Ricky Gervais calls Sam to ask why we dream? They discuss why puns are terrible and breakdown some of the mechanics of comedy. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Hello? | |
| Ricky? | |
| How's it going? | |
| Hey, uh, good. | |
| How's it going? | |
| Yeah, good. | |
| So, question. | |
| Yes, I'm ready. | |
| Go on. | |
| I'm ready. | |
| Wait, wait, let me make sure both feet are on the floor. | |
| I'm ready. | |
| What are dreams for? | |
| And I mean, do they provide a sort of medical or evolutionary advantage? | |
| Or are they just a byproduct of a living brain, which would be boring? | |
| So what are they? | |
| What are they for? | |
| Are they for anything? | |
| I don't, I don't, I don't even use the, the, I can't think of the correct terminology to ask you. | |
| That probably sounds like a dumb thing, but you know what I mean? | |
| Okay. | |
| I know what fingers are for. | |
| You know, I know what eyes are for. | |
| What are dreams for? | |
| Dreams are for the same thing as fingers. | |
| You're just using them wrong. | |
| You hit it perfectly, the question, what are they for, or are they just a byproduct? | |
| You know, the technical word people use in philosophy there is an epiphenomenon. | |
| They're not doing anything, they're just associated with something that's doing something. | |
| I don't think we know, really. | |
| I mean, we know that certain good and necessary things happen during REM sleep, which is generally associated with dreaming. | |
| That's not the only stage of sleep where we have dreams, but there seems to be several things going on. | |
| At least there's a process of memory consolidation that happens during REM. | |
| If REM sleep is disrupted a lot, your memory certainly suffers, but that's not... So is it, is it that, so could you say that it's your brain getting work done that it can't do when you're conscious, because it's, you're using it for other things, and it goes, right, he's asleep, let's do this stuff, let's stock take, let's put, let's, let's, is it like putting a kid's toys away when he's asleep? | |
| I can't grasp what you mean by, how do they consolidate memories? | |
| Where do memories go? | |
| Is it like putting it away in a drawer? | |
| You're going to have to use a lot of metaphor for me! | |
| I want to go back to the distinction you made quite naturally at the beginning, whether the dream experience itself is doing something, or whether it's just a byproduct of the thing that's doing something, and that I don't think we know. | |
| There's a remaining question. | |
| Why should there be any experiential component to this memory consolidation? | |
| It seems like the brain should be able to consolidate memories in the dark without there being any experience of it. | |
| It does most of what it does in the dark, or certainly seems to, which is to say that you're not conscious at any point of the maintenance it's doing or any of the other things it's doing. | |
| So, why we should have these bizarre experiences every night, and whether that is necessary for memory consolidation or anything else, that's a question. | |
| I totally accept that. | |
| If someone said, listen, this is synapse jumping and pinging off, and they're hallucinations that don't mean anything. | |
| Because you know you're not you're not engaging sort of critical thinking because you're asleep. | |
| I could totally accept that but I wonder why after You know, millions of years of evolution that they seem to be so important. | |
| No one doesn't. | |
| There's no one that doesn't dream. | |
| We do it every night. | |
| And also, isn't there isn't there a certain degree of why? | |
| Why? | |
| OK, right. | |
| This is why I think it might be pseudoscience and nonsense and and anecdotal evidence that has made me think there's a reason to them, because I remember when I was I was doing chemistry. | |
| And we were told that Kekulé, when he was trying to work out the structure of benzene, had a dream of a snake biting its own tail. | |
| And he woke up and said, it's a ring, right? | |
| Now, I can both accept that it might be giving you cryptic clues, because, you know, a lot of things happen in your brain that are subconscious, you know. | |
| I could also accept that that's nonsense. | |
| He made it up. | |
| It's a coincidence. | |
| He knew the answer. | |
| He went to sleep with the answer. | |
| And then, you know, I almost want to know the magic and the science, and I want them to be the same thing. | |
| Do you know what I mean? | |
| Well, most dreams are like a bad television show that just got greenlit 250,000 years ago and no one has figured out how to get it off the air. | |
