Dustin Peone on Comedy and Philosophy

Welcome back to the new thing, Kree. My name is David Barr with me as always. This is my good friend Alex, pre you. How are you doing now?

A little scared. I'm hoping Superman shows up because I see on our zoom, Lex Luthor is here. And you don't mean our good friend Greg McBrayer. Welcome to here.

Howdy doodie fellas. We're all excited about this episode. It's a long time coming. One of our best friends, Dustin Pion is here.

Welcome, Dustin. Thank you for having me. And I know you guys are listening. Can't see, but Alex has just as much hair as I do.

That's right. I have a beard. But also Dustin is more cleanly shaded. So Dustin and I.

You're the black tournament. You're really doing it up. And though you're you're you're able to buy it, right? Ablebody does.

You think let's lose your wheelchair? Yes, you know, I don't think that it is. I'm thinking of Dr. No.

You're just a rip, wearing star. I always David, why don't you introduce us? How do we know Dustin? So Dustin and I were roommates in college.

And I wish we could tell some of these stories. You can't remember. I'm in Maryland. And then Dustin would go on for a time at St.

John's. And then SUNY, New Paltz, New Paltz. He would later get his MA and PhD from Emory University in the philosophy department. Dustin, I'm bummed by the way.

I should say the author of many books. But he is the single greatest living Vico scholar in the world. Gianbatistan Vico. That was the last class that Strauss taught on Vico's new science.

The transcript is while he was at St. John's. Or at least maybe not taught on what. Were you shaking your head out?

No, he taught his last courses were on Nietzsche, Thucydides, and the Gorgias. And when where's his Vico, his Vico class? It's not Vico at Chicago, whatever this decides what. Anyway, so the one that we have the transcript of, I think, is from 1965.

Wherever that falls in Strauss studies. Ooh, I made a mistake there. So that's kind of the middle Strauss. We call that middle Strauss.

But you used to be the head up. And are you still involved with the Center for Vico studies? To the extent that it exists anymore. It's no longer affiliated with any university.

So I am probably the last person involved with it. Yeah, you're the emperor next month. Yeah, I've inherited all of the wall hangings from the Vico Institute left Emory. That's great.

I took my office into the Institute for Vico studies now. Did Emory know that? Did you, that you're embezzling their precious decorations? It was over and over and over.

They belong to the Institute. Now Dustin is an instructor at Mercer University. And he is also in charge of the philosophy of humor yearbook that were informed as published by Germans. That sounds like a joke.

But look, Dustin's the author of a great many books. I have to look some of them up. But the one that we're going to discuss today is your latest, right, Dustin? That's right.

And what's it called? Making Philosophy Laugh. Humor, irony, and following. Following.

Humor, I can fill this up with up. Oh, I read Plague literature. And I was like, this isn't funny at all. Yeah.

So I was like, I don't understand. So Dustin's books are very, very interesting. Because he's not, while he's sympathetic to Strauss, while Dustin was with me at the University of Maryland, we both started taking graduate courses with Charles Butterworth with him. Humor means close.

He was always kind of, he cut his own path. And unlike Greg and Alex, refused to be a card-carrying Straussian because he's no sheep. And I think some of that's evidenced in his books. One is called Memory as Philosophy, the theory and practice of philosophical reflection.

The book we're talking about today is Making Philosophy Laugh. And there's Shane fame and the technological mentality, which is good. But if you want to start with Pion, in his background, it doesn't very well read with literature. He didn't not read literature like Greg until just the past few years.

It's his book titled Plague literature, Lessons for Living Well during a Pandemic. And you can very briefly talk about that book. And then the interest you received by medical schools around the country. Yeah, sure.

So first, I should say that the Plague literature volume, no longer in print, a different set of Germans purchased it from me. And they published it as literary meditations for pandemic times, reflections on plague classics. Being Germans, they didn't appreciate the pithiness of the title. So they extended it at Infinietum.

So if anyone's looking for the book, that's where you'll find it. Yeah, so that it actually began with conversations with a few you guys. After COVID struck, I started teaching my classes online. And I decided to have a series of guests come and chat about philosophical stuff.

I thought that would be interesting for the students. And David and Greg, you guys both did it. And we ended up speaking about what we were reading at the time. And both guys were talking about literature surrounding plagues.

