Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
While I can somewhat appreciate where this post is coming from, it is bordering on a parody of autistic rationalist overthinking. You might as well ask for a steelmanned case for listening to music, or dancing, or looking at a beautiful sunset. Laughter is an inherently positive human experience. It doesn’t require a justification. That’s not to say that humor can’t be employed toward malicious ends, just as music can be used to deliver damaging philosophical/thematic content. It’s just to say that humor and music and love and joy are, in and of themselves, indispensable parts of what makes life worth living.
The distinction you draw between laughter as a social lubricant and laughter as a commodified social media engagement-farming product has the shape of a compelling argument, but fundamentally I think that laughter is basically equally valuable whether it’s my friend making me laugh, or a comedian on the internet making me laugh. In fact the latter is often more valuable, because professional comedians are more skilled at reliably inspiring laughter than most of my friends and loved ones are.
Now, the point about how humor is often used as a crutch or a dodge in order to avoid having to be serious is a fair point. While humor is good, serious discussion and introspection are also good (just like sometimes negative emotions are valuable as a counterbalance to positive ones) and I agree with you that humor can be used as a sort of manipulative “cheat” or “exploit” in discourse. Unsophisticated observers (and often even sophisticated ones) risk coming away from a debate with the erroneous impression that the funnier and more wry/sardonic guy won, even if his arguments are worse.
There’s a case for humor being inappropriate for certain scenarios; I love dancing maybe more than almost anyone else here, but I would consider it wildly inappropriate to dance at a funeral.
@faceh makes the case below that humor is maybe the most important element of charisma. This would be very flattering for me to agree with, since I am personally quite funny. I have performed stand-up comedy, I was a member of an improv comedy team, I’ve performed in dozens of comedic staged productions and made hundreds of people laugh. Outside of my day job, I moonlight as a bar trivia host (I’ve been cagey about giving specifics about this before because of fears of doxxing, but at this point I’ve given so many other details about my life that this additional piece isn’t going to move the needle) and I’m very comfortable working a room.
Yet @Ponder makes what I think is the correct observation that charisma is very dependent on confidence, and on the ability to confidently and smoothly adapt to shifting social/interpersonal scenarios. While I have a strong sense of humor, I can really only consistently deploy that humor if I feel like I’m “in my element”. If I’m nervous or concerned that my attempt at humor will be seen as inappropriate or unwelcome, I usually clam up.
A truly charismatic person, in contrast, makes every scenario his element. He creates the paradigm wherein his humor will be appreciated. (That or he simply has such a keen ability to intuitively assess every interpersonal scenario that he just knows exactly which canned joke or humorous observation will fit any given opening.)
It’s well-known that many very funny people are also profoundly insecure and self-hating. I think part of this is that absurdity is often a major source of comedy; recognizing the contrast between expectation and reality - exploiting cognitive dissonance - is a reliable way to get laughs. However, individuals who are good at spotting absurd, fake, hypocritical, bizarre quirks in the things normal people take for granted - good at de-encrypting the comforting illusions that help normal people function and maintain emotional stability - are usually not very well-adjusted, well-socialized people. In that sense, humor could in some way be self-destructive. Making others laugh while making oneself miserable. Pro-social but personally maladaptive.
Self-deprecating comedy is an especially powerful and dangerous double-edged sword in that sense. I know I’ve resorted to self-deprecation in the past as a way of trying to seize control of the things about me that people make fun of. I can draw attention to the stuff about me that’s superficially funny and keep the conversation focused on that, so that nobody notices the much more hurtful things that they could take shots at if they were brought to light. Chris Farley made a lot of hay out of fat jokes, whereas the things about himself that he actually hated, and which he did not want people to notice or joke about, were ultimately much more destructive to him (physically and emotionally) than his weight ever was. Robin Williams (who, to be honest, was not actually consistently funny, if you ask me) was constantly bombarding his audiences with a chaotic stream of disparate humor-adjacent quips and silly voices, such that the real man at the center of it all became inscrutable.
Personally, I like to stay away from satirical/topical commentary and focus on stuff that’s far more anodyne and ideologically-empty. Either stuff that’s just harmless and uncontroversial (wordplay, physical/visual comedy, whimsical surrealist stuff), confessional storytelling (guys like Mike Birbiglia and some of Louis C.K.’s material) or stuff that’s so over-the-top self-awarely “shocking” that it can’t possibly be mistaken for sincerity (guys like Anthony Jeselnik, Jimmy Carr, etc.). Leave the actual serious shit for people to talk about seriously.
But I have asked these to myself. I’m still considering the steelman case for music. The overuse of music is problematic because it’s a superstimuli that utilizes aural emotional cues. When you listen to too many sad songs you may become desensitized to the natural aural cues of sadness (in the voices of others, primarily). At the same time, because music is simply a packaged emotional state, we have to be wary of enjoying misleading music, which presents an emotional state that isn’t beneficial or realistic. The consequences of poor music consumption are both the potential dulling of real life emotional sensitivity (listening too much) and in being carried away into a fantastical emotional state (obsessing over the wrong kind of music). There’s adolescents who experience unreasonable despair because they listen to too much music of despair, just like how in 18th century youths were captivated reading the Sorrows of Young Werther (which Dostoevsky mentions in the opening of one of his books). This is a normal line of inquiry in the Socratic and Christian West, by the way. It’s only today that we have the idea that human proclivities and interests shouldn’t be instrumental to a greater good. Dances were organized to increase communal bonding and enhance mate selection, while conveying the physical movements of peacefulness and mirth rather than aggression. Sunsets were enjoyed in a spiritual way which deterred one from pantheistic thinking. Etc.