| They're not producing insights into science, right? | |
| It's just noise. | |
| I think one thing that dreams reveal about our minds is that it's possible for us to be pushed into new circumstances. | |
| You know, suddenly I mean you go to bed having every right to expect to stay in your bed and the next thing you experience is something quite different and you're not even remotely surprised by the transition. | |
| Your conscious mind is suddenly put in relationship to people who aren't actually there. | |
| You know, some people might be dead, some people might be, you know, famous people you don't know. | |
| Yeah. | |
| So, so, you know, I could have had a dream I was talking to Ricky Gervais before I met Ricky Gervais, and I wouldn't be surprised at all, right? | |
| Unless it's a lucid dream, which is its own thing. | |
| Well, we're getting Cartesian now, because this obviously could be a dream. | |
| I've had this dream. | |
| I've had a dream where I'm unaware that it's a dream, and I'm talking to dream characters, and I'm lecturing them on this very point. | |
| You realize, this could be a dream right now. | |
| And they're all looking at me. | |
| Yeah, I often have self-awareness in dreams. | |
| In fact, if I have nightmares, I now have got to the point where in my dream I can say, Jane, Jane, wake me up, wake me up. | |
| And sometimes I think she said, I have said her name. | |
| And obviously in the dream now, I'm in the nightmare, but I'm in bed and I know Jane is trying to wake me up. | |
| And it takes, I don't know how long it takes in reality. | |
| It probably seems to me like half the night and to her like three seconds. | |
| Well, that's a lucid dream. | |
| That's the opposite of what I was just confessing. | |
| I've had a dream where I had no idea I was dreaming, and I'm lecturing dream characters that this could be a dream. | |
| I'm having a conversation of the sort that we're having right now, and they're looking at me like I'm a total moron, and then I wake up. | |
| But this is one thing that reveals, actually, an example probably closer to your heart is Have you ever had someone tell you a joke in a dream, and the punchline actually works? | |
| I think so. | |
| I think I've had dreams where I've invented jokes, and I've woken up excited, and I've remembered it, and it's absolute bollocks. | |
| It's not as funny. | |
| It doesn't make any sense. | |
| But what I have had that's worked, I've dreamt tunes and I've gone down and I've worked them out and they're pretty good. | |
| Right. | |
| So that's because I think the reason is that a tune is one thing, but a joke is a misdirection. | |
| It's a magic act and it plays with expectation and logic and surprise. | |
| And I think that dreams, if I've got this right, They sort of take critical thinking out of it. | |
| They take out logic. | |
| So it's purely your emotions firing and practicing and just being spilt. | |
| So that would make sense that you'd wake up laughing that you've just invented the funniest dream in the world. | |
| But the logic and the critical thinking part of it says, well, it was actually bollocks. | |
| You just felt the fun. | |
| So I get that. | |
| Yeah. | |
| I have an embarrassing example of that, but I was going for the opposite of that. | |
| But my example of that, just to show you how insane one can be in the mere feeling without any anchor to logic or kind of reality testing. | |
| I once woke up beside my wife laughing my head off from a joke told in a dream. | |
| And I turned to her and I said, I just dreamt the funniest joke. | |
| And she, being wiser in the ways of science, said, it's not going to be funny. | |
| I said, no, no. | |
| And she said, it's not going to be funny. | |
| And I said, here's the joke. | |
| What sound does a monster make? | |
| And she said, I don't know. | |
| What sound does a monster make? | |
| And then I drum on the end table, the sound. | |
| In the dream, it was something like this. | |
| And then I actually go one further round. | |
| I say, no, no, that's not it. | |
| And then my psychosis lifted, right? | |
| I actually thought I could deliver the punchline a second time and it would land. | |
| And it was just me drumming on the end tape. | |
| Because you were still close to your subconscious dream state where you were convinced that this was... So your emotional side outweighed your logic. | |
| Your logic had to get up and rub its eyes and put its clothes on and go, Sam, that doesn't work. | |
| And you go, oh no, it doesn't work. | |
