“I got into philosophy at least partly because it was comic and that’s still much of what I enjoy about it.”
Helena de Bres is professor of philosophy at Wellesley College. In the following guest post, she talks about the connections and disconnections between humor and philosophy. It’s a topic she’s in a good position to discuss, being the rare (only?) philosopher to have written for both The Journal of Moral Philosophy and McSweeney’s.
The subject of Professor de Bres’ academic work has ranged from the highly global (distributive justice and international trade) to the highly personal (narrative, meaning in life, memoir, family). She is the author of the books Artful Truths: the Philosophy of Memoir and How to Be Multiple: the Philosophy of Twins, and she is currently writing a book on “philosophy in the first person.”
She’s also collecting philosophical jokes, and encourages you to share some in the comments.
This is the eighth installment in the 2025 Summer Guest Post Series. (As with the others, it will stay pinned to the top of the home page for a few days.)
On Being Seriously Funny
by Helena de Bres
When I told my parents I was considering taking a philosophy class in my first year of college, my father visibly shuddered. There may have been several reasons for this (I mean, god, take your pick), but a frontrunner would’ve been my jokey dad’s distaste for excessive gravity. You could get away with a lot in my childhood home—in particular, some extremely bad puns—but one thing you couldn’t indulge in for long was the sin of being earnest.
I share this prejudice and the companion love of the comic and it’s part of why academic philosophy has been a tricky fit for me. Philosophers can be very earnest, not least about the funny. “Don’t laugh much, or at many things, or without restraint,” Epictetus advised. Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, and the medieval scholastics considered humor some combination of foolish, nasty, dangerous, truth-obscuring, impious and low-class. Though this is all rather humorless, I get it. Much comedy has an anti-rational quality: it replaces coherent meaning, logic and linearity with ambiguity, contradiction, and non-sequiturs, shooting for the surreal and absurd. It can also be silly and flippant. For those of us on Team Reason-and-Depth, it can feel like a personal attack.
Throughout grad school I didn’t feel grave enough for the solemn endeavor I was engaged in. I couldn’t get through a class or talk without cracking a joke, either aloud or internally, the latter followed by a herculean effort to avoid sniggering in public about nothing. I didn’t do myself any favors by organizing a joke-filled department trivia competition and creating a guide for my students starring an invertebrate teaching assistant called “Philosa Flea.” (Guys, I’m sorry.) I felt pretty alienated, but most of the time it wasn’t an alienation I wanted to fix. I found my apparent lack of fit lonely but also amusing. I once had lunch with a fellow grad student who dismissively referred to someone else in the profession as “not serious” and I immediately wanted to meet them.
Maybe none of this was out of order. Some distinguished philosophers (including several in my grad school department) have been funny on purpose and/or spent a lot of time being amused—Democritus, Diogenes, Socrates, Montaigne, Voltaire, Wittgenstein, Austin, Nozick, Nagel and (Judy) Thomson spring to mind. According to Plutarch, Crates “passed his whole life jesting and laughing, as though on perpetual holiday.” And, in contrast to the dour admonitions I mentioned earlier, we have commendations of the comic, and of taking it seriously, from several of the greats, including Spinoza, Shaftesbury, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Santayana. They praise humor, variously, for being a core personal and social virtue, a route to the truth, a subversive philosophical teaching tool, a fitting response to the human condition, and a route to salvation. Zarathrustra’s enemy is the Spirit of Gravity, which you kill by laughing.
Coming from the other side, humorists tend to philosophize. A signature move of the disgraced-but-undeniably-funny Woody Allen—a college philosophy major—is to raise an existential issue, then sink bathetically to the mundane. (“Not only is there no God, but try getting a plumber on weekends.”) The standard set-up for stand-up comedians is to introduce some puzzling or awkward feature of human behavior, examine it from several angles, propose hypotheses and introduce counter-points, much as we in philosophy do. The key difference between us and them is that they bow out of the questioning relatively quickly in a string of wisecracks, whereas academic philosophers do not bow out. Ever. There’s a scene in Elif Batuman’s hilarious essay collection The Possessed where a group of academics are visiting Chekhov’s house. The guide asks if they’d like a quick viewing or the full tour. “’We want the full tour,’” the professor-in-charge says, “grimly.”