And Greg, Greg, you read Machiavelli's and Strutsi's strange little writing on the plague. And David, you were talking about Daniel Defoe. And a lot of my other guests, we had these same sort of conversations. And I realized there was something there that there might be some interest in putting out a compendium of stuff that people have written on past plagues since probably nobody living has ever lived through anything like that.

So we looked to the past. That's why we read literature, right? And we had to have conversations with the greatest minds that ever lived. So my original idea was to do a compilation, have different authors contribute different articles.

And I very quickly learned, as anyone has ever tried to do that, learns, give it four or five years for that to happen, to get all the stuff back from everyone. So I decided to do it myself. In particular, there was a scholar Guarini who I wanted to write on Boccaccio. And after much trying to get in touch with him, I found out he was quite dead.

So I'll just write on Boccaccio myself. I did the whole thing. We had it out in August. Hey, Tovik, get him?

No, he died a couple years before. That would have been fitting, I suppose. But so we had it out in August of 2020. And it was the first such book on the market.

So Duke, a couple of the professors there, Jehingith and Brian Quaranta, who were teaching med school, were teaching a class on literature about plagues. And they sort of stumbled onto the book. And Brian read this is great. I'm going to use this as the textbook for this class.

So I was being taught at Duke Medical School. And they invited me to come speak a few times. And I warned them. I don't know anything about medicine.

You guys realize this. That's fine. That's fine. I just come out.

It's really humanities. So I got to lecture to physicians and nurses, which is fun. That's something. Wow.

That's a really interesting point, Greg or David or guest. But give me a second before we get too into things. Can I take a moment to tell our audience about a very special educational opportunity from our sponsor? For the folks at home, they're all muted clearly nodding yes and giving me the double thumbs up, double.

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What were you about to say? How many, how many plays? I know we're going to talk about comedy, but how many playing start when human beings and animals have some sort of... We don't need to, we don't need to, I mean...

Overly intimate, I mean, AIDS started with a monkey, right? And then it's called a... Or a back out from a lab, I don't know. And then you think any can come from farm animals?

No. You're in Georgia, any Jordan, like Southern farm animals? No. It's pretty sure Washington leads the nation in bestiality.

Is that right? Yeah, it's the Pacific Northwest, Washington and Oregon. It's going to Seattle. All right, let's talk about philosophy and comedy.

I was struck by your title, Making Philosophy Laugh. Do you think philosophies too serious? Do you think philosophers need to laugh more? Is that true of all philosophers?

Like, feels like, hey, go maybe if you use a little rib tickling or maybe Kant, but those kinds can be funny in moments or Heidegger. But, you know, I don't know, Plato's pretty funny. Santa Feynman's pretty funny. He has Greg Wilotas.

Yeah, so I'll answer a few different things there. The title, Making Philosophy Laugh, comes from Berto Eco from the name of the Rhodes. At the end, you guys have read the book, but at the end, the fanatical zealot, what's the name? Yurge de Borgoes, right, named after Borgoes, the librarian.

He burns down the librarian. He eats, he devours the last copy of Aristotle's book on humor. And he just looks like a beastial figure devouge, salivating everywhere. And William, the primary figure investigating the crimes that the Avi says, you know, perhaps the answer, perhaps we need philosophy to laugh.

You know, what's the cure of her zealots like this? We need to make philosophy laugh. That's where the title comes from. Now, I think actually that most philosophy, most great philosophers, are quite funny.

And they're intentionally joking. That much of the work, and oftentimes when we take them too seriously, we don't even realize that much of the work is being done by jokes. Descartes begins his great work with the best distributed thing, because we all know we have it, right? And he's beginning with an irony.

So in the book, I try to work out this two-fold phenomenon that I think is occurring. One, all great philosophers, I think, are quite funny and are consciously utilizing humor. Do you want to do one- Like gangster rappers? Like gangster rappers.

The good ones, right? But then the emulators, who are not original, they're the ones who take it seriously. It's always the protege who takes the master seriously. So Marx has a great sense of humor.

Marxians do not. Hegel works as funny. At times he is, yeah. Hegel is useful.

I know his brothers were rude. Yeah. We're talking about the same Marx, duck soup. That's the man, yeah.

OK. All right. Nice to correct it. I actually can't make it through the Marxists.

I tried to watch him once. I was just like, anyway, sorry. But Dustin, to drill down a little bit further, I apologize for interrupting you. It is, they're intentionally funny, which is to say, they've discovered that humor can be used as a tool or medium with which to transmit philosophy.