| I quite like that because that's like a child's dream. | |
| Yeah. | |
| That's sort of like a child's dream because they've nearly got it right. | |
| It nearly works. | |
| It's got the rhythm. | |
| of the joke, but it doesn't quite work on a comedic level. | |
| And it's the same as that. | |
| Yeah, that's interesting. | |
| But I'm wondering, have you ever had the opposite experience where something actually quite rational and logical and fit for export into waking life has been communicated to you in a dream? | |
| Like the punchline actually works. | |
| I can't remember. | |
| I can't remember. | |
| And no, I can't remember, which is disappointing, isn't it? | |
| I could imagine that dreams could almost be like a simulator, where there were no distractions. | |
| You're close. | |
| Obviously, you're unconscious. | |
| Your brain's doing its thing, and it's taking you through scenarios, almost, that you could do when you're daydreaming and using logic. | |
| But obviously it's only on an emotional level, which is still good. | |
| If, you know, there could be an argument or there might be research done that the reason why logic's kept out of it is because it can be stifling in art. | |
| That, you know, your imagination is bigger than your critical thinking. | |
| So, you know, it's sort of like it's an infinite world emotion, isn't it? | |
| It can take you anywhere. | |
| It can take you anywhere. | |
| You can fly. | |
| You can shoot people. | |
| You can do anything that, you know, you can't practice in art. | |
| In real life. | |
| So maybe it's only preparing you. | |
| It could be that it's only strengthening you up emotionally. | |
| Like a kid dreams of their grandfather dying and then it's not quite as bad when it happens. | |
| Could that have any sort of value there? | |
| That it strengthens you emotionally in the sense that it takes your mind where your body hasn't been yet. | |
| You know, I don't know, because it is so discontinuous with what tends to happen in the waking state. | |
| I mean, that is, if you're sane, right? | |
| I mean, because insofar as the waking state begins to resemble what you experience in dreams, it becomes pretty dysfunctional. | |
| Like, you know, thinking that this is the funniest joke you've ever heard and it actually makes no sense. | |
| I mean, that is madness. | |
| Well, what's very interesting about that is, is that It shows that comedy is an intellectual pursuit as opposed to an emotional one. | |
| And I've always thought that as soon as you start putting emotion into comedy, it fails on a certain level, even down to the point that if you're saying things that the audience don't agree with or don't like, or it's a contentious thing, or it's a dark subject, they won't allow themselves to like the joke as much. | |
| As if it's just syntax or, you know, a pun or something. | |
| You know, that works for everyone if they understand the language, whereas... Not puns. | |
| Not puns. | |
| Spare me the... Well, puns are... I don't think puns are funny, but what I mean is, it shows that you understand... you have to understand that language and therefore you have to get... | |
| The joke. | |
| So, a pun is quite a good vehicle so that you've understood language. | |
| And also, it shows the misdirection very clearly, a pun. | |
| Again, not funny. | |
| So, let's linger there for a second. | |
| Some people obviously think puns are funny. | |
| Why are some people allergic to puns? | |
| I mean, that difference of opinion comedically. | |
| Do you have any thoughts about that? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Once you've done one, you know, you've seen them all really. | |
| They're the same thing. | |
| It's almost like a nod of the head. | |
| I understand those two words have different meanings. | |
| I saw the misdirection. | |
| It was a surprise. | |
| It's a release. | |
| There's no way that you could be crying with laughter on the floor at a pun. | |
| Like you could with something that, you know, That's fascinating, though. | |
| Is it too brief, or it's just too... its object being a language is too superficial, or what? | |
| No, I think on a couple levels. | |
| I think, really, one thing is that it's only discovered. | |
| It was always there. | |
| A pun was always there, because the dictionary was always there. | |
| So, with a pun, it takes someone to Suddenly stumble across those two words and put them into a sentence. | |
| And, you know, it's almost like you couldn't claim. | |
| If one comedian did a pun and another comedian who was a punster did a pun, he couldn't claim. | |
