An Example of Offensive Humor: Palestinian Alarm Clock Joke

A student used this as an example of offensive humor in their humor essay. They said that this might be explained by the Relief Theory of humor. They made a good case for it. I went to look up the video of the joke from Family Guy, as I had not seen it. This is the clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7_0NoRHOEM

http://www.funnyjunk.com/Try+everything+atleast+once/funny-pictures/4842531#90eada_4842087

Now this joke clearly can be seen as offensive, and as someone who (uh oh) is very supportive of a Palestinian state as well as someone who wishes more attention was paid to the non-violent means on both sides of the Israel-Palestine struggle, I still laughed. Yes. And I might be inclined to say that my laughter was immoral. But it was involuntary.

But as De Sousa argues, I clearly have to hold the belief in some way to find it funny, so the belief that terrorist-style (or terrorist indeed) violence and Palestinians blowing themselves up is a good thing might be present in my mind….hmmm, no, I honestly don’t think I find these to be a good thing.

But what also caught my attention were the comments. Normally, one should avoid Youtube comments entirely but they are a great place to mine for the WORST of offensive jokes. And since the Palestinian Alarm Clock joke was offensive, I figured the comments would also bear painful, wicked, immoral (and maybe funny) wit.

But also grief, sadness, appeals to decency, and a sense of people trivializing the tragic. Which it also had.

First: the TOP COMMENT reads as such– the offensive and….damn it…I laughed, perhaps an immoral laugh. Some less interesting comments such as “FTW” have been deleted. Spelling is kept in its original “flavor”.

Top comments

MidnightFox4 months ago

This is not funny. My father died in 9/11. His last words were Allahu Akbar. 

Frank Lotion3 months ago

Oh well……fuck the others that died huh??🤔🤔

KingTwibz3 months ago

my father also died with the same last words only he knew your father

Light 19883 months ago

my grandfather died in the jewish holocaust of 1942. He fell off the guard tower

Tracie Velge3 weeks ago (edited)

hey buddy i get it my family friend richie dumuso was a person who worked in the met life office who lost his right hand witch got an infection due to the exposure to the asbestis and chemicals from the towers in 9/11 he helped raise my family we nearly lost him due to the infection but he pulled through. lighten up a little i mean what did you expect…cough attention seeking dick

Tracie Velge3 weeks ago

stop making nazi jokes they are making me fuherious

zim197011 hours ago

that’s a very sad story and I am sorry to hear, but this is hilarious

Geeky Metalhead5 months ago

Sadly this joke blows up in our face.

Guy Smiley7 months ago

I’m Israeli and my people face the threat of this violence every day, and I found this to be FUCKING HILARIOUS!!!!

And those who were perhaps rightly offended

Raneem Herzallah3 months ago

+Guy Smiley yeah and have u heard about Palestine in the news no but u have about Israel and those say that us Palestine are bombing u. Oh yeah and have u heard the 4 innocent children playing in a sand pit and suddenly being bombed huh? Yeah I didn’t think so or the old man in a wheel chair being threatened to death? Yeah that’s what I thought. If u want I can continue. There’s more. And don’t tell me I am making these up cause every human person who supports Palestine will know what I’m talking about and not only them people around the world!

FIFA Legend2 months ago

abderahman elaziz thanks Im Palestinian and i found this really sad, i mean we don’t have any guns or bombs all we have is stones!

meso mos2 months ago

this is so racist . fuck this vedio

Back to GRADING!

Still Grading, but Still Pondering Phthonic Humor

“If two emotional contents are incompatible, that then will guarantee that at least one of them is inappropriate.” Ronald de Sousa, “When is it Wrong to Laugh?”

Some offensive jokes to think about as I think about the claim that it could be morally wrong to laugh at certain things. If anything, God won’t be able to laugh at much of anything, right?

Writing Break due to Grading. Enjoy Humor without the Philosophy Nonsense!

