrotum.

1:24:31 Mark: Looking at the range of comedy, just like the range of art, I take the same sort of self flagellating, self improving attitude towards comedy as I do about art. That is, I don't find that it is a virtue to not appreciate some kind of art. So I will dive in and like, God damn it, I'm gonna understand. I'm gonna like this opera, I'm gonna get this minimalist electronic music, these fucked up avant garde paintings or performance art pieces, I'm at least gonna get it. So I will take the same thing with humor that the most goofy experimental stuff or my patience for the really, really least common denominator stuff is gonna be limited because there's just.

I know we had a comparable discussion about different types of music, that there's some music that is really aimed at 12 year olds. And as soon as you have heard a number of songs, you're not going to find this that interesting anymore. And so I guess I put a lot of what you would consider the really dumb stuff in that category, but in terms of it being extra mean or being turned off by the violent element or something like, I almost see that as a challenge like that. I will fucking enjoy this.

1:25:35 Dylan: You'll watch every single episode of Saw until you appreciate it.

1:25:40 Mark: There are limits, but I'll make myself watch one of them. If there is something that smart people can get out of a form of whatever personality they are, then there's something that you could get a hold of with repeated exposure. So yes, Evil Dead 2 is the good example of a almost comic booky movie with just over the top gore and stuff that at least the first time I saw it I thought was pretty damn funny. And I think if you just can't even get there, then there's something and you're limited in some way that makes me better than you. See, that was self deprecating humor.

1:26:14 Seth: Yeah, except that we think you actually believe that.

1:26:19 Mark: Doesn't it cut both ways like that? That's why when somebody is really self deprecating in their humor. Yes. Okay. They're probably not actually that low on themselves, but if it weren't a live issue, it wouldn't be funny for them

1:26:32 Dylan: if they weren't self aware, if they

1:26:34 Mark: didn't feel a little crummy about themselves, if they didn't have some part of them that they're kind of battling with.

1:26:40 Dylan: So a genuine aristocrat who really believed themselves to be better than ours would never find it funny nor make a joke about themselves, about being an aristocrat.

1:26:49 Jennifer: I think that person would have a hard time making jokes at all. It would be very difficult.

1:26:53 Wes: Well, I have a joke about Aristocrats actually that I was hoping to tell.

1:26:59 Seth: Not the Aristocrats, not that joke, is it?

1:27:02 Dylan: I set that up for you there, Wes, didn't I?

1:27:06 Mark: Doesn't like Mitt Romney. And actually I was reading some other news article about a really rich multi. Multi billionaire guy that just wrote a book telling you why it's actually good that there's as much division in pay as there is because the rich help the rest of the world so much more than they help themselves. Whatever.

1:27:20 Jennifer: Right?

1:27:21 Mark: Yeah. I mean I see this kind of joking like in some of the things that guys like that or Mitt Romney will say. They're kind of uncomfortable about it. It's an awkward situation. They sort of should be that in some ways they do think like, yeah, well, you're a lazy ass and so you didn't earn millions of dollars like I did, so fuck you. But at the same time, they don't really feel that way. They do sympathize with other people. So it's this ambivalence. That's one of the ways the humor is cathartic.

1:27:46 Jennifer: It's interesting that you mentioned that article. It was Edward Conard is that guy's name. Ah, yes, it's. It's not Canard. It's not Canard with an A, it's with an O. So it's sort of like a combination of canard and con artist. So that's nice. A person who's in that position, in a position of what I would call extreme power and privilege, it's really hard for that person to be funny about anything. I mean, if that person really wanted to be a comedian for some bizarre reason, maybe he could do okay with some wordplay, just some sort of like, let's not have a human connection at all.

And maybe you could go somewhere with that. But it's very difficult to be funny from that kind of position. And a lot of comedians have suffered that problem when they become too successful. I mean, Seinfeld doesn't really do stand up anymore because everyone knows he's Seinfeld. I mean, no one believes he has the same problems that we do. He said that himself. I mean, that's from the horse's mouth. I remember watching David Spade do comedy live a couple years ago. And this is, you know, after Just Shoot Me and he didn't even really do comedy.