| You couldn't say, oh, no, you heard me say that. | |
| You'd go, well, no, it was in the dictionary. | |
| It was there. | |
| It's almost like it's not so creative. | |
| It's more like a found object, a pun, and you can be clever with it. | |
| And you know what? | |
| There are some amazing punsters, but I still think it's not as funny As someone falling over, because it's not visceral. | |
| You know, anthropologists say that the first bit of comedy was one caveman laughing and another caveman hit his head. | |
| Why? | |
| Empathy. | |
| That caveman knew that that hurt, because he's done it, and he knew that that other caveman didn't want to do it. | |
| And that's funny. | |
| That's actually funny. | |
| Okay? | |
| Because we feel it as well. | |
| I've almost contradicted myself, saying that it's an intellectual pursuit, as opposed to an emotional one. | |
| That's interesting. | |
| Well, yeah, obviously there's other types of humor. | |
| I'm going to stick to my initial premise that comedy is an intellectual pursuit, because I think my examples that are emotional aren't comedy. | |
| They're hardwired, visceral. | |
| They're funny, but they couldn't be called comedy, because I think comedy is some sort of creative framework to tickle your funny bone. | |
| Whereas, you know, having a sense of humor, you can look at the sky and smile. | |
| You wouldn't call it comedy. | |
| But we have this phrase, physical comedy. | |
| You've got Charlie Chaplin and, you know, everyone on up from there. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Making us laugh, or often making us laugh, by falling in the right places. | |
| Yeah, but there are physical jokes. | |
| I think the difference, if you're walking along the street and someone slips and it's their head and says, fucking out! | |
| That's funny, right? | |
| That's funny for the caveman reason, right? | |
| That's funny, we empathize. | |
| It's not us, right? | |
| They didn't want to do it. | |
| I think with something like Keaton and Chaplin, there are built-in jokes. | |
| There are actual built-in jokes, like someone bending down, missing the plank, getting up, tipping out, seeing a lady, getting hit in the plank. | |
| That's a constructed physical. | |
| They're using physicality there, like we'd use words and sentences and surprises and a joke. | |
| I still think that's different to just seeing someone falling over. | |
| You couldn't call comedy. | |
| But it can be the funniest thing. | |
| Well, it's the mismatch between, you know, having a, you know, a sick old person fall over. | |
| That's not funny, unless you're in a sociopathic frame of mind. | |
| But having a person who's full of pretension About their own station in life all over, it gets to the funny. | |
| And that's what, you know, when you create comedy and narrative, you know, you do, you do allow that because you're almost pandering to the audience that in fiction, we create our own heroes and villains as role play for the soul. | |
| So that, you know, villains get their comeuppance, heroes are rewarded and you make the world perfect. | |
| And you're right, pretension is the opposite of heroic. | |
| So when someone's smug and hits their head, that's funnier than the hero hitting his head. | |
| In fact, you could say the difference between comedy and drama is that drama doesn't show people's It's almost a celebration of being a loser, comedy. | |
| And as soon as you lose that, you start getting into drama. | |
| comedy at its best says we're all idiots so it's fine it's almost a celebration of being a loser comedy and as soon as you lose that you start getting into drama as soon as as soon as the the people are perfect or heroic or don't do anything wrong that's not funny same as stand-up if someone comes out and tells you how they outwitted the world how brilliant they are how you know what a great day they've had and you know they're infeasibly handsome | |
| and you go this isn't funny just like someone showing you holiday snaps of the perfect holiday you You want someone to come out, slip, bang his head, tell you what a terrible day he's had, and with his blessing, you're laughing more, because you want to hear, you don't want to hear, perfection isn't funny, it's just not funny. | |
| Flaws are funny. | |
| Mistakes are funny. | |
| There's this comedian, you might know him if you're a bit of an Anglophile, called Les Dawson. | |
| He was around in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s. | |
| And it was a great Northern comedian. | |
| He loved language. | |
| He was almost Alan Bennett-like in his, you know, he'd tell these funny stories. | |
