What's the definition of comedy? Banana. - Addison Anderson

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What makes us giggle and guffaw? The inability to define comedy is its very appeal; it is defined by its defiance of definition. Addison Anderson riffs on the philosophy of Henri Bergson and Aristotle to elucidate how a definition draws borders while comedy breaks them down.

Lesson by Addison Anderson, animation by Anton Bogaty.

What's the definition of comedy?

Thinkers and philosophers from Plato and Aristotle

to Hobbes, Freud, and beyond,

including anyone misguided enough

to try to explain a joke,

have pondered it,

and no one has settled it.

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

To define comedy, you should first ask

why it seems comedy defies definition.

The answer's simple.

Comedy is the defiance of definition

because definitions sometimes need defiance.

Consider definition itself.

When we define, we use language

to set borders around a thing

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

We say what the thing means

and fit that in a system of meanings.

Chaos becomes cosmos.

The universe is translated

into a cosmological construct of knowledge.

And let's be honest,

we need some logical cosmic order,

otherwise we'd have pure chaos.

Chaos can be rough,

so we build a thing that we call reality.

Now think about logic and logos,

that tight knot connecting a word and truth.

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

because some people say it's real simple:

truth is funny.

It's funny because it's true.

But that's simplistic.

Plenty of lies are funny.

Comedic fiction can be funny.

Made-up nonsense jibberish is frequently hilarious.

For instance, florp --

hysterical!

And plenty of truths aren't funny.

Two plus two truly equals four,

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

You can tell a true anecdote,

but your date may not laugh.

So, why are some untruths and only some truths funny?

How do these laughable truths and untruths

relate to that capital-T Truth,

the cosmological reality of facts and definitions?

And what makes any of them funny?

There's a Frenchman who can help,

another thinker who didn't define comedy

because he expressly didn't want to.

Henri Bergson's a French philosopher

who prefaced his essay on laughter

by saying he wouldn't define "the comic"

because it's a living thing.

He argued laughter has a social function

to destroy mechanical inelasticity

in people's attitudes and behavior.

Someone doing the same thing over and over,

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

or not adapting to reality

by just noticing the banana peel on the ground --

this is automatism,

ignorance of one's own mindless rigidity,

and it's dangerous

but also laughable

and comic ridicule helps correct it.

The comic is a kinetic, vital force,

or elan vital,

that helps us adapt.

Bergson elaborates on this idea

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

But let's stay on this.

At the base of this concept of comedy is contradiction

between vital, adaptive humanity

and dehumanized automatism.

A set system that claims to define reality

might be one of those dehumanizing forces

that comedy tends to destroy.

Now, let's go back to Aristotle.

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

no, Metaphysics,

the fundamental law of non-contradiction,

the bedrock of logic.

Contradictory statements are not at the same time true.

If A is an axiomatic statement,

it can't be the case

that A and the opposite of A are both true.

Comedy seems to live here,

to subsist on the illogic

of logical contradiction and its derivatives.

We laugh when the order we project on the world

is disrupted and disproven,

like when the way we all act

contradicts truths we don't like talking about,

or when strange observations we all make

in the silent darkness of private thought

are dragged into public by a good stand-up,

and when cats play piano,

because cats that are also somehow humans

disrupt our reality.

So, we don't just laugh at truth,

we laugh at the pleasurable, edifying revelation of flaws,

incongruities,

overlaps,

and outright conflicts

in the supposedly ordered system of truths

we use to define the world and ourselves.

When we think too highly of our thinking,

when we think things are true

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

we become the butt of jokes played on us

by that wacky little trickster, chaos.

Comedy conveys that destructive, instructive playfulness,

but has no logical definition

because it acts upon our logic

paralogically

from outside its finite borders.

Far from having a definite definition,

it has an infinite infinition.

And the infinition of comedy

is that anything can be mined for comedy.

Thus, all definitions of reality,

especially those that claim to be universal,

logical,

cosmic,

capital-T Truth

become laughable.