I mean, comedians like that, they can tell jokes about. I'll just use like, I think the TSA is my go to example for hack comedy. Sure, we all hate the tsa. I don't know what the statistics are on whether they're really keeping us safe. But we all hate it. And they do seem to strip search a lot of grandmothers and four year olds. So we can all talk about that. That's something we have in common. And I think that what's funny is that even someone like David Spade can't escape that. Even Hillary Clinton can't escape that. People who are famous or powerful are still subject to it, which is why it's something we have in common.

But I watched David Spade do comedy and basically he didn't even do stand up. I mean, he used to know how, but now he just tells stories about what it's like to Be David Spade. And it was actually very entertaining. He told a funny story that we can't relate to at all. It was a funny story about having a cut on his penis and needing to see a doctor, but knowing that every doctor would know he was David Spade and how awkward that is. And so people who come from that position of extreme power or privilege, I mean, they sort of lose the ability to be what I would call traditionally comic.

I mean, there needs to be some sense of disenfranchisement to build off of.

1:29:38 Mark: So you don't think any actual kings would do the Mel Brooks. It's good to be the king as they molest their underlings.

1:29:45 Jennifer: That's funny because we're laughing sort of at him. When Mel Brooks is acting in character, we can laugh at his character, but we're sort of identifying with Mel Brooks who created the character. You know, we are laughing with Mel Brooks the actor at Mel Brooks character. But if that genuinely were a hilarious rich guy talking about his servants, that's not funny at all.

1:30:03 Mark: But would he find it funny? Could somebody in that position make that kind of joke to his fellow aristocrats? And that's just the kind of joke that they make because they're assholes. That seems perfectly imaginable to me that you don't have to be empathetic.

1:30:18 Jennifer: Sure. I mean, it's problems they all have in common, you know, like the other day I told my secretary to do one thing and she did another. Isn't that ridiculous? That's why I pay her less than I would pay a man. I'm sure there are people who would find that funny coming from some kind of shared place of awfulness. That's terrible. If there is a stand up club in Saudi Arabia, I'm sure it's fucking awful. Oh, if we let women drive, imagine what they would do. They'd be voting. It's hilarious. I'm sure whatever happens in a stand up club in Saudi Arabia is execrable in every way, but it comes from a shared place.

1:30:56 Wes: Well, except to the extent to which comedy is countercultural. Right. It often serves that purpose.

1:31:01 Jennifer: There's someone doing countercultural comedy in Saudi Arabia. God bless. You know.

1:31:05 Wes: Well, there's a huge underground, you know, in places like Iran and Saudi Arabia there's a very westernized rebellious youth cultures and things like that. I don't know to the extent in Saudi Arabia, but I know in Iran, for instance. But the point is that not all comedy is simply going to reflect the norms of the culture. It might be Challenging them.

1:31:22 Dylan: Well, like political comedy, right? George Carlin's like this. Robin Williams is like this. They have the personal comedy about their drug addictions and about stuff like that. And there's also the go to subjects of family and body and stuff like that that it seems to me that even well known everyday comics pull off. And I suspect that even in Saudi Arabia or wherever, it might not be the jokes about women driving, which it might very well be that that plays for laughs there. But there's also going to be all kinds of comedy that we recognize every day based upon family relations and taking craps on the toilet and stuff like that.

1:32:00 Wes: Yeah, Bergson talks of absentmindedness, and that can be of an individual, but it can be of society as a whole to the extent that a society can be stupid or have too much automatism. So, for instance, if you have a society where Catch 22 is coming to

1:32:16 Mark: mind, I'm not sure if that's the kind of thing.

1:32:18 Wes: Yeah, exactly, like bureaucratic, mechanical stuff going on, then that's going to be right for comedy. And of course, there's lots of that type of stuff with catch 22. The army is a great subject for that kind of thing. Any sort of social structure is ripe.

1:32:31 Dylan: Isn't political comedy straight up just making fun of other people?

1:32:33 Mark: You disagree with people or systems or views.

1:32:37 Wes: Catch 22, for instance, it's the bureaucracy of the army, the ridiculousness of it. So it's not simply, I'm a Democrat and you're a Republican and so I'm going to laugh at you. The more subtle or sophisticated type of satire will get at that element of rigidity that we can all recognize.

