Ready for this?
It's humor.
The almighty sound of laughter...
The highest of all social graces. One who has a firm grasp on the keys to laughter, has the power to subversively dominate any social situation, and in an entertainment worshiping society such as ours, this gives him the power to rule.
Precious few philosopher's have ever even touched on the subject. No one really knows exactly why we laugh, we just do.
But humor is not a joking matter. We can use it defensively, by hiding behind it, or offensively, by using it to attack others. It's like a bulldozer of ideas. It's blunt, tactless and completely unstoppable. To a logical train of thought, it's the intellectual equivalent of a nuclear bomb. Turned to as a last resort, when reason itself has ceased to provide an adequate defense. It has the capacity to grind the most sophisticated ideas down to nothing... and there is nothing that is impervious to it's reach. Nothing is beyond it's skill to manipulate and contort. It has the power to turn the most beautiful, innocent thing into something vile and atrocious. Likewise it can shroud something truly vile behind a cloak of innocent, lighthearted fun.
Astonishing.
However humor's ability to level ideas can just as easily be turned to good use, not surprising when one considers that the vast majority of ideas that people have, are bad ones. As a general rule humans are impossibly silly and downright stupid most of the time... Yet from the ashes of human stupidity rises something beautiful in the form of satire.
Satire is a force that can existentially turn reality on it's head. We call it making light of something. In the realm of philosophy, you could classify it as Negation. Negation is a concept far too complex to get into here. Sufficing to say, negation is to deny the existence of something, and it is foundational to Nihilism, Existentialism, Absurdism, Buddhism, Taoism and various other schools of thought...
Maybe humor is a philosophy unto itself.
If that's true, it certainly is a philosophy for the cynics and the absurdists. After all, it's only the absurdity of life that makes humor possible. The funniest jokes are always those which tap into the sheer irony of human existence. And perhaps life is so absurd, so fraught with paradox and incongruencies, that humor truly is the greatest of all philosophies...
That's why I laugh when I read Ecclesiastes, or Nietzsche... The madness of it all... Vanity and chasing after the wind. The illogical nature of logic.
haha.
"Once you realize what a joke everything is, being the Comedian is the only thing that makes sense." -Watchmen
I don't much care for my random crazy train's of thought to have morals to them, but here's one: Don't fall into the popular deception that humor is a magical all-excusing social justification to say or do anything... It's more often used as a pillow that you hold over the gun barrel to muffle the sound as you pull the trigger...
7 comments:
You make a very good point. I certainly feel like I've been guilty of pulling the trigger before.
Is it justified at times, to pull the trigger?
Do some people need to be shut down before someone takes them too seriously?
That definitely connects with what you mentioned about humor's good use.... But then again, you didn't really explain exactly what you think that is...
well yes, it's definitely justified.
humor's good use is found in it's ability to negate things as i said but probably was unclear about. Sometimes that's good, for example if you find the humor in a grave situation, it's no longer such a grave situation... By looking at the grander perspective we can laugh at the trivialities of life that would otherwise bring us down.
though incidentally the part about pulling the trigger at the end was in no way a summation of the idea i was trying to get across, more like a moderately related allusion that i found particularly pleasing and just couldn't stand to leave out:p
Weapon reference. I understand.
Well that could work the other way.
We could look at the grander perspectives and see the trivialities of the things that make us happy.
And then where would we be?
Oh... wait...
we'd either be laughing or crying... and that would depend entirely on the strength of our sense of humor! bam.
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