WEBVTT 00:00:10.755 --> 00:00:12.560 What's the definition of comedy? 00:00:12.560 --> 00:00:15.108 Thinkers and philosophers from Plato and Aristotle 00:00:15.108 --> 00:00:16.875 to Hobbes, Freud, and beyond, 00:00:16.875 --> 00:00:18.706 including anyone misguided enough 00:00:18.706 --> 00:00:20.247 to try to explain a joke, 00:00:20.247 --> 00:00:21.322 have pondered it, 00:00:21.322 --> 00:00:22.581 and no one has settled it. 00:00:22.581 --> 00:00:25.037 You're lucky you found this video to sort it out. 00:00:25.037 --> 00:00:26.576 To define comedy, you should first ask 00:00:26.576 --> 00:00:29.377 why it seems comedy defies definition. 00:00:29.377 --> 00:00:30.303 The answer's simple. 00:00:30.303 --> 00:00:31.962 Comedy is the defiance of definition 00:00:31.962 --> 00:00:35.290 because definitions sometimes need defiance. 00:00:35.290 --> 00:00:36.933 Consider definition itself. 00:00:36.933 --> 00:00:38.841 When we define, we use language 00:00:38.841 --> 00:00:40.513 to set borders around a thing 00:00:40.513 --> 00:00:43.373 that we've perceived in the whirling chaos of existence. 00:00:43.373 --> 00:00:44.676 We say what the thing means 00:00:44.676 --> 00:00:46.756 and fit that in a system of meanings. 00:00:46.756 --> 00:00:48.666 Chaos becomes cosmos. 00:00:48.666 --> 00:00:50.280 The universe is translated 00:00:50.280 --> 00:00:53.146 into a cosmological construct of knowledge. 00:00:53.146 --> 00:00:54.111 And let's be honest, 00:00:54.111 --> 00:00:56.232 we need some logical cosmic order, 00:00:56.232 --> 00:00:58.006 otherwise we'd have pure chaos. 00:00:58.006 --> 00:00:58.871 Chaos can be rough, 00:00:58.871 --> 00:01:01.834 so we build a thing that we call reality. 00:01:01.834 --> 00:01:04.420 Now think about logic and logos, 00:01:04.420 --> 00:01:06.919 that tight knot connecting a word and truth. 00:01:06.919 --> 00:01:09.209 And let's jump back to thinking about what's funny, 00:01:09.209 --> 00:01:11.173 because some people say it's real simple: 00:01:11.173 --> 00:01:12.253 truth is funny. 00:01:12.253 --> 00:01:13.774 It's funny because it's true. 00:01:13.774 --> 00:01:15.890 But that's simplistic. 00:01:15.890 --> 00:01:16.421 Plenty of lies are funny. 00:01:16.421 --> 00:01:18.100 Comedic fiction can be funny. 00:01:18.100 --> 00:01:21.056 Made-up nonsense jibberish is frequently hilarious. 00:01:21.056 --> 00:01:22.665 For instance, florp -- 00:01:22.665 --> 00:01:23.810 hysterical! 00:01:23.810 --> 00:01:26.009 And plenty of truths aren't funny. 00:01:26.009 --> 00:01:27.852 Two plus two truly equals four, 00:01:27.852 --> 00:01:30.617 but I'm not laughing just because that's the case. 00:01:30.617 --> 00:01:31.890 You can tell a true anecdote, 00:01:31.890 --> 00:01:33.747 but your date may not laugh. 00:01:33.747 --> 00:01:37.487 So, why are some untruths and only some truths funny? 00:01:37.487 --> 00:01:39.746 How do these laughable truths and untruths 00:01:39.746 --> 00:01:42.063 relate to that capital-T Truth, 00:01:42.063 --> 00:01:44.861 the cosmological reality of facts and definitions? 00:01:44.861 --> 00:01:46.617 And what makes any of them funny? 00:01:46.617 --> 00:01:48.205 There's a Frenchman who can help, 00:01:48.205 --> 00:01:50.291 another thinker who didn't define comedy 00:01:50.291 --> 00:01:52.786 because he expressly didn't want to. 00:01:52.786 --> 00:01:55.077 Henri Bergson's a French philosopher 00:01:55.077 --> 00:01:56.696 who prefaced his essay on laughter 00:01:56.696 --> 00:01:59.254 by saying he wouldn't define "the comic" 00:01:59.254 --> 00:02:00.584 because it's a living thing. 00:02:00.584 --> 00:02:03.031 He argued laughter has a social function 00:02:03.031 --> 00:02:05.601 to destroy mechanical inelasticity 00:02:05.601 --> 00:02:07.609 in people's attitudes and behavior. 