1:32:53 Dylan: Bergson's account works really well for something

1:32:56 Mark: like satire, if that's the kind of satire that you're talking about, that it's an automism that's going on, that you're commenting on something that doesn't make sense about society, which is, yeah, well, what

1:33:05 Dylan: other kind of satire is there?

1:33:06 Mark: But one of the most instructive things I found is when you see humor that you don't get because it's coming from a point of view that you don't share, that you don't understand. So what I've experienced with that is watching in general things with more conservative viewpoint than I have, and somebody's like, oh, you know, isn't it crazy how these liberals are so fucked up or something. I'm like, I'm not sure I get it. But I guess the way in which I don't get it is instructive to me because again, I have that sort of challenge with myself that I want to get it. I don't want to be left out of any joke or any enjoyable experience.

1:33:38 Dylan: You mean something different than like all in the Family with Carroll O'Connor.

1:33:42 Wes: Right, because he, Archie Bunker is the butt of the joke there.

1:33:45 Mark: Right. No, I'm talking about like a stand up who's just expressing they're funny. How men can have long hair. I don't know if they're boys or girl. I can't think of a good example because it goes over my head. It doesn't stick with me enough to repeat it.

1:33:59 Wes: Usually I just think it's a bad comic. I don't think in terms of. I don't get this. I mean, usually I get what he's trying do to. To do and I.

1:34:05 Mark: Well, because there's two ways of not understanding. You could not understand what the point they're trying to make, or you could understand the point they make, but not understand how anyone could find it funny. Yeah, and there's an audience of people on the special that you're watching laughing at them. So these people find it funny. I'm divorced from this segment of the population somehow.

1:34:24 Dylan: Well, wait, what about nervous laughter? There's this really interesting analysis, I think it was by Errol Morris of the Abu Ghraib photos, where I forget the name of the woman who's in there. Sort of the poster child for the horribleness of this thing where she's photographed and she's got some prisoners, she's got her foot on them or something, or has them on dog leashes and she's smiling. And there's this long analysis of how the smile is not superficially an indication of happiness or laughter or delight, but is also can either be forced or can be posed, or can also be nervous. All of which are circumstances that don't involve actual enjoyment. There's also that phenomena just with laughter in general, where people laugh not because they even really find it funny.

1:35:18 Mark: So all of Gallagher's audience is just laughing out of nervous laughter his entire career. Hey, we should wind down.

1:35:26 Jennifer: I need to sleep or I'll die. Okay, okay.

1:35:30 Mark: Next time we will be reading three works. The main course will be Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue from 1981. We will get through at least the first chapters, but as a prelude to that, to get an idea of what he's objecting to, I want to read G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica, chapter one. And C.L. stevenson's essay the Emotive Meaning of Ethical Terms. So more is sort of the endpoint of this trend of ethical intuitionism trying to make a science out of common sense morality. And Stevenson, a student of Moore is really comes down in saying that ethical terms aren't referring to anything in the world at all.

They're just expressing emotions. It's the hurrah, boo theory of ethics. It would be very nice if folks listening to this would give the $1 suggested minimum donation, although bigger amounts are of course, welcome. Some of the people that have done that since last time are Frederick Kiss or Kishi something, John Fillmore, Patrick Max Roesch, Russell Baker, Andrew Worth, Michael Davies, Deborah Wooliger, Justin Tiwald, Andrew Short, Garth Kane, Christopher Langley, Brent Dahlgren, and Stuart Palmer.

1:36:41 Dylan: Thanks, everybody.

1:36:42 Seth: Thank you, folks.

1:36:43 Wes: Thanks.

1:36:44 Mark: Yes, you should go on partiallyexaminedlife.com to participate. Discuss what has just gone here. Say how much you liked our amazing guests. If you go on there and click the Amazon link, anything you purchase, a cut of that will go to us and it won't cost you anything additional. So I encourage you to do that, really, for the rest of your life. Join our Facebook group, follow us on Twitter, spread the word. But enough of that that let's end.

1:37:09 Jennifer: All right.

1:37:10 Seth: Okay.

1:37:10 Jennifer: It's been a long night.