Grading and end of semester killing me. I have 7 classes (5 different subjects, 3 different campuses, 0 self-care!). I will be back to writing soon on how God Can’t Laugh: Incongruity ain’t Happenin’ with the All-Knowing!

Until then, enjoy sadness-mirth.

LIKE ME!!! *Gets out boat for the river of tears*

BTW, I am wearing a dirty sweatshirt right now.

Happiness is knowing you aren’t happy. Which means to be happy, you have to not know it, which means you won’t know it… *gets glass of wine*

I love philosophy. I started philosophy about 18 years ago. I do what I love.

I fucking hate this drum too. *gets vodka and a shot glass out*

Breaking the Dark Humor barrier

Today, my therapist suggested that, in my state, seeing a psychiatrist might be a great help. During the intake, I was asked the usual questions about my mental state and behaviors. The question on suicidal thoughts came up. He asked me, “Do you have suicidal thoughts?” We discussed the suicidal ideation I have struggled with for as long as I can recall being me. He then asked the obvious follow up question:

“Do you have a plan to commit suicide, like a time, a place, a way you would do it?”

I replied: “I don’t have a plan, but dude, trust me, I’m like WAY super organized, so I would have one.”

The intake doctor chuckled. “Well, yeah, never heard that reply before.”

I feel I have achieved some kind of greatness in the dark humor world, as I am in a psychiatrist office being asked about suicidal thoughts, and I managed to cause laughter.

I left the psychiatrist’s office and my check engine light came on in my truck.

Now I truly want to die.

God’s Not Laughing Part #1

In the next few posts, I will be changing the subject of this blog to talk about something else in the realm of mirth that has made me think and furrow my needing-to-be-waxed brow: what is God finding funny? Does God laugh?

Inspired by the wonderful scenes from The Name of the Rose, in which the ever-so-holy Sean Connery speaks about the saint’s humor and Aristotle’s lost work on humor, this has begged the question about the possibility of the holy laughing. If Aristotle wrote a treatise on humor, would there be something inherently shameful in that fact, as the abbot proclaims. And if THE philosopher cannot be an advocate of mirth, wouldn’t it be the case that the one-in-three being higher than Aristotle, God, could not be an advocate of a chuckle as well?  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUUB96c6EpY 

In this post, I will argue that God cannot be laughing or finding anything funny under the most ancient of the theories of humor (that yes, some people are still arguing for today): the superiority theory of humor. This theory states, in a nutshell, that humor arises from a sense of malice and/or abuse towards something or someone deficient in some virtue relative to what that person or thing is. The humorous sentiment we experience comes from that realization of our sense of being superior to the “buffoon”. Consider the laughter we experience when a practical joke is being played on someone, such as this case here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rf7CyvC2lM&t=310s . Philosophers like Hobbes would say what gives us the pleasure is being in the know, being in the superior position as the one who knows the joke.

Look at many of the characters we do laugh AT (yes, laughing AT signifies the thinking going on in the superiority theory of humor). Lloyd and Harry in Dumb and Dumber, Tommy in Tommy Boy, all the way back to the men plagued with serious erections in Aristophanes’ Lysistrada. We laugh because Lloyd and Harry do not know the obvious: that Samsonite is the name of a luggage company, not Mary’s last name. We feel superior to Tommy when we thinks the answer to his exam question is Herbie Hancock (not John Hancock). We feel more in control of our desires and bodily lusts than then men (and then the women who just can’t wait for sex too). These are all cases that point to the validity of the superiority theory.

I won’t be arguing for or against this theory now, but instead imagine this is the correct theory. If the construct of humor is ultimately explained by superiority, I want to ask the question: could God laugh?