Does it help philosophy stick in the souls of the readers or where humor can be used to obfuscate meaning to get past the sensors? Your book begins with a nice little story pulled from Cicero with the philosopher Pythagoras where he uses humor, rather he plays the fool to trick the king from stamping out philosophy in its infancy. Leon of Fles, yeah. I think the use that philosophers make is manifold.

There are a few different uses. One is the philosophy that a humor rather is used as a tool of discovery. It's used as an organ. In the sense that to make a joke about something is effectively to turn it on its head, to hold it upside down, and it's pants fall down.

You see it's underpants. Which is to see something on a new light. It's to take some time. How pants work?

If you hold the person on the other shirt comes down. You're right. The shirt comes down. The molds out of the pockets.

Then you put them back and then you pull the pants down. Which may be, let me just say, I'm not encouraging anyone to do that. I probably have to, for legal reasons, I have to say that. But we see things in a new light.

In particular things that we had taken seriously, things that we held the most sacred. When we laugh at them, it's showing them in a new sort of light. It's showing them upside down, showing them backwards. It's looking at them from the rear instead of looking at them from front on.

That's why there's a philosophical value of the fool. In the sense that the prudent person buying a new horse inspects the teeth of the horse and the fool lifts the tail and looks in the rear of the horse. But both are important. The joke looks things in the rear.

It puts things in a new light. We can learn from doing that. The other thing that you mentioned, David, is making these ideas accessible to people through humor. I think there's a secondary great importance of that.

David, you're not a teacher, but Greg and Alex, you are. We employ humor in our teaching. I'm very funny. I'm very funny.

Yes. And there's a pedagogical reason for that. It's like rubbing the rim with sugar so the medicine goes down to use it. Alex does a lot of rubbing the rim.

He teaches. Let me go rub in the rim, of course. Rear end? I don't know.

Whatever. It sounds like Greg. Anyways. Back to what I was saying before.

I think most original philosophers are funny. Or if not funny, they're joking a lot of the time. A lot of the students are the funny side of life. Yeah.

I mean, there's a lot of properties that are joking all the time. But it's always the people at the deathbed of Socrates that aren't in on the joke. They don't get it. It's the devotee who's serious.

And I think part of the reason philosophy has become such a serious business these days is because there's more of that worship of whatever the school is, the Frankfurt School or something like that. We're doing very serious work. You may not laugh at us. I'll defend the cranky old philosophy professors for just a moment.

I'll confess that I fear that this may be true of me. The following thought is what has occurred to me. Anger strikes me as unfilisophic. Being particularly prone to weeping strikes me as unfilisophic.

And both weeping seems like a form of escape or an inability to face reality for what it really is. Anger seems like an irrational response to things as well. It seems to me that laughter could be a sign of an inability to face reality as what it is. It's just a joke or something like this.

And you're right that Socrates makes jokes. But we don't actually have a lot of examples of Socrates laughing. And one of the only examples I can think of off top of my head where Socrates is identified explicitly as laughing at the end of Zenithin's apology. Where I think that Socrates is trying to distract himself from reality that he's about to die.

And in the Republic, I believe that Socrates defines laughter as a sudden explosive hope or something like this. And so it's sort of, I'll try one more step and then I'll stop. But I read this great article on laughter once and it said that laughter seems to be an immediate tear that things are terrible followed by the thought that things are actually okay. Oh no, you throw a baby up in the air and it's terrified.

But then it laughs when it realizes that everything's okay. Because laughter is a way that we tell ourselves that things are okay. If that makes sense. Well, I do have to laugh too.

But there are some things that are profoundly funny. One doesn't laugh. Could you tell me laughter is almost a self-forgetting, an instance of self-forgetting? It's hard to get dust into laughter when I do.

It really pleases me. But I think it's funny. I get him to smile. I'm just laughing inwardly.

Or did I miss him? It's just an Instagram. No, no, there's exactly right. That I think that basically there's kind of self-forgetting at the core of laughter.

No, I think it's unfuls of it. Right. Okay. Yeah.

So our listeners are dudes who are not funny. They don't get it. They're laughing at dumb jokes. I don't know.

I don't know. I don't know. Greg's jokes are incredibly philosophic. They're not funny.

They're not funny in the least. See? What kind of defendant for laughter? And then Dustin, you settled this debate.

We just, you know, laughter is involuntary. And it comes when something unexpected happens. Right? And who in which laughter is connected with suddenly seeing a possibility or a reality that you hadn't expected?

