Humour is one of the few things I take seriously. I must have been too young to understand it at the time, as Name of the Rose I both read and saw the movie, and I couldn't summarize the plot of it like this article did for the life of me. The question of the role of laughter is something I think about a lot, because I believe sincerely that it prevails. One of my favourite observations I heard was Rogan stating that laughter is an involuntary response, but moreso, it's one of our very few honest responses. Fake laughter is almost universally detectable. A joke that is funny enough to provoke it is an honest signal of underlying sentiments. It's easy to set up the church as a sanctimonionus buzzkill the way Eco did in Name of the Rose, but as the article mentions, Hobbes examined humour as well, because if you are in the business of orchestrating a state or empire, undeniable, involuntary truth is the most powerful factor you need to manage. An old friend of mine did standup, and graduated from being a standup comedian to a standup philosopher.
More than a few comedians have made the transition from clown, to philosopher, to statesman. In very recent memory, Italy's Beppe Grillo, Ukraine's Zelynsky, Minnesota's Al Franken are examples that come to mind. Arguably, you could include examples of journalists in office as well, but we tend not to notice their progress in that path because they skip the philosopher stage.
Our relationship to humour hasn't really changed much since Hobbes or Aristotle either, as the entire culture war and censorship regimes at platform companies are about suppressing humour under the auspieces of hate and misinformation. That's what censors do. They don't care about the disgusting or stupid, but the funny remains dangerous because there are more than a few regimes in place today who are only just a good one liner away from cascading into collapse.
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[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 12.9 ms ] threadMore than a few comedians have made the transition from clown, to philosopher, to statesman. In very recent memory, Italy's Beppe Grillo, Ukraine's Zelynsky, Minnesota's Al Franken are examples that come to mind. Arguably, you could include examples of journalists in office as well, but we tend not to notice their progress in that path because they skip the philosopher stage.
Our relationship to humour hasn't really changed much since Hobbes or Aristotle either, as the entire culture war and censorship regimes at platform companies are about suppressing humour under the auspieces of hate and misinformation. That's what censors do. They don't care about the disgusting or stupid, but the funny remains dangerous because there are more than a few regimes in place today who are only just a good one liner away from cascading into collapse.