Now we will be using the typical idea of God espouses through Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition. Today, in relation to the superiority theory, we will focus on the property of omnibenevolence. God is all-good, and in this sense all-forgiving, all-moral, all-loving, all-merciful, etc (screw the Euthyphro dilemma here, everyone). Now let us just assume for argument’s sake that not only is the superiority theory true, but that there is an O3 God, meaning that this God is omniscient, omnipotent, and most importantly for this section, omnibenevolent. Can we imagine some being that is all-forgiving, all-kind, and all-good in every possible way, finding humor from feeling a sense of malice above something inferior?

Let us consider the traditional trope of the moron joke, a staple in the superiority theory justification box. Since I am from Texas, I will use an Aggie joke here.

Q: Why did the Aggies cover his ears?
A: He was trying to hold in a thought.

We chuckle because clearly we all know (as the Aggie should) that thoughts are *philosophical trigger warning* immaterial and cannot therefore slip out of your ears. But the imagined Aggie is too stupid. Instead of pitying the Aggie for their lack of intelligence, we mock them through malicious laughter. We are superior and we laugh from our pedestal.

God is on the highest pedestal of all though. If anyone knows for sure that thoughts do not slip out of our ears, it would be God. God knows this for sure. But can God maliciously laugh at the Aggie, who is in such a state of ignorance? I would argue no, God cannot laugh with his teeth barred like the non-Aggie Texans do at this joke. God is all-kind, all-understanding, all-merciful, all-good. God, having the property of omnibevolence, cannot be laughing at the misfortune of others, or the sorry state of their intelligence. God could only respond to the misfortune of others with all-pity and all-mercifulness. While we laugh, God pities. While we play the practical joke, God feels sorry for the poor buffoon on which the joke is played. God isn’t laughing. His all-good nature restrict him from laughing if the superiority theory of humor is true.God’s goodness, far beyond the human goodness, stops the mirth from taking hold in God’s being. God cannot find humor in the wicked, the stupid, the buffoonery, of mankind.

God isn’t laughing. God can’t, or God won’t.

Next time: can God laugh under the incongruity theory? image: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/66/ac/67/66ac67b685244350d4ffc00c3764b7a2.jpg

Schopenhauer Giggles

from Nihilist Memes Facebook page

“Unless suffering is the direct and immediate object of life, our existence must entirely fail of its aim.” -Schopenhauer 

Every semester I assign “On the Sufferings of the World” by Schopenhauer to my Meaning of Life course. If you haven’t read it, pick it up. It is a RIOT!  We open the semester speaking about the value of a virtuous life (Socrates and Aristotle) and a life as free of suffering as possible (Epicurus).

Now that the students are all buttered up, I lay that essay upon them and no one is very pleased. How could I spring such an awful world view upon them?! How could I? Am I the creator of the world? Am I the one who made it such that the essence of life is ultimately to suffer? No, I did not create the world to be the way it is (well, unless my lenses of perception need some scrubbing). The students claim God will make sense of the suffering of the world, or that the suffering will have some greater purpose of good in the end. But, like Dorthy Parker lamented “but tomorrow never comes”

And we are immensely good at suffering. We are very much aligned to our essences as humans when we suffer, no? Some people make suffering the meaning of their life, say that misery is interesting and pain is the only thing we can really know for sure. But those people tend to be tedious and dull and around 15 years old and from a moderate to wealthy home. OR tend to be ex-boyfriends of mine.

But I digress. And I am being a jerk.

But yet, the world seems to be on the more negative side of hedonic value. Many people seem to act in the way that Thrasymachus proposes, not Socrates. We stare at the sky seeking a higher truth or God, only to have a bird poop in our eyes (this happened to me once).

Schopenhauer was a fan of the incongruity theory of humor, and thought that a humorous attitude was aroused when we experienced an incongruity between our Idea of how the world should be and how it is at the moment. Dogs don’t roller skate! Idea: dog, a thing that walks on four legs and does not roller skate. Actual event: dog is on roller skates. HUMOR!