That's not destructive, right? It's not like a truck heading at your car that you can expect or something like that. Look, you're laughing about that. Yeah.

I'm not saying this is true of all laughter, but might be, you say this at the core of laughter might be the self forgetting, but can't there also be that laughter can be connected with a kind of realization of the limits of your opinions or the limits of your expectations about the world? And therefore discovering that there's a kind of funny complexity that you hadn't thought about and discovering it in a harmless. Dustin, figure this out for us. Yeah.

Yeah. All right. So there's a few things I want to say. One thing that's been pointed out to me about the book in a review written by Alex Bertland from University of Buffalo, he points out that the book is not really about making philosophy laugh.

It's about making philosophy humorous, utilizing humor, while the irony in philosophy, which is correct. I think I carry away with echoes quotation and wanting to fit that into the title. It's not so much about laughter. And I agree that to a certain extent, the laughter is it overcomes us, right?

It's something that takes over us in the way other great passions do. It's a sort of passion. Ultimately, my position is not that philosophy should simply be funky, that it should simply be humorous. My work is meant as a corrective and the Aristotelian sets bending the branch the other way, because I diagnose modernity as being too serious, too corrective.

I want to bring it excessively the other direction. And our branches, baby. Yeah. And the branches.

My ultimate position, which is the final chapter of this book, is that philosophy ought to have a tragic comic view of the world, not simply a comic view of the world, then you're just one of these frivolous buffoons, if you don't see that things are also serious. But don't we see the seriousness, don't we see the bleakness, the grimness, then you're an agalist, an unlaffing person, which somehow the publishers let me put in the words shimmy shester to refer to the unlaffing person. I think I'll pass the sensors. I refer to them as shimmy shester.

So the philosophical mind has to have a balance. And I think Socrates has that balance as much as anyone in history. And to give the idea of what tragic comedy means, I think the best quotation is from Beckett at the end of his unnamed trilogy, where he says, simply, I can't go on, I'll go on. I can't go on.

I recognize how brutal life is. I recognize that it's all for nothing, right? Ultimately, whatever I achieve is nothing. It crumbles.

I become as amandious. But I'll go on. It's the sadness followed immediately by the laughter because what else is there? And I'll read to you one of my favorite passages from Luigi, Peter, and Delo, the Italian playwright, which I just brought up.

You're not going to reach from his brother, Mario? Nope. Nope. This is Luigi.

I think the superior brother. I got it. Yeah, he's taller and he works out more. He's better built.

Right, right, right. The comic and its opposite are both present in the humoristic disposition itself and are inherent in the process, which results from it. The condition of a man who is constantly somewhat off key in whom a thought cannot originate without the opposite are contrary thought originating at the same time. And the for each reason, he has to say, yes, there arise one or more that compel him to say no and keep him suspended in perplexity for the rest of his life.

A man who cannot give into a feeling without suddenly perceiving something inside of him which mocks, disturbs, disconcerts, and taunts him is a condition which in its very abnormality can only be bitterly comic. And Peter and Delo here is describing the tragic comic condition. And my intuition is that most of our great philosophers have that sort of sense, that combination of both the seriousness of the thing and the utter silliness of the thing at the same time. Let me ask you a question.

There's a lot there. Two questions first. You do this distinction between ancients in moderns and on the questions. And what in what do the moderns or does the modern success of seriousness consist, right?

What makes them too serious? I'm struck by Machiavelli being a comic poet, for example, and quite funny as an author. You mentioned Descartes and others in Marx either, right? So there's, it's got to be a finer point that you mean, right?

And then second, this idea that I want to challenge you a little around this idea that philosophy is laughing despite the meaninglessness of things. Is that nihilism? Is that really the Socratic position? Or how do you mean that?

Because I want to hear you sort of ladies' ideas out of them. Yeah, dance with the first point. I don't mean to make an ancient modern distinction. Really what I mean to make is a contemporary academic philosophy versus everything else distinction.

I'm not drawing the distinction between what the Greeks were doing and what Descartes are doing, because I think Descartes is joking most of the time. Really, my criticism is directed at the self-serious academic philosopher today, which is not everybody, by no means, and probably may not even be the people that we would think it is at all time. So it's just certain moments when you've got conferences that are self-serious people. My criticism is against them.

And I don't think that that's a phenomenon strictly of this time. I think you get that class of people at every time. Where I would draw the line, I don't really want to draw the line. So this is the side you should be on, because there's a great value to that too.