1:37:12 Mark: Well, that's the tradition is to go until we are reduced to incoherent. That's at least how I feel at the end of all these things. Being sleep deprived and whenever I was

1:37:23 Jennifer: in a philosophy class in college, I feel like generally the level of discourse was pretty high for undergraduates. I felt pretty good about it, but there was always this one guy who just didn't belong there. And I always think of him. He sort of in every class, he just seemed to have a really. It was always a bearded man. I don't know if that's a weird stereotype that I have, but it was always some bearded dude who sat at the back. And then in the middle of a discussion, you know, like you're talking about John Stuart Mill or something. That's just not hard. And in the middle of that discussion, the guy pipes up and he's like, but what if we don't really exist? And I feel like that is where the point of incoherence is, you know, when we just start.

1:37:58 Mark: That's a day on our blog of the common summer.

1:38:03 Jennifer: Fair enough.

1:38:05 Mark: Not to criticize any of you, the listeners who are all very smart.

1:38:10 Jennifer: All right.

1:38:11 Seth: Do you have anything you want to pimp?

1:38:13 Mark: Yeah. Do you have any shows coming up or.

1:38:14 Jennifer: Well, you can find all of my business online@jennisfamous.com and also all of my shows. I have one about philosophy, one about punctuation, and one about. It's called the History of women in 60 minutes and they're available for colleges. And 100% of all of my shows have happened because some nerdy professor type has found me on the Internet. So that's pretty much how it works. So thank you for me having. Having me.

1:38:35 Mark: Thank you.

1:38:37 Seth: Thanks.

1:38:37 Jennifer: Thank you so much, guys. Good night.

1:38:39 Mark: Good night, everyone.

1:38:40 Seth: Good night.

1:38:41 Wes: Good night.

1:38:45 Mark: How many nipples do you have?

1:38:46 Jennifer: How many nipples?

1:38:47 Mark: How many nipples?

1:38:48 Jennifer: How many nipples do you have? Do you have? Do you have. Can you check?

1:38:53 Mark: Can you check, please?

1:38:55 Jennifer: Please check. Can you check? Can you check? Please check. You have checkness of them frequently. How many nipples do you have? Do you have? Do you have how many nipples,

1:39:12 Mark: I wonder?

1:39:25 Jennifer: Yeah, so I was a philosophy major in college and I have the history of Western philosophy in, in 90 seconds if anyone's interested. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Alright, so here goes. Philosophy began when an ancient Greek man named Empedocles stuck his hand out and said, what the hell is all this stuff? He decided it was earth, air, water and fire. He left out beryllium and manganese, but it was a pretty good start considering there was no science. Yet. Descartes came along and he was famous for saying, even though I doubt, I cannot doubt that, that I exist, therefore making knowledge possible.

In order to prove that, he gave us the XY coordinate plane. Moving on. Hobbes said that we have to give up all of our powers to the king in order to be protected. But Locke came along and said, oh, not all of them, just some of them. In summary, Hobbes equals Patriot Act, Locke equals aclu. Following this, Kant introduced an ethical system that said you should only do things if it'd be cool if everybody did them. There's a problem with this. For instance, if we were all Marilyn Manson, society would fall apart. But as long as there's only one, we can enjoy his music with no repercussions.

To continue, Nietzsche said that God is dead and that also we should worship really strong people. It turns out Hitler liked this idea a lot, which in philosophy we call a faux pas. But then Jean Paul Sartre came along and said that nothing has any inherent meaning whatsoever. We have to make it up for ourselves. And that was $120,000 in four years down the drain And that's it. I'm Jennifer Desura. Thank you very much. Come on lady, don't say baby I don't want your baby I just want

1:41:20 Mark: your love Come on baby, don't say baby I don't want your baby I just want your love I just want your love. What you is boys.

1:41:43 Jennifer: Yeehaw.

1:41:46 Mark: Here we go, guys.

1:41:48 Jennifer: Come on, feed me. I know that you're beaten don't eat your weed, just eat my love Come on lady, don't say baby don't want

1:42:00 Mark: your baby I just want your love I just want your love Ah, come

1:42:08 Dylan: on,

1:42:11 Jennifer: come on lady oh, I want

1:42:14 Mark: you to Come on

1:42:16 Jennifer: Come on lady come anywhere you like. Come on, come on,

1:42:30 Mark: Come on. How about a little solo? Don't want your baby I just want your boy

1:43:32 Jennifer: Come on. Love

1:43:36 Mark: time. Bridget.

1:43:40 Jennifer: That's cake. I was seeing people.