00:02:07.609 --> 00:02:09.443 Someone doing the same thing over and over, 00:02:09.443 --> 00:02:12.442 or building up a false image of themself and the world, 00:02:12.442 --> 00:02:14.023 or not adapting to reality 00:02:14.023 --> 00:02:17.074 by just noticing the banana peel on the ground -- 00:02:17.074 --> 00:02:18.518 this is automatism, 00:02:18.518 --> 00:02:20.525 ignorance of one's own mindless rigidity, 00:02:20.525 --> 00:02:21.965 and it's dangerous 00:02:21.965 --> 00:02:23.098 but also laughable 00:02:23.098 --> 00:02:25.459 and comic ridicule helps correct it. 00:02:25.459 --> 00:02:27.707 The comic is a kinetic, vital force, 00:02:27.707 --> 00:02:29.520 or elan vital, 00:02:29.520 --> 00:02:30.714 that helps us adapt. 00:02:30.714 --> 00:02:32.222 Bergson elaborates on this idea 00:02:32.222 --> 00:02:34.465 to study what's funny about all sorts of things. 00:02:34.465 --> 00:02:35.849 But let's stay on this. 00:02:35.849 --> 00:02:39.229 At the base of this concept of comedy is contradiction 00:02:39.229 --> 00:02:41.349 between vital, adaptive humanity 00:02:41.349 --> 00:02:44.100 and dehumanized automatism. 00:02:44.100 --> 00:02:46.650 A set system that claims to define reality 00:02:46.650 --> 00:02:49.344 might be one of those dehumanizing forces 00:02:49.344 --> 00:02:51.532 that comedy tends to destroy. 00:02:51.532 --> 00:02:53.433 Now, let's go back to Aristotle. 00:02:53.433 --> 00:02:56.264 Not Poetics, where he drops a few thoughts on comedy, 00:02:56.264 --> 00:02:57.739 no, Metaphysics, 00:02:57.739 --> 00:03:00.207 the fundamental law of non-contradiction, 00:03:00.207 --> 00:03:01.950 the bedrock of logic. 00:03:01.950 --> 00:03:04.914 Contradictory statements are not at the same time true. 00:03:04.914 --> 00:03:06.998 If A is an axiomatic statement, 00:03:06.998 --> 00:03:07.889 it can't be the case 00:03:07.889 --> 00:03:10.992 that A and the opposite of A are both true. 00:03:10.992 --> 00:03:13.096 Comedy seems to live here, 00:03:13.096 --> 00:03:14.758 to subsist on the illogic 00:03:14.758 --> 00:03:17.713 of logical contradiction and its derivatives. 00:03:17.713 --> 00:03:20.227 We laugh when the order we project on the world 00:03:20.227 --> 00:03:22.313 is disrupted and disproven, 00:03:22.313 --> 00:03:23.984 like when the way we all act 00:03:23.984 --> 00:03:26.099 contradicts truths we don't like talking about, 00:03:26.099 --> 00:03:28.395 or when strange observations we all make 00:03:28.395 --> 00:03:30.361 in the silent darkness of private thought 00:03:30.361 --> 00:03:33.138 are dragged into public by a good stand-up, 00:03:33.138 --> 00:03:34.734 and when cats play piano, 00:03:34.734 --> 00:03:37.652 because cats that are also somehow humans 00:03:37.652 --> 00:03:39.695 disrupt our reality. 00:03:39.695 --> 00:03:41.365 So, we don't just laugh at truth, 00:03:41.365 --> 00:03:44.210 we laugh at the pleasurable, edifying revelation of flaws, 00:03:44.210 --> 00:03:45.998 incongruities, 00:03:45.998 --> 00:03:46.930 overlaps, 00:03:46.930 --> 00:03:48.316 and outright conflicts 00:03:48.316 --> 00:03:50.834 in the supposedly ordered system of truths 00:03:50.834 --> 00:03:53.529 we use to define the world and ourselves. 00:03:53.529 --> 00:03:55.450 When we think too highly of our thinking, 00:03:55.450 --> 00:03:56.967 when we think things are true 00:03:56.967 --> 00:04:00.102 just because we all say they're logos and stop adapting, 00:04:00.102 --> 00:04:02.556 we become the butt of jokes played on us 00:04:02.556 --> 00:04:04.763 by that wacky little trickster, chaos. 00:04:04.763 --> 00:04:08.395 Comedy conveys that destructive, instructive playfulness, 00:04:08.395 --> 00:04:09.979 but has no logical definition 00:04:09.979 --> 00:04:12.558 because it acts upon our logic 00:04:12.558 --> 00:04:13.800 paralogically 00:04:13.800 --> 00:04:15.827 from outside its finite borders. 00:04:15.827 --> 00:04:18.359 Far from having a definite definition, 00:04:18.359 --> 00:04:20.695 it has an infinite infinition. 00:04:20.695 --> 00:04:22.429 And the infinition of comedy 00:04:22.429 --> 00:04:25.362 is that anything can be mined for comedy. 00:04:25.362 --> 00:04:27.330 Thus, all definitions of reality, 00:04:27.330 --> 00:04:29.780 especially those that claim to be universal, 00:04:29.780 --> 00:04:30.389 logical, 00:04:30.389 --> 00:04:31.079 cosmic, 00:04:31.079 --> 00:04:32.507 capital-T Truth 00:04:32.507 --> 00:04:34.794 become laughable.