I joined the grim tour out of necessity leading up to tenure, then wheels began to fall off. I started publishing humor pieces and comic personal essays, wrote a book about the philosophy of twins (slapstick, obviously), and publicly diagnosed all my colleagues as absurd. For a while I interpreted this as me quiet-quitting the field. But now, further along in the dialectic—Hegel’s semi-indecipherable Phenomenology of Spirit has been called a comedy, which is funny—I’m starting to see the whole trajectory as fitting together.
Let me get unserious/serious here and say I got into philosophy at least partly because it was comic and that’s still much of what I enjoy about it. Philosophy is a perfect fit for the most popular philosophical account of humor, the incongruity theory, according to which funniness arises from discrepancy: say, a shift from one meaning to another, or from the high to the low. Philosophy perpetually engages with the high (or, equivalently, the deep), but we philosophers are all too human to stay up there permanently, so we’re constantly caught in this slippage and tumble. In our discipline’s founding act of slapstick, Thales fell into a well because he was too busy staring at the sky, but the rest of us do it less conspicuously every weekday by, for instance, lecturing on Kant’s metaphysics with lines of chalk dust across our asses.
Another way philosophy is comic is that it shares many of the core features of comedy, as I touched on earlier. Both comedy and philosophy take aim at big human questions from a semi-detached standpoint, incorporating what Bergson called “a momentary anesthesia of the heart.” They operate via abstraction, defamiliarization and hypothetical reasoning, and pay obsessive attention to logic and language. They treat nothing as sacred, shoot for truth and have a radical bent. They often end with a neat resolution: the intellectual pleasure of getting a joke is somewhat like that of a getting an argument, or, more generally, the point.
Speaking of which, let me get to it. I want to say that these surface similarities between the philosophical and the comic are grounded in three deep affinities. Humor can be, first, a way of seriously philosophizing, including about philosophy itself. Making fun of philosophy, as comedians do directly or indirectly, and as some of us do from inside the temple, brings to light the inherently incongruous nature of philosophizing, which is funny, but it also casts some healthy doubt on the exalted place accorded to reason and reasoners in the Western tradition. In his recent history of Oxford philosophy, Nikhil Krishnan writes: “Jokiness stands in one sense against seriousness; in another, it represents only a rejection of the characteristic postures of seriousness, of which humourlessness is surely the most obvious.”
Second, when generalized into an overall orientation toward reality, humor can itself be a philosophy. A comic attitude is the closest thing that those of us in the analytic tradition—who tend to eschew overarching cosmic takes—may have to a comprehensive philosophy of life. (Or, if it isn’t the only option for us, it’s the most fun.)
Third, when worked up in that way, humor can perform one of philosophy’s traditional roles as a form of existential consolation. Viewing our dire condition from a comic perspective takes some of the edge off it and can be a route to empathy, self-compassion and peace. As a meme I saw recently put it: “’I don’t know how you can joke around at a time like this.’ ‘Sir, that dark sense of humor is a load-bearing structure.’” Some of the things I have joked about in life would make a Stoic weep.
These philosophical benefits of humor—which, to be clear, don’t exhaust its value—are at their most transparent in jokes about death. (To quote Allen again: “I don’t want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.”) In its deft levity, a good funereal witticism exerts a momentary advance triumph over one’s messy and grave defeat. The fix is partial, yes, but how else are we going to do it? Via our treatises? LOL!
When considering the best possible deaths, I’ve always thought it’s obviously either die at sea, like Shelley, or die laughing at one’s own joke, like our colleague Chrysippus. The first is serious, the second farcical; in the act of summing up, crowning and farewelling life, you ideally want both. So maybe you’d start by chuckling at sea and then accidentally drown, or die jesting about how you nearly just drowned as you (don’t) recover on the beach. Haha? Okay, not yet. As with our existential situation, I’ll work on it.