So is doing opiates. But the reason we don’t do opiates is because the pleasure is transient and “pleasure” is a limited experience, so if we experience pleasure from opiates, we experience less pleasure from real life — which has disastrous consequences. So it is with an inappropriate use of laughter. Laughter is relief, and if you experience too much relief from the comedic superstimuli, you may experience less relief where it matters — real life. This is really the root claim… laughter can be deeply relieving, but it’s a relief that is completely unattached from anything significant.
Yes, I know, I’ve read Plato as well. I remember rolling my eyes and audibly groaning at the passage where he implores the state to regulate the musical modes people are allowed to listen to, such that music can only be used for “pro-social” ends.
Absolutely untrue. We have examples of hedonistic philosophy as far back as the Epic Of Gilgamesh; the alewife Siduri offers the advice: “Fill your belly. Day and night make merry. Let days be full of joy. Dance and make music day and night… These alone are the concern of men.” In Ancient Greece, Socrates’ student Aristippus of Cyrene founded a whole philosophical school of explicit hedonism. Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill were arguing about the particulars of egoist hedonism 200 years ago.
Do you genuinely believe that this is the primary reason people have danced throughout history? Not to experience spontaneous joy? I think you have a very blinkered understanding of human psychology. People fifty thousand years ago were quite capable of having fun, and of doing things spontaneously without needing to have all social action coordinated by authorities optimizing toward the “greater good”.
Again: When and by whom?
It’s so ironic, because what’s one of the most common conservative critiques of rationalist materialism? “You just want to reduce all human affairs into a systematizable spreadsheet. Your worldview leaves no room for organic human experience. You want every human action and utterance to have a quantifiable rationalistically-legible purpose, such that humans become mere cogs in a machine.” Yet to me, this is precisely what you are doing, and claiming that all the great Christian and/or Western civilizations of old were exactly like this! Where is the room for joy and spontaneity in any of this?
Why didn’t you think about it instead of “rolling your eyes and groaning audibly”? This doesn’t mean anything to me. My dog also rolls her eyes and sometimes groans and her reasoning is mediocre.
You have misinterpreted the Epic of Gilgamesh. It’s an epic, which commemorates the deeds of a heroic man who meets a variety of figures and obstacles. The very existence of the Epic is a rebuke against hedonic philosophy. Siduri is a young woman who keeps wine, both symbolic of vanity. Gilgamesh argues against Siduri and moves on. The advice of Siduri is placed in the epic so that it can be rebuked by the writers of the epic. As your first example was way off I have to assume your others are as well.
Dances were not spontaneous in European history. They were organized, the dance routines themselves were orderly, they were scheduled on a calendar, and there were rules about gender intermingling. The only people I see dancing spontaneously in joy are homeless people, schizophrenics, and characters in Hollywood movies. Even today dancing is not spontaneous. You plan to attend an event in which you dance, and you conform to the dancing tradition of the group — this occurs even if you’re a member of the Crips!
blinks
People 50,000 years ago are irrelevant.
“Spontaneity” is a late 20th century meme. But joy is a real thing, and it’s telling that we no longer speak in terms of joy today but fun. Joy is a deeper pleasure than fun. We wouldn’t say that a person who spontaneously binge drinks experiences “joy”, or the person who stands in a crowded bar jumping up and down. People experience joy from deeply satisfying experiences which don’t leave a residue of guilt but which are actually beneficial for them in every dimension (physical, spiritual, etc). There is joy around a campfire after a hike with friends, but there’s no joy in “spontaneous” unreasonable pleasure.
I never claimed that the author(s)/compiler(s) of the Epic agree with Siduri. I am saying that her existence in the text very clearly demonstrates that there were in fact people at that time who did espouse hedonism. Your claim was that hedonism is “a recent phenomenon”. Yet I have provided you with what I consider very strong evidence that it is not, in fact, recent. (And how convenient for you that you received to even give a cursory look at the other examples I provided.)
Again, they are very much not irrelevant if your claim is that fun and hedonism are a recent phenomenon. If in fact people who are the exact opposite of “recent” can be shown to have fun, your argument falls apart.
When I read Tacitus’ account of the Germanic peoples, I see a great deal of spontaneity and unstructured play/fun. You don’t have to think this is a good or admirable way to live - I think there are a lot of very unsavory things about the lifestyle he imputes to them - but to flatly state that it didn’t exist strikes me as a highly tendentious claim.
Yeah no, this is a textbook example of joyless thinking, and it makes me wonder if you’ve ever actually experienced what normal people would think of as joyful.
Look, I agree with you that people should be temperate in their indulgences! I agree that the life of a heroin addict merits scorn! To be entirely ruled by one’s passions and incapable of distinguishing between the appropriate decorum in different scenarios is indeed beastly and unbecoming. However, everybody needs to be capable of letting loose sometimes. Everybody needs moments that are unstructured, unplanned, and not directed toward rationally-legible ends. I would not wish to live in a purely “Apollonian” civilization shorn of any appreciation for simple pleasures.
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I've always had this problem with overbearing scores in film or blatantly manipulative music that dosen't stand up artistically.
Granted that films are supposed to be emotionally manipulative experiences (why else would you ever watch a horror film?) but yeah, I really, REALLY hate when a movie's score is trying to sell me on some moment as though it is a huge deal, be it the action, or romantic elements, or some 'huge' twist, and I NOTICE I'm being manipulated because the music is telling me to feel an emotion that the film simply hasn't earned or induced with its other elements.
Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln is the most obvious example of this experience for me.
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