There's a great value to the people doing work on special interests, social justice, and that sort of thing. They take themselves very seriously, more seriously than I think they should. But they're doing good work. There's an importance there.

I'm interested in the balance though. I'm interested in giving the minority report so that we don't forget ourselves. You don't forget what's the point of social justice, to be able to have some sort of joy, don't give up on joy in pursuing justice. Your second point, the nihilism.

That I think is more my own account of the world. The nihilism is mine versus my expression of what other philosophers are saying, though some of them certainly are. But that was pointed out to me by one of the respondents at a recent Meet the Author that you were at, Alex in New Orleans, you're at conference, not the panel. He laid out all of the presuppositions of my basic position.

And in hearing them laid out, I just, I just want to put the potion on. I guess I'm a die-hard nihilist. I had never thought of it before, but hearing what I believe to be true laid out in that manner, well, yeah, okay, I guess so. I guess my personal position is one of a vacuous actuality, as Whitehead would say, that's you know, there's no meaning whatsoever.

Actuality is vacuous. And we impose it all. The human project is the project of imposing meaning. But behind that, there's nothing that's only what we make of it, which to me, I find it funny.

One could find it incredibly tragic and crushing. That's a matter of disposition. So we need both the tragic and the comic. We need the both.

I'm struck by how much Woody Allen relies. I wonder about the laughter at nihilism. I've seen Woody Allen interviews and like with public audiences where he'll just lay out very kind of clear nihilistic position. It's all meaningless.

We just make it up. We're just trying to cope. And people will laugh, but I think it's like an anxious laughter. And I'm thinking about his movie, things called Whatever Works, which already, they're going to call the movie Nihilist and movie Whatever Works.

I mean, that's just the one with Larry David. And then he gives it to the chess teacher, right? I believe so. I haven't seen it so long.

But I just remember the opening joke. He starts screaming in the middle of the night and he goes, I'm dying. I'm dying. And he goes, oh my God, you're dying?

What's wrong? He goes, not now, eventually. Fantastic. Fantastic way to open a movie.

But that is sort of what it's like. You're woken with anxiety. And there's something hilarious about it, but it's quite anxious right that laughter. And that's what we get in the whole corpus of Beckett, right?

That's all of his plays waiting for Godot. That's what you have to do in the audience. Did you want to go ahead? Go ahead.

If it's related. Yeah, I have two questions, actually. One is on this ancient modern thing. And then I have a second question.

But the first one is, I know you're not drawing this ancient modern distinction. You're sort of saying the philosophers are in this one camp and the scholars or academic philosophers are in a different camp. And that's just not as funny. There's sort of serious people.

And I have no problem bashing academics and scholars. I think that's absolutely right. But I was actually led by your dream of thought though to think it does strike me. I mean, I'd be interested to hear you push back on Marx and Hegel and these guys because it does strike me that the ancient might have been funnier.

And I'm reminded of the saying of Pascal that Aristotle and Plato wrote on politics as though it's a madhouse. It was a joke for them because they didn't take it very seriously. Whereas modern philosophy, I'm inclined to think that maybe it's less funny because it actually is aiming to accomplish serious things. Like Marx says, the goal is to change the world, for example.

And my givoli's funny, I'll set him aside. But I do see a sort of earnestness in modern philosophy that I don't see in ancient philosophy. So that's one question. And my second question, I'll let you handle this a little bit.

I can't help but notice that your mind seems to be turned toward literary figures more than philosophers is even tragic comic. I mean, that's poetry more than philosophy. So I'm just wondering how that fits in for you or this enter class. Is it just philosophy by another name?

Yeah. I know that you guys are going to push back on this and probably all of your listeners. I don't think there is an ancient quarrel. And I don't think Socrates thinks that Socrates doesn't say that there is.

He says that there's a lot of an ancient quarrel between the philosophers and the poets. And he says, let's tell the poets there is an ancient quarrel. And this is one of our noble lives. I don't think that there really is that quarrel.

I think there are rivals in a certain sense, rivals to wisdom. And the rivalry is over the tool that they both use, which is language. So it's sort of a turf war over who has the right to be the masters of language in a certain sense. But I don't like to make this strict distinction between such and such person is a philosopher on what grounds because they use some rational method because they're asking a particular type of question versus James Joyce, who's strictly a literary figure.

