Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux - 1686 Comedy
Aired: 2010-06-22
Duration: 10:38


=== A Mini-Mystery In Humor (03:37) ===

[00:00:01]  So an interesting question was asked recently on the message board, and that question was, what is comedy?
[00:00:08]  What is comedy for?
[00:00:10]  What is humor for? Why do we enjoy it?
[00:00:12]  Why does it make us laugh? And I guess the why we enjoy it is because it makes us laugh.
[00:00:17]  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.
[00:00:24]  But I think are evocative and perhaps even provocative ways of looking at the question of humor.
[00:00:35]  The one thing that seems to be true of humor is that it's like a mini-mystery.
[00:00:43]  A joke is like a mini-mystery.
[00:00:44]  And it's like a very, very short story with a twist, right?
[00:00:49]  So, to take a classic joke...
[00:00:55]  A man walks into a bar.
[00:00:56]  Ooh! Right?
[00:00:58]  This is a...
[00:01:00]  A man walks into a bar and you expect it to be a drinking place, right?
[00:01:05]  Like a tavern.
[00:01:07]  But it's a bar as in a bar of metal or something like that.
[00:01:11]  And so he goes, ooh! And so you're expecting it to be a long joke.
[00:01:15]  And you're expecting... When it says a man walks into a bar, that's also a classic setup for a joke.
[00:01:20]  Like, you know, three men walk into a bar and blah, blah, blah.
[00:01:25]  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?
[00:01:35]  That's the end of the joke? Wait a second, what does that mean?
[00:01:37]  Oh, a man walks into a metal bar, or something like that, right?
[00:01:41]  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...
[00:01:53]  It incites you, in a way, to pay very close attention to language, to the manipulative powers and possibilities of language.
[00:02:01]  I don't mean you would do this for any nefarious means, but I think it's important for alertness.
[00:02:06]  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?
[00:02:12]  And I would say two, and then he'd write one next to each other, and he'd say, no, it's eleven.
[00:02:18]  And of course, if you would then say 11 the next time, he'd say, no, 2.
[00:02:21]  You don't even know what 1 and 1 is.
[00:02:23]  I mean, that's just a bit of a mind game or whatever, right?
[00:02:25]  But what it does say is that it says, pay attention to the phrase and here, because it can be interpreted in two ways.
[00:02:37]  The first way, of course, what is one and one is two, or the other one, what is one and one and eleven.
[00:02:40]  Now, he doesn't say one plus one.
[00:02:42]  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.
[00:02:51]  And so, it's a way of saying, pay attention to language.
[00:02:56]  And that is, to me, a comedy It's all about alertness.
[00:03:03]  It's about training your mind to look for nuance, to be alert to twists or to changes.
[00:03:09]  It's a form of mental exercise in the same way that music is, and we can get into that perhaps another time.
[00:03:17]  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.

=== Mental Alertness Comedy (06:59) ===

[00:03:38]  I mean, the war between habit and innovation in the mind is deep and powerful and fundamental to human progress, right?
[00:03:47]  So, if you want to write a new or a novel kind of story, novel kind of story, great use of language stuff.
[00:03:54]  If you want to write a new kind of story, it doesn't do much good to invent your own language, right?
[00:03:59]  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.
[00:04:07]  As they say, there is nothing new under sun or moon.
[00:04:10]  There is only a pendulum that swings back and forth for the most part.
[00:04:13]  And so creativity is a genuine challenge.
[00:04:22]  Even the Dada is Poets that I talked about in the Death of the West part 2.
[00:04:26]  The Dada is Poets Did not invent a new language.
[00:04:29]  They simply broke the conventions of the existing language.
[00:04:34]  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.
[00:04:49]  Your lips are like a red, red rose.
[00:04:52]  A rose is like a sinking sunset of swirly flowered ammonia.
[00:04:55]  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,
[00:05:10]  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.
[00:05:30]  And so, instead of saying, a rose is like a hamina hamina, her statement was, a rose is a rose is a rose.
[00:05:40]  It's a rose! And you don't need to surround it with all this florid language to evoke the image in the mind.
[00:05:45]  In fact, too much florid language destroys the rose and replaces it with nebulous puffs of poetic nonsense.
[00:05:52]  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.
[00:06:06]  And they stayed away from the poetic, which I thought was an interesting swing in language.
[00:06:15]  Sorry, minor sidestep.
[00:06:19]  So humor, to me, has always been about setting up expectations And then changing them.
[00:06:30]  And that is something that...
[00:06:33]  And also containing very compact levels of truth.
[00:06:40]  Very, very compact levels of truth.
[00:06:43]  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.
[00:06:51]  Now, those are, of course, about reinforcing stereotypes.
[00:06:53]  And the truth that they contain is stereotypical and quite probably bigoted.
[00:06:58]  But it does tell you a lot about a particular piece of information.
[00:07:06]  Sorry, about a particular perspective that people have.
[00:07:11]  And so that setting up of expectations, the need to pay attention to language.
[00:07:17]  There is, in humor also, There can be, and I think quite often is, an element of aggression.
[00:07:26]  It's like magicians can be that way as well, illusionists.
[00:07:30]  I'm in control, and I'm going to outsmart you.
[00:07:33]  A joke is all about outsmarting you.
[00:07:35]  So a joke that is too obvious is not a joke.
[00:07:37]  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?
[00:07:44]  But, sorry, what's one plus one with two?
[00:07:46]  It's not a joke, right?
[00:07:47]  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.
[00:07:56]  And so there is an act of mental superiority in joke-telling.
[00:08:01]  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?
[00:08:12]  Of being smarter. Of being smarter.
[00:08:17]  Comedy also does a great job of puncturing pretension.
[00:08:23]  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.
[00:08:34]  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.
[00:08:51]  And he was, of course, drinking and smoking throughout this routine.
[00:08:55]  And he was saying, well, these guys are idiots, right?
[00:08:59]  These guys who are strapping themselves to trees during a hurricane.
[00:09:01]  He says, you know, because they say, well, I'm an Iron Man.
[00:09:03]  I'm fit. And he says, well, it's not so much that the wind is blowing.
[00:09:08]  It's what the wind is blowing.
[00:09:09]  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?
[00:09:14]  Which I thought was actually a very funny routine.
[00:09:17]  And it punctures the vanity.
[00:09:20]  And there's a lot of...
[00:09:23]  Propaganda in comedy.
[00:09:26]  And so this guy, who's drinking and smoking, is saying that extreme fitness buffs are ridiculous.
[00:09:34]  And he's, of course, taking that.
[00:09:36]  And you see this all the time in movies, where the cool person is just right.
[00:09:41]  You see this all the time in medical dramas, right?
[00:09:43]  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.
[00:09:56]  This was the whole first couple of seasons of Grey's Anatomy, where you get this hierarchy that's just set up.
[00:10:03]  And comedy, particularly stand-up comedy, is very often an argument for a particular hierarchy.
[00:10:10]  Like, extreme fitness buffs are ridiculous.
[00:10:13]  Relax, have a drink, and a smoke.
[00:10:16]  And let's laugh at these idiots.
[00:10:19]  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.
[00:10:31]  Again, that's a form of aggression and superiority and a mocking of this kind of perspective.