So when I read Schopenhauer, clearly this is happening to me:

Idea: the world is a happy place ultimately, where hard work is rewarded, justice is fair and implemented, and God gives everything a purpose

Actual Event: A bird pooped in my eye for no reason and the bird will be painfully eaten by a hawk, which is hardly retributive justice for pooping in my eye (meaning, life is suffering)

“To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness.” -Woody Allen, Love and Death

Things That Are Often the Subject of Suffering/Humor

Honest confession: I was making a comparative list between things that are often the subject of jokes and a list of things that are often the subject of suffering. I looked up jokes first and made a list of the things often joked about: death, marriage, sex, sexism, religion, money

I then realized I was actually writing these things by accident under the things that are often the subject of suffering. But it did not seem to make much of a difference which list these were under. The lists are very similar.

Part of the list had happy sides to the suffering side: a happy marriage in which one has married the right person is not the source of suffering, a religion which is actually taken to be a source of good will and love (it can happen!), a good romp in the hay with no disastrous consequences (it can happen?)

There was something that caught my attention- some of the things on the suffering list did not have a really happy side. Take child abuse. I could not think of the benefit or happy side of child abuse. It seems to be one of those “bad by definition without exception” categories. Or drug addiction. “Well, he’s a functioning addict” might be as good as it gets. But yet, though these things that are often the subject of suffering have a funny side?

But their funny sides might be on the tasteless side as well? Take for example the Family Guy joke of Brian talking to a young woman named Tracy:

Tracy: And then in high school, I was violated sexually by my father, it happened on numerous occasions and I was too afraid to tell anyone because I felt like it was my fault.

Brian: So… you do go all the way. (Family Guy, Former Life of Brian)

South Park even titled one of their episodes “Child Abduction Isn’t Funny” to make the point that the subject they are about to make jokes about isn’t funny, except that it is WITHIN the episode of South Park.

Some have argued that some things that are the subject of suffering can be funny after a certain period of time. This might add to the topic of psychical distance. How does one get some distance? Well, over time of course. Time heals all wounds and puts a clown hat on them. Unless you are Zeno of Elea, then tragedy never gets a humorous twist and wounds are never healed. But time is often given as a requirement for the tragic to become funny. This comes up in the Benign Violation theory as well, that a way to make the horrible benign is see it from a distance, and time in this cases is a way to produce such a distance. Genocide yesterday? Not funny. Genocide 1,000 years ago? Funny. Of course, when something is too far back in time, the humor and tragedy fades, so maybe we need to have a tragedy that is around 22.3 years to 100 years old (borrowed from South Park: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=612DEoTFH0o )

“Hitler wasn’t such a bad guy. After all, he did kill Hitler.” (www.laffgaff.com)

I find this joke to be a very clever gem. It is funny, many agree. And it is a triple threat- genocide, suicide, and paradox. It can be laughed at by many, even those of the groups targeted by the Nazi regime. Not all will laugh, some will not think the time has created the comic from the tragic, but some will.

Concern (one of the many): Tragedy is never far from our more daily lived experience. One can imagine a young man in the trenches joking about how he is about to be blown to bits, we have comedians joking about their very present and very dangerous cancers (Tig Notaro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Kz-lV4t-3w  ), and dates calling you fat. Hitler was in the past, but dates calling you fat is very present.

I went on three dates with someone, and on the third date, I was graced with the great truth that I was “too fat to be attractive” I was shocked. 1) How did it take him three days to figure out that I was fat? Surely, if I was too fat to be attractive I would have been very visibly and noticeably fat. 2) What kind of person tells a date that on their third date? The correct protocol is to never call the supposed unattractive pile of nothing after the first (or third date). You ghost them, just like any other mature adult.