I just don't know where to draw the line. And I think that as Argy Collingwood says, the philosopher ought to go to school with poets ought to go to school with the poets in order to learn the use of language, which is his tool. So it is my tendency to collapse the two and to use the categories of one to discuss the other. And the categories, Patrick and comic, ultimately largely have their source and Aristotle.

I mean, he's the great philosopher distinguishing the two. I mean, this is a fantastic line where he says the novel is just a platonic dialogue in which Socrates is absent. And I think you could use that for a lot of poetry or literature and say that, you know, people's in the best case, like Shakespeare's great at this where you can get a glimpse of what somebody's basic view of the world is, right? What their opinions are.

And rather than being refuted, right, the world kind of undercuts them in some way or confounds them in some way. And so it's what would have been an argument that then leads somebody to attack Socrates, right? And then there's an experience that leads them to sort of curse the world or the gods or whatever they believe to be true of the world. And there is a kind of there's a way in which something like the Socratic Alenchus is built into the poetic work.

That said, that's still a substantive difference that there's a man in there making the arguments, right? And this is true, not just of a platonic dialogue. It's true of Aristotle, for example, where, you know, it's a treatise, but it begins with certain accepted opinions, works through problems, tries to refine them, maybe just arises up, arrives at problems. And there's a kind of enduring, there's a sort of intimacy there.

But I don't know, that strikes me as more than just the means, right? The language, it certainly philosophers have much to learn from poets and Plato's rife with quotations or poets that are used in interesting ways that show that Plato's really studied these plays or the or home or whatever it is and learn from it. But I don't know, I don't even, I don't know exactly what I'm asking, but I do want to see if you'll say something more on, because the quarrel is in the republic and you get much more felicitous relationships and say to symposium and the phagors, right? So I'm very much aligned with that.

But I don't know, is there, is there something more to the quarrel than just just a dispute about language or is there a substantive difference between philosophic poetry and the rest of poetry? You aren't good that way. Yeah, I think the poets would be offended at what, aren't we all philosophical poets? The best I can come up with when I really give this consideration is that at the center of philosophy is the concept and at the center of poetry is the image.

However, there are certainly concepts throughout poetry, there are certainly images throughout philosophy. So maybe it's a matter of what the weight is. I mean, in Hegel, the concept is doing most of the work, but it's rife with images, right? Every chapter has its own very memorable image as memorable as any poetic image, the highway of despair or the owl of Minerva, these great poetic images.

I don't know, I don't know where to draw the line. I don't know that there is a strict line, but I don't even know where to make the hazy line, to be honest. And the reason it's not my concern is because ultimately I'm interested in, as I think most philosophers are, in figuring out the nature of things, the nature of the good, the nature of the true. And whatever the source is that allows me to do that, I'll take it as Nietzsche says about when he reads Montaigne, he takes a wing and here and he takes a leg here and he takes Montaigne apart for the food that he wants.

That I think is what we have to do with what's before us, all the claims to wisdom before us. It's a poet, it's an artist, it's an interpretive dancer or whatever. We take what we can learn from and we employ it in our own thinking. I just meant real simply, like as I read your seventh chapter, it just seems the vast majority of the references are to what we sort of usually call literary figures, that's all.

But yeah, my philosophers are analyzed more in the irony chapter. Gotcha. Gotcha. Well, sorry, but Greg, what was the first part of your question?

I answered the second. Oh, sure. My other question was, you know, you were sort of distinguishing between contemporary academic philosophers and the history philosophy. Oh, but I was actually inclined to say that ancient philosophers are funnier than moderns because they don't take their practical recommendations as seriously.

There's that Pascal quote about they were writing for madmen or something like this. Yeah, that's an interesting point. It seems like you would be able to take yourself less seriously, the less engaged you are in the prexagra, the actual doings of the marketplace, right? If you think there's no solution to the little problem, you're probably inclined to be funny about politics.

And if you think we can actually do it, and here's what the marginal tax rate should be, right? Like it's already fling. I suppose. Mayor Keynes is not terribly, he is actually, he jokes sometimes, but he does.

Yeah. He does. Yeah. He has some funny lines, mostly about mathematicians.

You have funny economists. I never get a chance to tell stories. Give me the one chance. Do you know who Thorston Veblin is?

I share a name with them. Yeah. Dustin is the anglicization of Thorstein. I thought you were like related to the Veblins.

He apparently, he used to like to prank people. And one time he borrowed somebody's bowling ball and he gave back the bowling ball with a beehive in it, which is a fantastic prank if you ever want to f*** with somebody. Just give him a bag with a beehive in it. That's like borderline terrorism.

