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June 22, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
10:38
1686 Comedy
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So an interesting question was asked recently on the message board, and that question was, what is comedy?
What is comedy for?
What is humor for? Why do we enjoy it?
Why does it make us laugh? And I guess the why we enjoy it is because it makes us laugh.
And I've puzzled this over over the years, and I've put together a few thoughts that I'm not going to claim are in any way inclusive.
But I think are evocative and perhaps even provocative ways of looking at the question of humor.
The one thing that seems to be true of humor is that it's like a mini-mystery.
A joke is like a mini-mystery.
And it's like a very, very short story with a twist, right?
So, to take a classic joke...
A man walks into a bar.
Ooh! Right?
This is a...
A man walks into a bar and you expect it to be a drinking place, right?
Like a tavern.
But it's a bar as in a bar of metal or something like that.
And so he goes, ooh! And so you're expecting it to be a long joke.
And you're expecting... When it says a man walks into a bar, that's also a classic setup for a joke.
Like, you know, three men walk into a bar and blah, blah, blah.
And so you're expecting it to be a bar, and you're expecting it to be a longer joke, so you kind of mentally prepare yourself for one thing, and then there's a twist, and when somebody goes, uh, it's like, well, what's that?
That's the end of the joke? Wait a second, what does that mean?
Oh, a man walks into a metal bar, or something like that, right?
And so there's a setup, there's an expectation, there's a twist, and one of the things that I think is definitely true of humor is that it...
It incites you, in a way, to pay very close attention to language, to the manipulative powers and possibilities of language.
I don't mean you would do this for any nefarious means, but I think it's important for alertness.
So, something that my brother used to, sort of a quote joke my brother used to play on me was, what's one and one?
And I would say two, and then he'd write one next to each other, and he'd say, no, it's eleven.
And of course, if you would then say 11 the next time, he'd say, no, 2.
You don't even know what 1 and 1 is.
I mean, that's just a bit of a mind game or whatever, right?
But what it does say is that it says, pay attention to the phrase and here, because it can be interpreted in two ways.
The first way, of course, what is one and one is two, or the other one, what is one and one and eleven.
Now, he doesn't say one plus one.
If he said one plus one, it would be lamer to say eleven, but one and one could be interpreted to mean either eleven or to mean two.
And so, it's a way of saying, pay attention to language.
And that is, to me, a comedy It's all about alertness.
It's about training your mind to look for nuance, to be alert to twists or to changes.
It's a form of mental exercise in the same way that music is, and we can get into that perhaps another time.
Another time. So, my experience of comedy was, and this is perhaps more of a British style of comedy, but it really was around Mental alertness and it also was around the breaking of convention.
I mean, the war between habit and innovation in the mind is deep and powerful and fundamental to human progress, right?
So, if you want to write a new or a novel kind of story, novel kind of story, great use of language stuff.
If you want to write a new kind of story, it doesn't do much good to invent your own language, right?
So, creativity Creativity is a real challenge because you have to use existing things to build something new when so much has already been built.
As they say, there is nothing new under sun or moon.
There is only a pendulum that swings back and forth for the most part.
And so creativity is a genuine challenge.
Even the Dada is Poets that I talked about in the Death of the West part 2.
The Dada is Poets Did not invent a new language.
They simply broke the conventions of the existing language.
Or Gertrude Stein, who had on her notepaper, on her stationery, the phrase, a rose is a rose is a rose, was attempting to undo all of the florid language associated with the rose.
Your lips are like a red, red rose.
A rose is like a sinking sunset of swirly flowered ammonia.
Making stuff up, right? But a rose had been so analogized and become itself such a metaphor within the English language that one of the attempts, conscious or not, of that group of writers,
of which the most prominent was Ernest Hemingway, who went to go and visit Gertrude Strine and Alice Toklas, where they were living, I think in Paris, was to remuscularize the language, was to detach Simple objects from the increasingly florid language that surrounded them.
And so, instead of saying, a rose is like a hamina hamina, her statement was, a rose is a rose is a rose.
It's a rose! And you don't need to surround it with all this florid language to evoke the image in the mind.
In fact, too much florid language destroys the rose and replaces it with nebulous puffs of poetic nonsense.
And this is why a lot of the writers back then We're really into this fairly bald and muscular prose, where a language was stripped down to some pretty core essentials, and you can really see this in Hemingway's writing.
And they stayed away from the poetic, which I thought was an interesting swing in language.
Sorry, minor sidestep.
So humor, to me, has always been about setting up expectations And then changing them.
And that is something that...
And also containing very compact levels of truth.
Very, very compact levels of truth.
So, you know, some of those, you know, sometimes fairly bigoted statements, you know, a Jew and a Black and an Oriental walk into a bar and then they go hamna, hamna, hamna.
Now, those are, of course, about reinforcing stereotypes.
And the truth that they contain is stereotypical and quite probably bigoted.
But it does tell you a lot about a particular piece of information.
Sorry, about a particular perspective that people have.
And so that setting up of expectations, the need to pay attention to language.
There is, in humor also, There can be, and I think quite often is, an element of aggression.
It's like magicians can be that way as well, illusionists.
I'm in control, and I'm going to outsmart you.
A joke is all about outsmarting you.
So a joke that is too obvious is not a joke.
So if the joke had been, what's one and one, two, well that's not a joke, that's just a math question, right?
But, sorry, what's one plus one with two?
It's not a joke, right?
What's one and one can go either way, and it's a form of manipulation and domination, because no matter what answer the person gives, you switch the answer, and then you're cleverer, and you've fooled them.
And so there is an act of mental superiority in joke-telling.
And this is why I've noticed, I don't think it's statistically provable or proven, but I've noticed that insecure people will often go into comedy as a form of Of domination, right?
Of being smarter. Of being smarter.
Comedy also does a great job of puncturing pretension.
As Gertrude Stein's, hey, it does fit, a rose is a rose is a road, punctures the pretension of the romantic poetry around a flower, a rose.
And so there was a comedian I saw once who had the sort of following routine about guys who were interested in strapping themselves to trees during a Florida hurricane because they wanted to experience extreme elements and so on.
And he was, of course, drinking and smoking throughout this routine.
And he was saying, well, these guys are idiots, right?
These guys who are strapping themselves to trees during a hurricane.
He says, you know, because they say, well, I'm an Iron Man.
I'm fit. And he says, well, it's not so much that the wind is blowing.
It's what the wind is blowing.
If you get hit in the chest with a Volvo, it doesn't really matter how many sit-ups you did yesterday, now does it?
Which I thought was actually a very funny routine.
And it punctures the vanity.
And there's a lot of...
Propaganda in comedy.
And so this guy, who's drinking and smoking, is saying that extreme fitness buffs are ridiculous.
And he's, of course, taking that.
And you see this all the time in movies, where the cool person is just right.
You see this all the time in medical dramas, right?
Where there's the trembling-lipped young intern or first-year resident, and then there's the grizzled old Aggressive surgeon, and they have to sort of go up and beg and plead and want attention.
This was the whole first couple of seasons of Grey's Anatomy, where you get this hierarchy that's just set up.
And comedy, particularly stand-up comedy, is very often an argument for a particular hierarchy.
Like, extreme fitness buffs are ridiculous.
Relax, have a drink, and a smoke.
And let's laugh at these idiots.
Who are getting up and strapping themselves to trees and doing extreme fitness things and are so deranged that they think that sit-ups will somehow protect them from a car that is flying through the air.
Again, that's a form of aggression and superiority and a mocking of this kind of perspective.
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