I’m collecting jokes by or about philosophers: please drop your favorites in the comments.
images by J.Weinberg using ChatGPT and Photoshop
Related:
The Philosophy Special
Bits of Laughing Matter
A Parody Issue of Mind… from 118 Years Ago
How to Teach Philosophy in Comedy Clubs
A Collection of Philosophy Humor
Comedy, like philosophy, requires a delicate blend of truth and absurdity. It’s just the proportions that differ. Obviously, comedy requires more truth.
No, really, why does Zeno hate “chicken cross the road” jokes?
(Because they never reach the punchline.)
In an undergrad political theory course one of my professor spent a few weeks hyping up a special surprise guest who would be coming to visit our class. On the day of, we took a 5 minute break so he could go and retrieve said guest. When he returned, he was wearing a wig. He spent the rest of the class fielding questions in character as Edmund Burke. We laughed and laughed. Hundreds of students in a big lecture hall. His performance would make most comedians salivate.
Wonderful. Who was the professor?
Edmond Burke
While I understand the impulse to make philosophy more “accessible” or “approachable” through the use of humour, I must once again register my dismay at the creeping erosion of seriousness in our discipline. Philosophy, let’s not forget, is a discipline whose dignity lies in its demand for clarity of thought, analytical precision, and apart from that, moral seriousness. To inject silliness or levity into philosophical writing—deliberately and self-consciously—is to (as this humble thinker sees it) flirt with the dilution of that seriousness. This is not to say that the occasional wit of a Plato or a Kierkegaard is without merit; but such moments are rare, disciplined, and in service of argument—not a substitute for it. What I think we see too often today (se also the recent DN post about ‘vibing’!) is not wit in the service of insight, but quips in the service of branding, entertainment, or the cultivation of a personal ‘voice.’ Must every footnote now come with a punchline?
Philosophy is not stand-up comedy with footnotes. It is not a late-night monologue about metaphysics. It is (at least in its rightful and pure form) a vocation of the intellect, and as such demands a tone befitting its subject matter—grave where gravity is called for, severe when clarity is at stake, and — to emphasize here, always governed by the principle that truth is not well served by smirks.
Sure, let us be human in our writing. But let us not conflate humanity with flippancy, nor forget that the most enduring philosophical works are those that take both their readers and their subject matter very seriously indeed. The philosopher is not a jester in the court of ideas, but a steward of reason. Let us comport ourselves accordingly.
LOL
This is the single worst take I’ve read in the Daily Nous comment section—an amazing feat!
Academics are standup comedians but without the jokes.
If this is ironic humor, it is masterfully constructed.
“Laughter can get through the keyhole while seriousness is still hammering on the door.”―Terry Pratchett
I don’t really *get* music. I’m not opposed to it or anything. I just see that other people are really moved by it — to the point where they’re willing to just stand around doing nothing else but listening to it for hours at live shows — and I don’t feel the same way.
The point is that I’m really grateful to Traditionalist. I’d previously assumed this was merely something different about me that was, in many ways, regrettable because it kept me from enjoying something the same way other people do. But now, after reading what Traditionalist has said, I’ve realized that’s not what’s going on.
What’s actually going on is that I’m morally and intellectually superior to people who do like music. What they perceive as “enjoying something lots of other people enjoy” is actually nothing of the sort. It’s failing to properly engage their intellect. It’s living life with a tone not befitting its subject matter.
Take that, Swifties. If you could just have less fun, like I do, you’d see how much better it obviously is.
It was not for nothing Plato kicked the musicians, poets, and other passion-stirring layabouts out of the Republic; they threatened to unseat reason and disrupt the rightful rule of the philosophers.
“What I think we see too often today… is… quips in the service of branding, entertainment, or the cultivation of a personal ‘voice.’ Must every footnote now come with a punchline?”
I disagree with much of your comment, but this part is spot on and worth pointing out. I’ll add that I find it annoying not because philosophy is so esteemed as to be incompatible with humor, but simply because philosophers are very often not as clever or funny as they think they are. Yes, that includes me, oh well.
You have to embrace the dad-joke-mindset. The joke is there for you, so you can chuckle to yourself. Whether anyone else finds it clever or funny has nothing to do with it.
No.
This comment makes me considerably more sympathetic to Traditionalist’s point.