Anyway, sorry, Dustin. I was going to say, I love Greg to your point. That's why I begin with Pythagoras, because Pythagoras' definition of philosophy is you're at the market as the spectator. You're there to watch, to behold, the spectrum.

Everyone else is there for a reason. You're the only one that's there without a reason. You're there just to see the other people scattering about. It's a complete disconnection from the actual doings of the market.

And in that sense, yeah, you may be right about this distinction of ancient philosophy, but you may be right about this. There's less at stake, though. I mean, Pythagoras, we know, did have political interests, or at least the Pythagoreans did. Aristotle and Plato and various points did have their short-lived attempts to actually engage in politics.

I don't know. It might be interesting to look at Plato's work, for instance, around the time he was involved with Sicily versus when he was wholly abstracted from it, to see if there's a greater seriousness there. Yeah. I have a quick question.

It's just a slightly shift gears. What you guys are talking about is thinking a lot about the relationship between the philosopher and his audience. And I wonder if the philosopher's ability to use humor to his intended effect is in some way constrained by the mores of the audience that receive his work. So to put it in simpler terms, you can be a funny man, but before a certain type of audience, your jokes will fall flat.

You think of Dave Chappelle from an audience of Germans a few decades ago. He's extremely funny to us. It may not be so funny to them. I haven't formulated a question other than you could just talk a little bit about the constraints of the audience, how a good philosopher can work through that, other than philosophies written for anybody at any time in place.

I think that's one of the great conceits of philosophy that it is written for anybody at any time in place. There's always an audience. The writer has to be acutely aware of that. irony is the main fallback.

You can say what you want to say many times more easily without saying it literally in, I don't want to say pandering, but in adapting your speech to the preconceptions and notions of your audience. And we see that in philosophers, always masters of irony. We see it in Voltaire all the time. We see is a great example in Montesquieu, where Montesquieu gives a multi-point justification for slavery, where he begins.

Slavery blacks. Right. And he begins, if I had to justify this, this is what I'd say. And he gives what are patently bad reasons.

Would you list some of those for us right now, Dustin? I don't have the text at hand. Also, I wouldn't want to be taken out of context. Yeah.

David, back to your question. Montesquieu slavery. Oh, yes. Montesquieu.

Yeah. Oh, you would ask about the audiences. The question that always comes up for me is there are certain things that I read as jokes, but I'm not 100% sure they are. And there are other things that I read as completely serious.

And I'm not 100% sure they are. And it may very well read very differently, especially amongst the ancient, because the further back you get the more divorced we are from the same day-to-day way of thinking. Right. So I read the end of Socrates' life, where he says, sacrifice a cock to a sleepiest.

I read that as a joke, because the cock is the worst thing you can sacrifice to a sleepy. If you really want to honor it, you got to sacrifice a bull or something big. So he's telling Credo to give you. First of all, Credo has to chase the rooster around and try to get it.

Secondly, the rooster is the universal sign of the fool. So I take it that he's calling Credo a fool. You mourn, you fool. Go find a rooster and sacrifice it to the god.

I see it as terribly funny. Nietzsche saw it as sort of Socrates at the end dishonoring his entire life. Nietzsche's critique is very biting. This is the one thing Socrates should not have done.

But this is the same at the end giving up. Or similarly, like Biggie with Little Seas or Tupac with Big Psych. These are ostensibly his close friends. They're close friends.

But you listen to some of the stuff they're saying, it's quite funny, but they're the butt of the joke. And so really one wonders. Yeah. So I confront that all the time in my own research.

Is this a joke or not? How do I cope with this? I err on the side of it. It's always a joke when it seems like it might be.

But I recognize, often as we have no way of knowing, we're not the audience. We're not the intended audience at all. There's more there than we will ever realize. The scholar has to realize that.

It's a little tragic comment. Well, we don't want anyone. We keep doing it. We know we're faded to folly.

We go on anyway. So pound for pound, who's the funniest? Philosopher? Yeah.

Pound for pound's got to be huge. Yeah, Nietzsche's pretty funny. No, no. It's what we laugh about is he's a sometimes a wee laugh about Nietzsche's saying is actually he's being quite mean.

Yeah. Nietzsche is using humor. He's using a very malicious sort of humor often. But it is still humor.

Humor is a tool. Like any other tool, you can use it to different ends. You can use it to create. You can use it to destroy.

