What a JOKE!

Dimitri:   This clarifies everything we’ve
                 been talking about
Tasso:    In what way?.
Dimitri:   What you call philosophy,
                I  call a joke.
 
Thomas Cathart & Daniel Klein.
Plato and a Platypus Walk Into
a Bar: Understanding Philosophy
through Jokes.
 
     What, a Joke ?
 
from Indo European yek: to speak;
Latin: jocos, joke, jocose, jocular,
jeopardy, juggle
    
You might wonder how-it-is speaking
and joking and juggling and jeopardy
might be relatives: all in the family.
 
Irony – from Gk eirein: to say
            (the eireinist: one who says)
 
A priest and a rabbi and a Presbyterian
      go into a bar…
 A truck driver goest into a bar and pus
     his pet frog on the stool next to him…
20 students go went into a classroom…
   There once was a man from Nantucket
Why did the chicken cross the road?
  Knock, Knock….
 
Tell me what a joke is?
So much diversity  and yet, like people,  
there must be something  absolute in
common with all of them, True? 
What is it?  Say.

Right there: that small popcorn explosion.
is how Arthur Koestler, biologist & novelist,
represents  JOKE—it’s origins:  when ever
two (or more) matrices (he calls them that:
frames of  mind,  protocols, expectations,
attitudes, cultural biases,  habits, disciplines,
conventions, customs modes) COLLIDE—
(at the cross roads so to speak): out of that
small or big bang comes
 
                  tragedy (art)
comedy (humor)  invention (science)
 
Get it?
 
Origins of laughter, tears, creativity:
a crash, a collision, a punch line, or
as Koestler say (yek, yek) at the  
“bisociation” of 2 (or more) alma
matrices
       oops
           oh my
               damnit
                   ouch
                       ahhh, ooo
                           yesYes YES
 
Birth of blues &  brain storms
Hah, Ah, A HA.  Hurts so good. ;
 
20 students walk into a cold
cinderblock and fluorescent
classroom at  8:00 in the
morning. …
what?
what the?
what the hell?:
 
                What a joke!
          What a tragedy !
         What ? What the ?
 
Jeopardy.
 
The construction and payoff of jokes
and the construction and payoff of
philosophical concepts are made of
the same stuff. They tease the mind
in similar ways
 
That’s because philosophy and
jokes proceed from the same
impulse: to confound our sense
of the way things are, to flip ouir
worlds upside down, to ferret out
hidden, often uncomfortable
truths about life.

What the philosopher calls an
insight, the gagster calls
a zinger. (Cathart & Klein)