Hi considerably more sympathetic to Traditionalist’s point. I’m dad.
Well played.
St. John Chrysostom (c. 387): “To laugh, to speak jocosely, does not seem an acknowledged sin, but it leads to acknowledged sin. Thus laughter often gives birth to foul discourse, and foul discourse to actions still more foul. Often from words and laughter proceed railing and insult; and from railing and insult, blows and wounds; and from blows and wounds, slaughter and murder.” (Homilies on the Statues, C. 15)
Until about the 18th century, the superiority theory of humour seems to be more or less the default view, though the only substantial text (i.e not just a few paragraphs here and there) defending it is an obscure French dialogue from 1768, at which point the relief theory had already made serious inroads.
There may have been more diversity among medieval European philosophers. I found an article by Boaz Faraday Schuman called “Scholastic Humor: Ready Wit as a Virtue in Theory and Practice.” Schuman gives this quotation from Aquinas in response to the question whether lack of humor is a sin: “But there are those who are lacking in humor, and will not crack a joke, and moreover are annoyed when other people do, because they refuse to accept even moderate humor. And such people are, accordingly, vicious.” (Quoted from Schuman, History of Philosophy Quarterly c. 39, 2022; Schuman cites Summa Theologiae [II-II, q.168, a.3])
Schuman gives a few examples of scholastic humor. They don’t seem to be attempts at demonstrating superiority over other people. E.g., Aquinas: “… an argument from authority is the weakest sort of argument—according to Boethius.” Schuman credits Buridan with a version of the view that humor gave one a release from tension (Schuman, n. 34).
Still, the superiority account of humor seems to have been the default view, as you say.
Yeah, there are definitely some exceptions. Joubert’s Treatise on Laughter is the earliest dedicated treatise I know of (1579), and it advocates a thoroughly physical account of laughter (basically a relief theory).
“Thus laughter often gives birth to foul discourse, and foul discourse to actions still more foul.”
I’m still trying to figure out if this is an argument for or against laughter.
New copypasta just dropped.
I think the headline here is that Traditionalist actually said “The philosopher is not a jester in the court of ideas.” I mean, who even says things like this?
On a lighter note, review David Chalmers’ philosophical humor repository.
I love the collection of proofs that P
It has always seemed to me that if one would be a philosopher following Zhuangzi, a sense of humor would be an absolute, non-negotiable prerequisite. (Also, if you are after philosophers with humor and haven’t read Zhuangzi, you’ve missed the most original. He makes these western philosophers look dreary and dull.)
Because I TA’d for Amy Olberding, I am able to regularly incorporate Zhuangzi in my introductory courses. 🙂 And I was thinking of him while I read this! But I was also thinking of the barrier his humor often poses to students. I think de Bres’s piece captures this dynamic really well, though in a professional, rather than pedagogical, context.
I think we should all read Zhuangzi. But I don’t really know what to do about the pedagogical friction (except embrace it).
PHIL101 humor deserves special honor, as a gateway to increasing undergraduate majors in philosophy. I could see the following joke being told effectively on day 1 of PHIL101, preceding notes on how to read the Discourse or Meditations seriously.
‘Descartes is sitting in a bar, having a drink. The bartender asks him if he would like another. “I think not,” he says … and disappears.’
From Michael Huemer‘s (Colorado/Boulder) page (search sidebar menu for Jokes/Philosophy/More Philosophy Jokes)
As John Allen Paulos would say, I think, therefore I laugh (subtitled “The Flip Side of Philosophy”, Columbia University Press, 1985,| rev. ed., 2000).
I always ask my critical thinking students to analyze the joke, but to date nobody has caught the invalid inference on their own.
Horse walks into a bar. Bartender asks “Why the long face?” and the horse says “My friend René died.”
René Descartes walks into a bar. Bartender asks if he’d like a drink, he says “I think not”, and disappears.
True, those jokes would have made more sense if they were told in the opposite order, but that would be putting Descartes before the horse.
