On Philosophy and Comedy

Message in a bottle

Growing up means trying as hard as you can to become your idol. Adolescence is a period largely shaped by feeling connected to someone we have never met, yet we sense that we share an invisible bond through some common understanding of the world. Whether it’s their music, their books, movies, or comedy, something about them speaks to us in a way that makes us feel immediately heard. The remoteness of that connection, however, makes it even more powerful, as we are not constrained by reality. Our imagination runs untethered, and we create this story of the other—still somehow related to the public image of the person, with gaps filled by our hopes. Paul Celan once wrote that a poem is “a message in a bottle, sent out in the—not always greatly hopeful—belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps.” When we are young, we are looking for those washed-up bottles.

The first idol I can remember looking up to was Eminem. As a white boy, I confusingly identified with the rage embedded in his lyrics. Confusingly, because as a kid from a middle-class family, I shared none of the hardships and background of his upbringing. However, puberty doesn’t discriminate based on class identification, but speaks solely to your turbulent emotions. And I felt rage (at my great parents and privileged environment, I suppose). I used to wear sleeveless white shirts, wear chains around my neck, and my hair was naturally as blond as it could get.

During middle school, my rage slowly faded away and I became more pensive. I started reading voraciously, and my idols changed. I became enchanted with poetry, and Vladimir Holan and Paul Celan became my new beacons in life. I could recite their poems from memory (I remember some of them even now) and started writing poetry myself. My penchant for reading opened new avenues, and I started picking up philosophy books. Nietzsche, Borges, and Foucault became my daily companions, and my opinions about the world were being molded as poor caricatures of their original thinking.

Not only were my influences shaped by the good old physical world, but the burgeoning digital era started to make its mark on my thinking. And discounting some brief infatuations with TV shows and their stars, I think Louis CK had a significant impact on my formative years. Louis CK is an American stand-up comedian who started becoming famous in the late 2000s and became a premier TV star, appearing in multiple high-profile movies and even having his own TV show produced (Louie). In his stand-up, he is a descendant of the George Carlin style of comedy (which he readily admits). His bits always touch on deeply personal topics, from the troubles of raising kids to his ethical doubts and sexual obsessions. He approaches these topics with a healthy dose of outrage and emotional engagement, which makes his comedy very relatable. He is not skimpy about making social observations either. He talks about American politics, society, and religion, always with a self-deprecating manner.

To me, his comedy felt richer—more than just the sum of his jokes. His jokes, by having such strong grounding in the interplay between the personal and societal, always exposed certain philosophical stances. And this is what fascinated me about it. He wasn’t just making you laugh. He was introducing you to a worldview—a worldview of what it means to be human in today’s society.

Never meet your heroes

For those of you who know the story of Louis CK, the last few lines might seem, if not misplaced, at least a bit perplexing. For those of you who haven’t been following his story, there is one crucial detail of his career that I haven’t yet mentioned. Louis CK was accused of multiple instances of sexual harassment in 2017, which he initially denied but later admitted to. After that, he embarked on a self-imposed hiatus that lasted for just over a year, and then gradually started touring again. He continues performing to this day (having released several specials since then), but he now lives in the shadow of his former glory.

He has been a divisive figure since then. Many well-known comedians and American cultural figures have called for his complete vindication, while others are demanding a more sincere investigation and acknowledgment of his actions. In his most recent specials and interviews, released since the accusations, he has publicly acknowledged his wrongdoings, even though to some it might feel rather forced and formal. He has since moved on and doesn’t touch on this subject in his comedy anymore. In our current predicament, where violence against girls and women is an everyday presence (even though it might feel invisible to many men), sexual harassment, even though perceived as only minor by some, must mean something completely different when done by a public figure. It’s a glaring symbol of never-ending injustice built into our cities and societies. It’s a fair price to pay for being famous.

The allegations and subsequent publicity around his actions felt like a personal betrayal. I was confronted with a different side of a person I felt was speaking the same language as I did. The sense of some deeper understanding of the other was shattered. Watching his comedy became a sour experience embedded with contradictions rather than an enjoyable one. I also felt that something culturally important and unique had been tarnished. There is no way to talk about Louis CK and discuss his work without the ever-present undercurrent of his life story. The work and the author’s complicated life have now become intrinsically interwoven. There is no lack of precedents in modern history. Heidegger’s involvement with the Nazi movement, Polanski’s sexual abuse cases spanning his lifetime, or Norman Mailer’s stabbing of his wife are just a few prominent examples. The artists’ lives overshadowing their art.

Basic Life

Comedy has always been proud of staying a bit edgy and outside of the mainstream cultural flow. Comedians are eager to claim that they open social discussions that would otherwise stay dormant, that they point out problems with conventions and herd mentality, and that they maintain a healthy dose of critique toward political and moral elites. Although this feeling of higher purpose, almost a God-given mission, can end up somewhat overstated in the words of comedians themselves, liberal democratic societies need self-critique, and comedy can be seen as one vehicle through which that critique is funneled.

What struck me about Louis CK’s comedy is not only that he stayed within this socially engaged comedy tradition (for lack of a better term), but that he overstepped it. His comedy became a much more intimate portrait of life in modern society, and in the end, morphed from social critique into philosophy. Though still veiled behind the facade of self-deprecating humor, his comedy was built on top of a worldview.