| But he used to do this thing where he'd play the piano and he'd get the, and he'd hit the wrong notes, but he was very arrogant about it. | |
| And he'd smile and he'd wink like he was Liberace. | |
| And it was, it was, and it was hilarious. | |
| And I've, I've thought of that for years. | |
| And, and I almost use that as a metaphor for sort of dark humor. | |
| We're laughing, right? | |
| Because we're laughing at the blind spot that he thinks he's brilliant and we know he's not. | |
| Right? | |
| But we can only laugh if we know that tune. | |
| If we don't know that tune, we don't know the mistakes. | |
| So I think people laugh at the wrong thing because they know what the right thing is. | |
| And I've tried to apply that to, you know, everything in comedy, politics, whatever. | |
| And I think that's a good feeling. | |
| Just like people when they laugh because they get the pun, it's almost a celebration of understanding and surprise. | |
| And I think that's interesting. | |
| Laughing at the wrong thing, because you know what the right thing is. | |
| Those notes are the bits we laugh at. | |
| When he hits the wrong note, we laugh at that wrong note. | |
| Because it sounds bad, because we know what the right thing is. | |
| And that might be also an interpersonal Understanding of what's right in music, because I'm sure there are some avant-garde pieces of music that sound worse, where they've explored it in, you know, seconds, and, you know, and it sounds to the average person a monstrosity, but to, you know, the people who understand it, would they appreciate it more? | |
| I make it a point to laugh at those people. | |
| Well, of course, I'll tell you an anecdote here. | |
| I was at college with a guy, and He was studying languages and he went to see this foreign film. | |
| And it was subtitled, the audience, all the students watching this. | |
| And there was one bit where a Russian guy was talking to another Russian guy and it wasn't subtitled. | |
| And so he told a joke in Russian and one guy who was studying Russian at the back went, Just to let everyone know. | |
| And I think, right, that joke can't be that funny. | |
| You're just letting everyone know you understood a joke in Russian, right? | |
| So there's that celebration as well, and that you're right about the retention of them. | |
| But maybe not. | |
| Maybe, you know, because I can't get into jazz. | |
| I've tried. | |
| But then there's gateway things. | |
| Oh, that's good. | |
| I get it. | |
| And slowly, you know, and all the things I love now were an acquired taste. | |
| They were challenging. | |
| You know, I didn't like Radiohead at first. | |
| You're now drinking scotch for breakfast? | |
| Wow, that's another thing. | |
| You can't just, yeah, pure questions are probably not good for you. | |
| So I get it. | |
| I understand it. | |
| But I think you sometimes have to work at stuff to appreciate them more. | |
| And, you know, I suppose I've been worried about pretension, but now If I believe someone, if someone... I'll give you another example. | |
| Okay, so when I was on the dole, what do you say? | |
| On welfare? | |
| I left college and I didn't have a job and I had no money. | |
| Yeah, welfare. | |
| Yeah, welfare, right. | |
| So yeah, no money. | |
| So what I used to do all day is just run. | |
| I used to run around London, right? | |
| I thought I'd keep fit and I couldn't afford to use the subway. | |
| And I saved up all my money for a pint of beer. | |
| And I used to go to art galleries because they were free. | |
| And I remember I went in one art gallery and there was a Dali exhibition on. | |
| And I saw for the first time lobster telephone. | |
| So it's basically a telephone with a lobster on as the receiver. | |
| And I saw it and I looked down And it just said, Lobster Telephone. | |
| And I laughed, because I just thought, that's so funny and so primitive to do a, you know, he didn't give a highfalutin title, he called it Lobster Telephone. | |
| And I laughed, and a couple of people who were looking at it gave me a dirty look. | |
| As if to go, what are you doing here? | |
| You, you scruffy... You sweaty bastard. | |
| Yeah, you don't know anything. | |
| And it really annoyed me. | |
| And it's that thing in that Woody Allen film. | |
| I wanted to get Dali out and go, were you joking? | |
| And he'd go, yes, of course I was joking. | |
| I go, see? | |
| Fuck off. | |
| So, you know, I'm very aware of pretension, but... | |
| Do you know Dolly? | |
| They're selling out and they're selling out. | |
| At the end of his life, he would just sign blank canvases. | |
