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What's the definition of comedy?

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Thinkers and philosophers from Plato and Aristotle

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to Hobbes, Freud, and beyond,

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including anyone misguided enough

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to try to explain a joke,

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have pondered it,

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and no one has settled it.

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You're lucky you found this video to sort it out.

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To define comedy, you should first ask

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why it seems comedy defies definition.

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The answer's simple.

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Comedy is the defiance of definition

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because definitions sometimes need defiance.

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Consider definition itself.

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When we define, we use language

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to set borders around a thing

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that we've perceived in the whirling chaos of existence.

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We say what the thing means

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and fit that in a system of meanings.

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Chaos becomes cosmos.

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The universe is translated

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into a cosmological construct of knowledge.

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And let's be honest,

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we need some logic cosmic order,

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otherwise we'd have pure chaos.

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Chaos can be rough,

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so we build a thing that we call reality.

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Now think about logic and logos,

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that tight knot connecting a word and truth.

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And let's jump back to thinking about what's funny,

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because some people say it's real simple:

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truth is funny.

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It's funny because it's true.

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But that's simplistic.

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Plenty of lies are funny.

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Comedic fiction can be funny.

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Made-up nonsense jibberish is frequently hilarious.

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For instance, florp --

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hysterical!

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And plenty of truths aren't funny.

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Two plus two truly equals four,

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but I'm not laughing just because that's the case.

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You can tell a true anecdote,

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but your date may not laugh.

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So why are some untruths and only some truths funny?

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How do these laughable truths and untruths

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relate to that capital-T Truth,

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the cosmological reality of facts and definitions?

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And what makes any of them funny?

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There's a Frenchman who can help,

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another thinker who didn't define comedy

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because he expressly didn't want to.

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Henri Bergson's a French philosopher

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who prefaced his essay on laughter

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by saying he wouldn't define "the comic"

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because it's a living thing.

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He argued laughter has a social function

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to destroy a mechanical inelasticity

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in people's attitudes and behavior.

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Someone doing the same thing over and over,

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or building up a false image of themself and the world,

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or not adapting to reality

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by just noticing the banana peel on the ground --

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this is automatism,

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ignorance of one's own mindless rigidity,

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and it's dangerous

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but also laughable

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and comic ridicule helps correct it.

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The comic is a kinetic, vital force,

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or elan vital,

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that helps us adapt.

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Bergson elaborates on this idea

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to study what's funny about all sorts of things.

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But let's stay on this.

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At the base of this concept of comedy is contradiction

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between vital, adaptive humanity

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and dehumanized automatism.

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A set system that claims to define reality

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might be one of those dehumanizing forces

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that comedy tends to destroy.

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Now, let's go back to Aristotle.

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Not poetics, where he drops a few thoughts on comedy,

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no, metaphysics,

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the fundamental law of non-contradiction,

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the bedrock of logic.

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Contradictory statements are not at the same time true.

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If A is an axiomatic statement,

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it can't be the case

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that A and the opposite of A are both true.

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Comedy seems to live here,

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to subsist on the illogic

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of logical contradiction and its derivatives.

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We laugh when the order we project on the world

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is disrupted and disproven,

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like when the way we all act

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contradicts truths we don't like talking about,

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or when strange observations we all make

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in the silent darkness of private thought

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are dragged into public by a good stand-up,

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and when cats play piano,

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because cats that are also somehow humans

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disrupt our reality.

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So we don't just laugh at truth,

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we laugh at the pleasurable, edifying revelation of flaws,

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incongruities,

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overlaps,

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and outright conflicts

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in the supposedly ordered system of truths

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we use to define the world and ourselves.

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When we think too highly of our thinking,

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when we think things are true

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just because we all say they're logos and stop adapting,

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we become the butt of jokes played on us

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by that wacky little trickster, chaos.

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Comedy conveys that destructive, instructive playfulness,

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but has logical definition

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because it acts upon our logic

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paralogically

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from outside its finite borders.

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Far from having a definite definition,

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it has an infinite infinition.

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And the infinition of comedy

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is that anything can be mind for comedy.

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Thus, all definitions of reality,

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especially those that claim to be universal,

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logical,

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cosmic,

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capital-T Truth

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become laughable.