Start with the South Parkesque absurdist beginning of this series, if that’s the kind of thing that you’re into. Satire and Irony as Political Tools I’ve already written on humor for this series; shouldn’t this topic have already been covered? Well, no. As Wikipedia tells us (citing Robert Corum writing about French satire), satire need not be actually funny. Animal Continue Reading …
Philosophy of Humor (Philosophical Issues Related to the #thatasshole Campaign, Part 1)
Mark muses on why cursing, or ideological humor, might be not funny for everyone, and why it’s partially THEIR GODDAMN FAULT due to their lack of aesthetic self-development. Motherfuckers. JK! 🙂
Living Ironically: The Upshot
With a few comments on my last post to spur me on, here are some hopefully final thoughts on the ironic life for the moment. Irony is one of the characteristic social modes for Americans of at least the Generation X (that would be mine, i.e. 40ish) and younger. I can’t speak for how pervasive it is demographically in terms Continue Reading …
More Examples of Irony as Epoché: Cake, Cliché and PEL Bombast
Following up on my last post, here are some more examples, some cultural and some personal, to make my point. 1. Consider Cake: Listen to Cake singing “I Will Survive.” When this rendition came out in 1996, it was greeted as a “naughty cover.” A parody of some sort. When I hear it now, I just think it’s awesome, and Continue Reading …
Humor as Epoché: Irony and Hypothesis
Near the end of our humor episode, I threw out the truism that humor tends to deal with something we’re uncomfortable with, like death, sex, or embarrassment itself. The example I gave was of someone like Ed Conard making jokes about being rich. Now, I’ve since seen Conard on the Daily Show, and while he was good natured enough, I Continue Reading …
Tripe, Sklep, and the Unexpected (Dave Barry to Michael Brodsky)
Just because I brought it up on the episode, I call the new readers’ attention to a book I wrote in 1993, Tripe. You can get it for free here. I also blogged in 2010 about the first few chapters. I had a few purposes in writing this, one of which was to explore the thesis that what makes something Continue Reading …
Dave Chappelle
Black Americas have historically used comedy to cope with the sad realities of racism. Living in what Cornel West called “a perpetual state of emergency” has heightened Black American’s sensitivity to sometimes-subtle social truths. The best of the Black-American comedians cast a fresh light on every day social interactions in sometimes painful but often hilarious ways. Dave Chappelle is among Continue Reading …
In Defense of the Expectation Thesis
[Editor’s note: We’re happy here to get a contribution on humor from Philosophy Bro who was on our recent Wittgenstein episodes. Give him a nice round of applause.] I think that “funny” is one of those words that you’re going to have a real bad time trying to delimit or explain entirely. But, uh… fuck it. Here goes. In Wittgensteinian Continue Reading …
When Things are Not Funny
While discussing (through Bergson’s book) how humor works in us, we had a couple of forays into related off-topics. The first was the question of laughter and delight. My contention was that the laughter of delight may be related, but is not the same thing as a reaction to something being funny. The second was the question of something not Continue Reading …
Humor Case Study 2: Henny Youngman
So Mark took on the comedy stylings of Louis CK in the first case study, someone who establishes a core insight and then plays it out through both content and performance. I’d like to take a look at two other (multi-generational!) comedians who rely on establishing a premise quickly using audience assumptions and then make a joke by twisting either Continue Reading …
Humor Case Study: Louie CK
We mentioned Louie CK on the episode in the context of his body image bits, but since he’s not a paradigm case of that (meaning it’s not his only shtick), we didn’t pursue it. So here’s a piece from I chose semi-randomly for us to discuss, having to do with kid naming and in general dealing with your offspring: Watch Continue Reading …
Borat on Display
In the episode we spent some time discussing Sacha Baron Cohen’s humor of duping people (I don’t know whether he does this in his current movie, which sounds like it has more scripted elements), which I generally think is great, while Dylan and Seth found it hard to sit through given the duping of the innocent. This scene from his Continue Reading …
Science Determines Beauty
This Reuters video (and I’m sorry about the 30 second commercial that you have to sit through to get to it) depicts “Britain’s Most Natural Beauty,” where the contest “wasn’t just a matter of subjective beauty, but settled with science. Researchers said that the distance between facial features, and the width and length of the face are deciding factors for Continue Reading …
Humor and Imagination (and Humor vs. Good Humor)
One point I had intended to make during the episode was about the role of the imagination in aesthetic appreciation, including appreciation of humor. One distinction that Bergson glossed over and which we weren’t very consistent about making is the difference between “falling within the category of humor” and “actually being funny.” This came through a bit in our discussion Continue Reading …
PREVIEW-Episode 57: Henri Bergson on Humor
On Bergson’s Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1900). What is humor? Bergson says that, fundamentally, we laugh as a form of social corrective when others are slow to adapt to society’s demands. Other types of humor are derivative from this. With guest Jennifer Dziura.
Episode 57: Henri Bergson on Humor (Citizens Only)
On Bergson’s Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1900). What is humor? Bergson says that, fundamentally, we laugh as a form of social corrective when others are slow to adapt to society’s demands. Other types of humor are derivative from this. With guest Jennifer Dziura. Learn more.
End songs: “The Nipple Song” (1991) and “Come On, Lady” (1990, with Ken Gerber and Brian Hirt) from Mark Lint’s Black Jelly Beans & Smokes, plus Jen’s standup.
Topic for #57: Henri Bergson on Humor
Here’s the episode. What is humor? Henri Bergson’s Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1900) states that humor is a social tool by which we mildly scold each other for being insufficiently adaptive and flexible. On this account, the paradigm of humor is the absent-minded person, but any form of idiocy or freakishness or social ineptness also Continue Reading …