| Really? | |
| They'd pay him, I forget what it was, but something like $20,000 to just sign away, and he would just sign endless numbers of blank canvases for that people could do whatever they wanted with. | |
| That's amazing. | |
| I heard an anecdote about Picasso, which is one of my favourite things ever about getting good at something, I guess. | |
| Towards the end, he used to do the same for charity, and people would queue up And he'd, uh, he'd do a little squiggle, a little Picasso squiggle for $500 or something. | |
| And one woman queued up and he squiggled a thing and, you know, she went, you're going to charge me $500. | |
| That took you a few seconds. | |
| And he said, no, madam. | |
| It took me all my life. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And I think that's so good. | |
| People who are great at something, it doesn't look like they're trying hard. | |
| It doesn't look like they're, you know. | |
| So I do like that and I do appreciate that 10,000 hours to be genius. | |
| But I am in awe of things that I can't do, like getting back to music. | |
| I mean, it's like downloading emotions. | |
| I don't understand. | |
| Why does some pieces of music, with no association, right? | |
| It's not, you know, my gran didn't used to play it. | |
| A chord can make me feel sick, like I want to cry and laugh at the same time because it's so beautiful. | |
| Now that must be, that must be some sort of hard wiring, mustn't it? | |
| But why? | |
| We weren't, there weren't orchestras when we were Australopithecus. | |
| Why? | |
| Why does that? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Wow. | |
| Yeah, well, it's clearly a kind of super-stimulus. | |
| Do you know this concept of a super-stimulus? | |
| No. | |
| Someone who was interacting with a species of seagull was raising these seagull chicks, and the mother seagull has a red dot on her beak to which the chicks orient and bond. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And so they created a fake mother with a specially large red dot. | |
| Oh, I've seen this! | |
| Yes, yeah. | |
| And it was even more effective than the natural version. | |
| I actually think television and film is a kind of super stimulus for us, and it's one of the reasons why we find it so captivating, because I can't remember if we spoke about this when we did a podcast. | |
| I wonder if it just makes, I just think it makes, you're there, you can see things you couldn't possibly see, it's not like a, you know, you can't, in a documentary about Vikings, you don't see marauding Vikings with personality, whereas when you watch, you know, a great production, it's like you're seeing real life, even though it's fiction, you're seeing things you shouldn't really have seen. | |
| Well, I think the crucial thing is, yeah, you're seeing things you shouldn't or couldn't have seen in a condition where you're invisible. | |
| This is what's amazing. | |
| I can look at your face when you're on screen and I'm unimplicated. | |
| Yeah. | |
| There's nothing you're going to do with your eyes that's going to expose me to your glance. | |
| And so it's this experience of just transcendent voyeurism. | |
| Yeah. | |
| But I also think it still has to be good because otherwise there wouldn't be such a thing as a great film and a terrible film. | |
| And I know that's subjective, but that's true of everyone's. | |
| You turn things off. | |
| This isn't doing it for me. | |
| Why am I watching this? | |
| you know so yeah it is that it is that experience and there's another one we're on that right in the 30s when people saw a film they were blown away but when we watch it now we go oh it's black and white it's a bit flickery there's no special effects you know worse than that my daughter i've got a i've got a 12 year old daughter who's not impressed by films i know blew me away when i was | |
| Well, I think you've hit on something with the participation, because that's why video games are bigger than movies, because you are participating. | |
| I think that people want to be part of every cause of web they can, they want to cause They want to cause the commotion. | |
| They want to have an effect on the world. | |
| So I think the next level is a film that's as good as The Godfather where you're in it. | |
| I think that's the next level. | |
| You do and say things and those characters react. | |
| Or we can all become as stupid as we are in dreams and just find everything just amazing. | |
| Oh! | |
| Yeah, well that got back to the... Yeah, so basically you don't know the answer. | |
| Alright, thanks. |