A few years back, I was reading at a coffee shop, as the pretentious types like me tend to do. While I was reading, or trying to, I overhead the table next to me deep in Socratic debate. “My friend told me that she thinks she has a coke problem. I was like, thinking, ‘whatever, you’re fat, like you could really have a coke problem, PUH-lease! Shut up!” And to think, I hope to meet the love of my life in a coffee shop. Not that day. Not that day…

“You’re too fat to be attractive” “You don’t have a drug problem because you are fat, friend.” How could these slices of life be soo cruel, and yet, both have become sources of humor for me. To be honest though, the second scenario got a chuckle much sooner.

Our first response to these jokes and situations is rightly shock. I was shocked to hear such a cruel judgment from a date, I was shocked to hear such cruelty dealt to a friend, and shocked when I hear jokes like “My babies first phrase was, Now that I’m born, I’m pro-choice.” Shock is correct—the social norms of friendship, dating, respect, life, babies—they are violated. But these are no benign violations that have been softened with time. The struggle of society and weight continues for everyone, of bad friends and drug addiction, or the right to choose. We feel shock, but also humor at the same moment, or very soon. Life is the joke, as long as we remember the order of the show. Tragedy then comedy, just like those Greeks said.

Time does not pass for many tragic jokes. They are about wounds that do not heal because they are the wounds that make life life. Bad marriages, loneliness, cancer, sexism, death: these are all wounds that bleed without end. They are always the things that cause suffering. They are the tragic of everyday life. There is no distance or time that changes that. All of it calls for tears. But perhaps next we laugh through the tears. Nihilistic observation humor.

“You ever notice that life is meaningless in the grand scale of things?”

Silence.

“Is this thing on? Does it even matter that it is?”

Humorous Attitude? Bullough me!

Marmysz describes the humorous attitude as a “talent of capacity for reinterpretation. The humorist, upon encountering incongruity, demands of it that it makes some contribution to the enjoyment of life.” (152)

Humorous attitude brings to mind the term aesthetic attitude. Maybe we can understand the relationship to the enjoyment of nihilist humor but diving into this idea further. What is the aesthetic attitude and the psychical distance? To figure out how we all might laugh at the tragic state of our human condition, thus enjoying the possible reality of nihilism itself, we might ponder the idea of psychical distance from the 1912 article by Edward Bullough, “Psychical Distance as a Factor in Art and as an Aesthetic Principle”. Now this is a very proper piece of aesthetic work, not one I would normally think of when pondering humor, which is hardly ever proper.

Fart.

See? Not proper.

But with a humorous attitude, perhaps we can have the proper humorous experience of it.

So what is Bullough talking about when he uses the term psychical distance? He describes it as a spatial, temporal distance from an object. Aristotle too speaks of certain distances required in the experience of art (heck, when you see an Aristophanes play, you probably want some spatial distance since real fees would sometimes be used on stage!) There is the temporal distance, and for Greek tragedy, this meant something like placing the play in an earlier mythological age. Bullough writes, “[t]emporal distance…remoteness from us in point of time….has been declared to be a factor of considerable weight in our appreciation.”

Bullough uses the example of fog to elaborate on the idea of distance. He says one should imagine looking at fog while at sea. As a sailor, our practical response to fog would be: ANXIETY, FEAR, ANNOYANCE, DANGER, DISTRESS (boy, he’s a serious John carpenter fan, this Bullough). Now, to achieve the psychical distance to the fog and enjoy it on some different level, you must abstract from the experience of the fog. When you abstract from experience the idea of the fog, remove your practical needs from the experience, you can encounter the fog this way: BEAUTY, SMOOTHNESS, SHADES OF GRAY (okay, damn, can’t use that phrase any more), SHADES OF OFF-BLACK, DIFFUSE LIGHT, SUBLIME, NATURE’S POWER. Bullough says that the distance needed to have an experience of beauty requires we remove our personal interests and self from that experience, allowing us to abstract it. He says, very much in Kantian fashion, “the distance appears to lie between our own self and its affection….anything that affects our being, bodily, or spiritually…Distance lies between our own self and such objects as are sources of vehicles of such affections.” The fog, transformed by this mental process by which we remove ourselves from the experience, our personal needs and interests that is, puts us out of our actual selves, allows this fog, the object of fear normally, to “stand outside the context of our personal needs and ends” and become an object of beauty for us. For Bullough, it is a negative process, in that it cuts out our means-end side of our everyday experience. But positively, it produces an entirely new experience of interpretation (of the thing as beautiful). But do not forget: the distance view is not our normal mode of existing, nor should it be, for Bullough.

