Monty Python and Philosophy, Gary Hardcastle [portable ebook reader TXT] 📗

in bad comedy, we must not forget), but this is why we must attend to the peculiarities of absurdist humor. For it is not true that one gets a joke just if one finds it funny. Getting a joke is understanding a joke and understanding why it is, properly speaking, a joke, even if it is not funny. In the case of absurdist humor, we dig down to yet another level, however: sometimes what is most funny about a Monty Python skit is how it resists full comprehension—the way it presupposes wildly bizarre events, often without drawing attention to these presuppositions.93 Graham Chapman appears as a black African tribesman who is also the son of a white working-class Londoner. Calls to the fire department require that you give your shoe size. The intellectual pleasure here is how very much such things do not reflect or describe the world as we know it; they have their own logic, their own structure. The world of the joke is not our world, but the joke reveals something about our world precisely by presenting a different world.

The lesson here about philosophy is not that Monty Python has anything in particular to teach about the issues that philosophers find philosophical. Please, do not, despite what anyone else in this book tells you, watch Monty Python to learn about the mind-body problem or the nature of knowledge. There is no particular philosophical content in Monty Python—but the form of the work tells us something about the form of philosophy. Philosophy is formally just like absurd comedy without being funny. The intellectual pleasure in understanding Leibniz’s monadology is, thus, just like the intellectual pleasure of watching the Python sketch in which Michael Palin is trying to hijack a plane to Luton (Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Episode 16, “Show 5”)—except in the case of Leibniz, there is no amusement. The intellectual state of doing philosophy (as analytic philosophers do it) is, thus, like comprehending a Monty Python episode minus the amusement. It is like having a keen sense of humor without finding anything actually funny.94

On this account, the principal difference between, say, Terry Jones and Martin Heidegger is that Jones is aware that he is a comedian and Heidegger is not aware that he is a comedian. This helps to explain why philosophers come closest to being funny when they are sending up those whom they diagnose as asking silly or meaningless questions or offering meaningless propositions. For, in such instances, the self-awareness that the philosopher in question lacks is provided for us, the readers, by the philosopher who is sending him up. For example, without quite being funny in his remarks on Heidegger, Carnap at least does let us see a glimpse of how hilarious he and his philosophical friends in the Vienna Circle found Heidegger.95 Another excellent example of this mode of exposing the comedy under the grave facade of the philosopher is provided by William James. In one of his essays, James tries to convince his reader that the question “which is more essential to knowledge, the contribution of the mind or of the world?” is silly by comparing it to other questions: “Does the river make its banks, or do the banks make the river? Does a man walk with his right leg or his left leg more essentially?”96 It is clear that whatever else James is doing in this passage, the argumentative work has already been done through reductio ad humorum—once a question has been rendered silly, its possible answers are all silly. James’s point is that philosophers should stop asking such questions. 97 (I leave as an exercise for the reader to watch John Cleese as the Minister for Silly Walks as an attempt to answer James’s question about walking.)

Indeed, on at least one occasion, a philosopher in a reductio ad humorum passage came strangely close to the view that I am here offering. In a well-loved footnote to Chapter 2 of Our Knowledge of the External World, Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) becomes dimly aware that G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) might be, albeit unconsciously, a comedian. We need not burden ourselves with the particular mistake Russell accuses Hegel of making. Here is, however, the lesson Russell draws: “This is an example of how, from want of care at the start, vast and imposing systems of philosophy are built upon stupid and trivial confusions, which, but for the almost incredible fact that they are unintentional, one would be tempted to characterise as puns.”98

Hegel is an unintentional punster, led inexorably by the internal logic of punning to an execrable philosophy precisely because he doesn’t recognize the humor of his own pun. Accept the original pun, and Hegel’s philosophy follows; accept that working class Londoners might beget black African tribesmen, and the rest of the skit follows. Among the many interesting aspects of this passage from Russell is the illumination it offers regarding the errors of philosophers—philosophers do not make factual mistakes at the start of their work. They are confused and their subsequent mistakes derive from this initial confusion.

On very rare occasions, something of self-consciousness on this matter has dawned in the minds of a few particularly acute philosophers. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900, and note the ‘s’) wrote that philosophers do not feel like friends of wisdom as much as they feel like “disagreeable fools and dangerous question-marks.” Nietzsche’s “philosophers of the future” were to be free spirits, possessed of a joie de vivre that few actual philosophers have shown—they would even know how to laugh.99 Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) came to understand that the joke was a potent tool for philosophical clarification, as in this passage from the Philosophical Investigations:

The problems arising through a misinterpretation of our forms of language have the character of depth. They are deep disquietudes; their roots are as deep in us as the forms of our language and their significance is as great as the importance of our language.—Let us ask ourselves: why do we feel