It's a very real sense of humor is destructive. There's most of the debates about humor now that's Chappelle and people like that are about how harmful humor can be. It's not always creative. Nevertheless, it's humor.

Nietzsche is using humor. Whether we always agree with him or not. Machiavelli I think is very funny. Pure and Delo called him the greatest humorist in Italian literature.

Plato. Russo makes jokes. But perhaps it's not there for funny. Russo takes a little bit seriously.

Yeah. Though it is a hilarious figure. It's sort of like watching one of these confessional shows like the office where the humor lies and you see what's actually happening. And then you see what the person thinks about what is happening and the disparity between them too.

That's what reading was all about. You like the d'Oycheerut of Geneva? No, it's too. Let me say something.

Because you kind of danced around when you're talking about one thing that just kind of delis me about comedians. And this is partly in our day. But I think it's true maybe a little bit of their stuff. And this is how seriously comedians take themselves.

Like, if I have to hear one more time from Joe Rogan, that comedians are like truth tellers of the world and they're constantly persecuted, meanwhile he's talking about like taking DMT and seeing like an eyeball or whatever in the sky. I'm like, is this the dangerous truth? You're telling us, Joe? It's quite annoying.

About Nietzsche though, and Socrates, I wanna say something about Nietzsche makes him exceptionally funny, he's malicious. He also turns it against himself in very, very cutting ways. And he talks about philosophy as cruelty, but also this cruelty shows itself as a vivisection of your most beloved thoughts. And there are times, for instance, the problem with Socrates and Twilight the idols, he lets Socrates get the last laugh on it.

He attacks him in the penultimate section, then he concedes that Socrates knew. He's no think so, he mentions the rooster, or a cock he says to into a squeopius. And he takes this to be him maligning life. It turns out that's not what he's doing ultimately in his final account.

And then he mentions a cock only one other time in Twilight the idols when there's a new dawn after a cunt and plainism. So it's almost like Socrates is laughing at the whole history of philosophy until Nietzsche. They're kind of like two close associates after the sort of dark night of, yeah, almost like they're sort of rubbing their minds, maybe other things together, but they're sort of a king. But I'm struck by that about in each of that.

And I think Rousseau might be a little bit of this too, but how much he's willing to laugh at himself and to hide into himself as well. Yeah, no, I think that's right. Also, I'll say that the cock plays a huge role in Finnegan's Wake. David, I know you named your child after Finnegan's Wake without actually having read it.

But it's the human world is created by rooster who scratches the letter from the litter. It's one of those. That's true. Yeah.

I've never read it. He has a hilarious name. It's Biddy something. You can tell David's personal father that he named his first child after a book about a guy who died.

Eigle. Right away. First page, he falls off the ladder on the first page. He's dead.

He really bought the ladder. I've never read it either. It's called Finnegan's Wake for God's sake. Well, they're not called Finnegan falls off the ladder and has a wake.

That'd be a great time. Finnegan's a great deal. When he gets translated into the German, that's the title. Yeah.

I'll also put on a plug for Hegel as being a great humorist. His humor is never recognized because he's German. And because of the denseness, the opacity of his language. But he has no engulfed Alforth.

No. Claremont guy. We were talking about Hegel in time. And he just mentioned to me, well, it's all a joke.

He's Schwabian. And I started reading Hegel as it being a joke. And Hegelian dialectic, if I can make a very lowbrow comparison. Are you guys familiar with the Dr.

Seuss book, The Zacks? So it's about the Zacks as some weird species. Their entire deal is they just walk straight forever. And there's one who only goes north, the North going Zack.

And another who's a South going Zack. And he only goes south. And eventually, of course, they run into each other. And rather than figure out someone to just take a step to the side, they just butt heads and they're there forever.

And they build a city around them. They go over into them. And year after year, they're just glaring at each other. That's the alien dialectic.

The dialect at every stage, there's a yes and a no. And they cannot be reconciled. And they end up in a position of the Zacks. And it's terrible if you're a Zack.

And we're all Zacks. We all end up in that position. But from the outside, from Hegel's position, it's a grand joke. He's the one reading Dr.

Seuss to his kids. Look at these fools. They just take a step aside. I'm going to call you a bull's on the Zacks thing.

Because this is a lot like the pants thing. Like if the North going Zack reads the North Pole, doesn't he just stop? Same thing with the South going Zack? They're like departing from the same point.

No. Yeah. You know what? I never thought of that.