Metaphysical Humor and Stand-Up Cosmology

In the book discussed yesterday -- Deep Exegesis -- there is a chapter called The Text is a Joke, which comes close to an explication of what we call the guffah-HA! experience. 

In short, insight into any subject matter has a form analogous to getting the joke. Bearing in mind that there are stupid jokes and humorless people. Every paranoid patient I ever saw was conspicuously lacking in humor, except maybe the bitter and snarky kind.

Conspiracy theories are like elaborate but stupid jokes. Come to think of it, their devotees are also generally humorless, the latter because they lack self-awareness and take themselves so seriously. 

Have you ever seen an MSNBC host? What makes them so punchable is the combination of smug superiority, conspiratorial insight, and mocking pseudo-humor toward those of us that the conspiracy supposedly "explains" -- for example, that you and I are racists who want to dismantle Our Democracy™ and long for an authoritarian strongman. Now that's funny.

Bold Statement:

Every text is a joke, and a good interpreter is one with a good sense of humor, one with a broad knowledge and the wit to know what bits of knowledge are relevant. All interpretation is a matter of getting it. All texts mean the way jokes mean.

Like how? Well, first of all, the reader has to bring something to the text analogous to what we have to bring to the joke in order to get it. Any form of sophisticated humor will go over the head of a child or MSNBC host because they are lacking vital information. The more you know, the deeper the joke.

If the reader "comes to the text with his mind a tabula rasa, the text will be as empty as his head." 

Everyone brings information to the text that is not in the text, and seeks to illuminate the text with light from outside.

For example, even a literalist brings his literalism. His literalism is his hermeneutical technique. But in my experience, the more literal the person, the less the capacity for getting the joke. 

If you -- the reader -- get my metaphysical humor, you may also have some insight into Bob's struggle with the world -- the world of people who get neither it nor Bob. Every post is packed with lightheaded japery, is it not? 

But why? Must be because of all the cosmic connections everywhere, which some people see and most don't. Looking back on it, this tendency of mine really began to develop in grad school. Why is that? Because I began to internalize more information that I could bring to this or that text.

For example, I remember learning all the mutually exclusive theories and schools of psychology, from behaviorism to neurobiology to psychoanalysis, which I found funny. 

Now, this absence of agreement is either a misfortune -- a cautionary tale -- or a joke. If someone, for instance, is shallow enough to become a behaviorist -- a psychologist who denies the existence of the psyche -- they certainly won't get the joke of so many "experts" who can't even agree on so much as a first principle of psychology. 

Very much like philosophy, and why there are so many jokes about philosophers. A philosopher may be defined as someone who disagrees with other philosophers. Have you heard the one about the solipsist who thought it was such an attractive philosophy, he couldn't understand why more people don't believe it? 

Which is much like the determinist frustrated by his inability to convince people to accept determinism, or the atheist whose intellectual powers are so godlike he can confidently pronounce on the nonexistence of God.

Certainly this is why Marxism is such a bad joke. But instead of laughing at themselves, they elaborated a theory of "false consciousness" to account for people who do get the joke. 

In order to get the joke of Marxism you have to be outside Marxism. Wokeness and identity politics are the latest ways to pull them back in. Which is why the Woke are simultaneously so tediously humorless and precisely why they are so deserving of mockery.

Likewise, when science becomes scientism, it becomes a joke: "theorizing always involves not only an amassing of data but telling a story that gives the data coherence." Like a good joke, in a way.

There is an imaginative leap from the data in Newton's gravitational theory, quantum physics, chaos theory, and Darwinian evolution. Theorizing is a joke.... It is a matter of gathering all the data, and suddenly, joyously, getting it.

Or not. For

If texts function like jokes, then texts require certain kinds of interpreters. What kind of interpreters? Funny ones? That would not be a bad start.

But what "can one do with someone who has no sense of humor?"

Analysis and teaching might improve things marginally, but that person's main problem is not a technical but a spiritual one: somebody without a sense of humor suffers from a contracted soul, and the only real solution is conversion.

The chapter somewhat abruptly ends with the following:

For both the interpreter and the reader of interpretations, the commentator and reader of commentaries, the experience of a good interpretation is very much like the experience of a good joke. An exegete pores over a text, and finally, and often suddenly, a dozen pieces fall into place; the experience is one of sudden release...

Indeed, "The exegete might actually laugh." In which case he has had a guffah-HA! experience.

They say that Trump's supporters take him seriously but not literally, while his enemies take him literally but not seriously. Which is precisely why we laugh with Trump at those seriously literal-minded scolds and ideological puritans.