This week’s episode of Hotel Bar Sessions on the topic of comedy is a gut buster, not least because one of your co-hosts pretends to be a stand-up comedian at night– the only job for a philosopher that pays less than being an adjunct professor! 

Comedy is a historically and philosophically rich topic, starting with primitive hominids drawing penises on cave walls. Our co-hosts’ begin with Plato, then try to anticipate what Aristotle might have said about comedy (it would not have been funny), before turning to the formalist aesthetic of 20th C. stand-up and the banality of crowd-work. We ask: what makes something funny? Is there anything that can never be funny? What does comedy do for us, socially and politically?

 Join us for drinks and a few laughs as we discuss an art form that deserves much more philosophical attention.

This week’s jukebox picks:

• Jen’s Pick:  “All These Things That I’ve Done” by The Killers
• Bob’s Pick: “Clandestino” by Manu Chao
• Leigh’s Pick: “It Wasn’t Me” by Shaggy

In this episode, we discuss the following thinkers, texts, ideas, etc:

• Plato, Symposium
• Aristotle, Poetics
• Jonny Thomson, “Gallows Humor: The surprising benefits of dark laughter” (Big Think, 2023)
• The “Ultimate Guide to Shakespeare’s Fools”
• Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (1872)
• Amor fati (the love of fate)
• Shakespeare’s Falstaff
• Toni Morrison
• Sigmund Freud, Jokes and their Relations to the Unconscious (1905)
• Slavoj Žižek, “Jokes aren’t just jokes”
• Jon Cage’s “4’33′”
• Formalism
• Andy Kaufman
• Steve Martin 
• “The Office” as “cringe comedy”
• Seth Rogan filmography
• “Crowd work” in stand-up comedy
• Anthony Jeselnik
• Matt Rife
• The “yes, and” rule for improv
• The Jimmy Kimmel/Stephen Colbert/Donald Trump debacle
• The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
• Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
• François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel (c. 1532-1564)
• Voltaire, Candide (1759)
• Lenny Bruce
• George Carlin
• Richard Pryor
• Moms Mabley
• Robin Tyler
• Lily Tomlin
• Our earlier (Season 3) episode on “cancel culture”: Episode 34: “Cancel Panic”
• The “Portland Frog”
• Srđa Popović’s TED Talk on “The Power of Laughtivism” (2013)
• Srđa Popović, Blueprint for Revolution: How to Use Rice Pudding, Lego Men, and Other Nonviolent Techniques to Galvanize Communities, Overthrow Dictators, or Simply Change the World (2015)
• John Higgs, “Generation Z and The Breakfast Club” 
• Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1900)