Now here’s where it gets very juicy and tantalizing to apply to the tragic/comic enjoyment of nihilistic humor. This psychical distance requires “a sudden view of things from their reverse….[it] comes upon us as a revelation, and such revelations are precisely those of art.” Aristotle anyone? Incongruity and Kant anyone? Aristotle requires a good tragedy have a reversal. Kant and many incongruity theorists of analytic persuasion say the enjoyment of incongruity is a reversal and a resolution. The joke is the inciting incident, the revelation is that this is the comedic context, and the resolution is the punchline. This is not necessarily the view I agree with, but the view from the Kantian humor tradition (that’s the joke, really- Kantian humor tradition).

Bullough argues that distance is required for the beautiful, much like Kant says beauty is outside of what is agreeable.  Bullough says (drum-roll) “IT IS A SPECIAL MENTAL ATTITUDE.” And I typed that in call caps. Yeah, it is serious.

Now how to we have distance and also emotional experience when viewing art? Bullough says this concern is the “antinomy of Distance”, that we have to have personal experience but it can only be expressed in detachment from the experience. Art is something we experience not with our personal desires and needs, but outside of ourselves. Schopenhauer says art is a place where our self disappears. Kant says something like “it is universal but personal, above the self but experienced as selfless”.

What? I’d like a square circle please. Is that on the philosophical menu today?

But maybe this might be the beginning of a discussion of comic persona versus actual comic, a nihilistic view versus actual nihilist, and this is how we come to laugh.

Here comes the philosophical fog of doom:

There is a voice emanating from the fog screaming “DICKIE, DICKIE, DICKIE! And no, it is not an adult film title or something worn with a tuxedo. George Dickie is the philosopher who challenged the idea of psychical distance and the aesthetic attitude, perhaps the same sort of premise Marmysz is putting forth to explain our enjoyment of dark humor. And I think Dickie defeated it for good. But next time, I will salvage whatever I can from this view, taking our the antinomies and saving something about distance, but a distance that will not remove the self. As Dickie argues in his 1964 article “The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude”, YOU CANNOT BE WITHOUT A SELF WHEN VIEWING ART! DUH!!! WE JUST ATTEND TO ART DIFFERENTLY THAN OTHER ACTIONS! GROW UP!!!!

All quotes pulled from http://www.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/361_r9.html Accessed Sept 23 2016

Life as Comedy

“When we humorously reflect upon experiences that are otherwise painful, we reorient ourselves towards those experiences in such a manner that we gain a feeling of control and mastery over them. In choosing to view unpleasant situations through a humorous lens, we demonstrate not only our own intrapersonal prowess, but also a rebelliousness against pain and negativity.” (Marmysz, 145)

Questions: How does one learn to reorient themselves and therefore rebel against pain? When should we NOT rebel against pain, but give into it as the correct path of action? Isn’t the pain we rebel against also the pain experienced in the not-to-hilarious existential anguish? And what do we actually gain control of?

Perhaps, much like how the absurd man, that beautifully tragic man, Sisyphus himself or Oedipus, silences the idols not just by contemplating his condition but also acting against it by choosing meaning against nothingness, the comic man of the same condition can silence the idols with his mirth.

Nietzsche, as unpacked by Nehamas (and less elegantly by me in my undergraduate honors thesis), argues in his work “Nietzsche: Life as Literature” that Nietzsche treated the world as a literary work, a work of art. And yes, a tragedy at its most brutal. The human condition does seem to share Aristotle’s qualities for a tragedy: our unavoidable Fate (of death, of lack of objective meaning, of choices we cannot be certain of), recognition of such a Fate, the universality of this Fate, and of course the universality of our hamartia in the form of our arrogant hubris: that we can get out of our human condition, either by religion, brain-washing denial, or escapism through pleasure.

