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)