The main thread of that worldview is the yawning dissonance between the quality of life people enjoy in many countries around the world and a glaring subconscious disavowal of this incredible achievement. By and large, living as a member of the middle (or higher) class in today’s Western societies is an easily overlooked but hardly deniable achievement from a quality-of-life perspective. Most people do enjoy, statistically speaking, unsurpassed levels of longevity, incredible leisure and self-realization opportunities largely devoid of serious life-threatening situations. Even though we can enjoy vacations on the other side of the planet, leisure amenities beyond imagination, and health care that our ancestors could never have dreamed of, we forget how lucky and fortunate we are. We still stress about the pettiest problems. And this is what Louis CK tries to restore: that feeling of awe at our modern life.

In one of his bits (Hilarious, 2010), he makes fun of people’s annoyances when flying that exemplifies this attitude: “People on planes are the worst… They get off the plane, they come to your house, and they tell you about their whole flight experience. And they make it sound like it was a f* cattle car in Poland in the ’40s. ‘That was the worst day of my life. I had to sit on the runway for 40 minutes.’ That’s a story in this country.” In the last hundred years since its invention, flying has indeed become an innate element of our worldview that we take as absolutely essential: “What happened then [after sitting on the runway for 40 minutes]? Did you fly through the air like a bird? Incredibly? Did you soar into the clouds impossibly? Did you partake in the miracle of human flight?”

The stories of technological revolutions that occurred in the past few centuries are filled with such adaptations in our worldview. From railways to telephones, trains, diesel cars, cinema, and computers, we always fully shifted from viewing these elements of life as niche and mesmerizing to mundane, almost invisible. Early electricity advances were ostentatiously presented in exhibits around major cities amid massive popular amazement. Early cinema was a notoriously shocking experience for its viewers. The same happened with other scientific advances. Progress in medicine in eradicating swaths of diseases, including rabies, tuberculosis, measles, and chickenpox, is almost completely forgotten. The extensive dissemination of domestic appliances almost eliminated the necessity of attending to several day-to-day chores. “We have white people problems in America, that’s what we have. White people problems. You know what that is? That’s where your life is amazing, so you just make shit up to be upset about. People in other countries have real problems. Like, ‘oh, shit, they’re cutting off all our heads today.’ Things like that. Here we make shit up to be upset about. ‘Like, how come I have to choose a language on the ATM machine?’ ‘I shouldn’t have to do that. I’m American.’” (Hilarious, 2010) This doesn’t imply that we live in a post-problems, carefree society. On the contrary, Western societies are riddled with challenges seemingly more complex than ever before. But we remain as oblivious to the giant leaps as to the seemingly insurmountable problems in front of us.

In psychology, there is a theory of the hedonic treadmill that provides a personal counterpart to this paradoxical blindness to our affluence. The theory maintains that almost whatever event affects us, we always return to the same level of happiness or sadness in the long run. If we get promoted, or we are affected by the death of a relative, in a couple of months, we get used to the new reality. We think about the long-desired promotion as normal (and we no longer mourn the loss of our close one). Similar behavior we might trace within the evolution of Western abundance. Even though, on a communal level, we have experienced massive jumps in both directions, we have always returned to some hypothetical middle ground. We found new things to be excited about and new things to be annoyed about. “It’s amazing how different shit is now, and it hasn’t been this way for a long time. It’s been a very short time. Everybody has a phone in their pocket. It didn’t used to be that. You had a phone—just a few years ago, nobody had their phone. It was just the phone. It was this thing, the phone, that was in a room in your house. And then you had to dial this fucking thing. There was a rotor, and you had to turn it and go—you actually hated people with zeros in their numbers…” (Hilarious, 2010)

Don’t get me wrong, I do not in any way claim Louis CK is coming up with some entirely original perspective on life. These are all things you can probably read in the most clichéd New York Times best-selling books on Eastern philosophy or self-help therapy. What is indeed unique is the channel of comedy that conducts these maybe not-so-penetrating but still valuable philosophical messages. And as a young person, you are looking for those washed-up messages.

“I feel like even if my life ends up being short, I got lucky to have it, ‘cause life is an amazing gift when you think about what you get with a basic life… Here’s your boilerplate deal with life. This is basic cable, what you get when you get life. You get to be on earth. First of all—oh my god—what a location. This is earth, and for trillions of miles in every direction, it f* sucks so bad. It’s so shitty that your eyes bolt out of your head ‘cause it sucks so bad. You get to be on earth and look at shit…. You get to be here. You get to eat food. You get to put bacon in your mouth. I mean, when you have bacon in your mouth, it doesn’t matter who’s president or anything… It’s a great deal. You get to eat. You get to f. You get to read ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’ It’s a great life.” (Oh My God, 2013)

Oedipus Rex

Louis CK wanted to make us laugh, but he also wanted to give us something of Greek philosophy—a compendium of ideas about how to continue being in awe of our incredible modern condition. He did achieve that. Unfortunately, he also ended up authoring a Greek tragedy along the way.