שערי מדע לא ננעלו - א מעסעדש צו די פילע געסט

a serious and good philosophical work could be written that would consist entirely of jokes

The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature

While there can be laughter without humor — tickling, embarrassment, nitrous oxide, and vengeful exultation have been known to bring it forth — there cannot be humor without laughter. That, at any rate, is what contemporary philosophers think. “The propensity of the state of amusement to issue in laughter is arguably what is essential to its identity,” we read under “Humour” in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. But laughter is physical. You need to have a body to do it. So, if the philosophers are right, purely spiritual beings couldn’t really “get” a joke

The process of proving something has some similarity with the process of comedy writing you’re trying to think of a joke out of thin air (that also is on a certain subject or tells a certain story), there's no guarantee that there exists a joke that accomplishes all the things you’re trying to do . . . and is funny. Similarly, if you’re trying to prove something mathematically, it’s possible that no proof exists. And it’s certainly very possible that no proof exists that a person can wrap their mind around. In both cases — finding a joke or proving a theorem — intuition tells you if your time is being invested in a profitable area

Comedy writers all like to think that we’re great observers of the human condition and that we understand pathos, bathos, and all the -athoses. If you wanted to disparage the mathematicians, then you could say that they are cold and heartless, and that they don’t have great jokes about what it’s like to love or to lose, but I disagree. However, there is a difference. I think the mathematical mind lends itself best to writing very silly jokes, because logic is at the heart of mathematics. The more you think about logic, the more you have fun twisting it and morphing it. I think the logical mind finds great humor in illogic

Why do philosophers die laughing? The explanation must have to do with the philosophical attitude itself. At the root of virtually any philosophy there is a strong deconstructive element. The philosopher’s originary gesture is to call everything into question. “Things are not what they seem to be!” is the philosophers’ first commandment. To look at the world philosophically is to see right through it. Whatever passes for real needs to be contested, demolished, abolished. At its essence, philosophy is highly acidic: it dissolves anything it touches. Arthur Schopenhauer regarded this capacity to see the unreality of things as the philosophical gift par excellence

The philosopher can thus find himself alone with his phantasms, caught up between a “real” world that no longer is and an “ideal” one that is too difficult to sell. Sometimes more adventurous minds turn this vision of emptiness into a philosophical program in its own right: that is, a program according to which the world is fundamentally unreal, and human existence is shadowy and phantasmatic in its nature. A higher form of existence — this line of philosophizing goes — may be possible, but we never have access to it. We remain perpetually cut off from it. Indeed, if some god created and placed us here, he must have done it in mockery, just for amusement. That we are nothing but God’s plaything is an insight as old as philosophy itself: Plato for one says as much in the Laws

It is entirely conceivable that philosophers entertaining such a vision, or one close to it, at the moment of their death may well come to think that their lives haven’t been “the real thing.” They now realize that they are dying without having ever lived. At such moments, ironically, existence no longer reveals itself as uncertain, but as something strikingly clear: a farce

Realizing, then, that everything has been set up in such a way as to make you a laughable entity, what is left for you do to? Nothing really, unless you can come up with a counter-laugh. The best thing you can do when the world is laughing at you is to start laughing in turn. Moments from dying, you laugh at yourself, at the entire cosmic mise-en-scène and the deus ludens that has cast you in the farce of existence

Now philosophy, more than ever, is a matter of performance. The philosophers’ laughing at existence at the very moment of their departure from it must be their most significant feat—the ultimate philosophical masquerade. And what is such a laugher if not the best possible way to act out your final philosophical insight — the notion, that is, that you were made in mockery and your life is a cosmic joke? Your existence has been taking place on a stage all along, even though you’ve discovered it only now. You’ve been badly laughed at, mocked, and ridiculed, and you’ve had no idea. The trick, however, is to show no surprise and pretend that you’ve been playing along all this time. This would be to trick the trickster. Ironical existence at its best. That’s how you can preserve some dignity in the comedy of being in which, unasked, you have been cast to play

Though not widely known, Bernard Suits’s The Grasshopper is one of the most remarkable philosophy books of the twentieth century. It’s utterly unique, a book without peers

This is partly because of its style. Most philosophical works are sober and even ponderous, but The Grasshopper is wonderfully funny as befits its topic of games. You read it with a broad smile on your face, punctuated by loud guffaws: this is laugh-out-loud philosophy. But The Grasshopper is also completely philosophically serious, both in what it says and in how it argues for it