Kierkegaard spins in his grave every time you go to the spa to avoid the anguish of existence, ladies. Don’t let that happen.

We think we prove God exists, or that God doesn’t. We think surely there must be some objective meaning and we can know it. In this way, we all go through he plot of our lives and experience recognition of this fault, and cry out “What the fuck, universe?! I MEAN, COME ON!!!” As Camus so delicately put it, “One always find’s one’s burden again.”

Life as literature, Nietzsche through Nehamas’ very accurate analysis? Life as tragedy? Well, maybe we should start thinking of life as comedy (of course, when life is comic and when it is tragic is a line that still needs to be reckoned with). “Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same Earth” can be read perhaps as “Comedy and tragedy are two sons of the same shitty Earth.”

More on comedy as tragedy and tragedy as comedy next time

Last section of the Myth of Sisyphus here: http://dbanach.com/sisyphus.htm

Congruent Incongruency

https://xkcd.com/220/  Accessed Sept 20 2016

Congruent incongruency: seeing both the connection and the disconnect at the same time. A prime example is jumbo shrimp (both small and large). This is an oxymoron: both terms contradict the other in one sense, but not in another. In one sense, we use the term shrimp in English to say something is small, and most shrimp actually are smaller than most Gaffigan-esque seabug cuisine that humans in coastal regions devour with pride. But yes, jumbo shrimp are bigger than other shrimp. Yeah, obviously that is why they are called such. Duh.

Recall George Carlin’s response to the phrase “near miss”. It is a strange congruent incongruency and it makes him irate. Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDKdvTecYAM (Sept 20 2016). The audience laughs at the joke because all at once they know what “near miss” means in everyday English. It means something almost got hit or crashed into but did not get hit or crash into in the end.  They know this, they are aware of this truth. BUT they also now know the opposite, that this word literally does not mean that at all, as Carlin deftly points out. The phrase really should be “near hit”, and “near miss” literally means they almost DID NOT hit or crash, but did. They hold these two contrary ideas at once, knowing both to be true.

This is the very heart of the incongruity theory of humor, this fundamental holding of two contrary truths at the same time. It answers well the what of many jokes. But it does not finish the story of humor. Some incongruencies are funny, some are not. I brought up the benign violation theory to add to the story of incongruence. And it does help. “Jumbo shrimp” and “near miss” are benign violations, harmless linguistic violations, as many words are!

But what about this joke: “Hiya, folks! I just flew in from Minneapolis and boy is every city equally useless.” (from http://www.theasterisktoday.com/galleries/top-ten-nihilist-jokes/?from=the-philosophy-of-lettermans-late-show)

 I would write my own nihilistic jokes, but what’s the point? 

Please don’t steal my joke. Of course, everything that brings me joy is taken from me any ways and morality is subjective any ways, so whatever.

We recognize the joke set up easily. It is a classic joke format. Much like we know what “jumbo shrimp” and “near miss” means, we know that “I just flew in from…” means “Oh, this means a joke is coming. This means an attempt at humor is coming.” But then we are given a sad piece of truth: everything is useless, meaningless, hollow. But this is a joke, so we might laugh. If Rodney Dangerfield delivered it, I sure would laugh.

This is not benign. This is serious, heart-breaking. We may understand the truth of the format of joke, but we don’t want the truth of the content. It makes us sad to imagine the world as empty of all that is valuable. We tend to consciously reject such an idea even when we might conceptually argue for such a state of affairs of existence in a philosophical argument.

But we laugh. I laugh. Maybe you do too.

But now I must go teach my Meaning of Life class. Seriously, no joke. That’s the joke.