I’m gonna be honest, I find specifically philosophical humor depressing and awful. The reason is that it is often little more than an inside reference to some philosophical idea, and the pleasure just derives from being “in the know” re: that idea. You and the joke-teller get to *winkwink* about having had to learn about Zeno, delighting in the shared understanding that a good chunk of the human race wouldn’t get it. That’s not actually the humor response. It’s something else. Observe:
Q: How does Santa’s accountant value his sleigh?
A: The Net Present Value.
Is the same joke, but for accountants. “We’re stuck with this shit, let’s cope by making a reference to it.”
Philosophers can be super funny (Helena your McSweeney’s essays are hilarious!) but not when they’re telling these jokes. I hate them.
Prove me wrong, DN. Tell me a philosophical joke that is funny and doesn’t just rest on some disciplinary inside reference.
Agreed, they are truly terrible.
Nick,
I think you are absolutely correct. Philosophy jokes are but a sub-genre of dad jokes.
A few quips (I’ll leave it to you to give necessary and sufficient conditions for a “joke” to decide if these count) from Sydney Morgenbesser:
To skinner: “Wait, let me get this straight, you think we anthropomorphize people?”
To David Albert, while Morgenbesser was dying of ALS “Why is God punishing me? Is it just because I don’t believe in him?”
To Austin, after Austin claimed at a talk ‘Isn’t it interesting how in some languages a double negative is a positive, but a double positive is never a negative?’ Morgenbesser, sarcastically from the back, replied “Yeah, yeah”.
and from Steve Martin, from his delightful memoir, Born Standing Up, on being influenced by Lewis Carroll’s “logical” humor:
“But Carroll’s were more convoluted, and they struck me as funny in a new way:
1) Babies are illogical.
2) Nobody is despised who can manage a crocodile.
3) Illogical persons are despised.
Therefore, babies cannot manage crocodiles.” (p. 74)
“I’ll leave it to you to give necessary and sufficient conditions for a ‘joke’ to decide if these count”
Perfect example!
thanks!
(More seriously, another Morgenbesser: upon being asked why there is something rather than nothing, he replied “and if there were nothing? You’d still be complaining!”)
this isn’t so much a dad joke, but does require that you know something about philosophy to find it funny. G. A. Cohen doing his Gilbert Ryle impression: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80AovwgVY8Q
I contend that G.A. Cohen was one of the funniest persons to have ever lived.
No offense, but that’s nuts.
All right I’ll take a shot. This is a joke I saw Ricky Gervais tell Jerry Seinfeld in a video:
“A holocaust survivor eventually dies of old age and goes to heaven. He meets God, and he tells God a holocaust joke. God says, that’s not funny. And he says, I guess you had to be there.”
This is great. But maybe it’s not the sort of philosophical joke OP had in mind. It has a philosophical flavor; it’s not a lame, pun-ish reference to some technical term or something like that.
What the Tortoise said to Achilles.
“Our laughter is always the laughter of a group … However spontaneous it seems, laughter always implies a kind of secret freemasonry, or complicity, with other laughers. real or imaginary.” (Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, 1900)
I feel like you’re asking too much. How can a joke be “philosophical” without ipso facto being “inside” philosophy?
For what it’s worth, I do think philosophy can be very funny. I can’t imagine anyone denying this while living in the same geological era as Steve Yablo.
Also Nomy Arpaly. And Sergio Tenenbaum (whom I’ve heard described as the only funny Kantian, which may not be true, but which is pretty funny).
You’re identifying one kind of joke that exists across subject matters. It usually involves making a pun involving a term that the students have recently learned. They take a moment to recognize it, and then they get that aha, and it feels funny, and they laugh.
As you note, the purpose of this sort of joke is to identify oneself (and the other people who get the joke) as members of a community. Sometimes it’s a rarefied community, when you’re punning on something relatively specialized, like abstract algebra. (“What’s purple and commutes?” “An abelian grape!”) But sometimes it’s actually a very broad community, like people who know a little French. (“Why do the French only eat one egg for breakfast?” “Because one egg is un oeuf.”)
I can see why someone might think negatively of the kind of humor that exists only to create an in-group and an out-group – but I think that bonding with a community is a positive thing, and most people only tell these sorts of jokes in contexts where they expect everyone to get it, and not to feel left out.
Still, this is only one genre of humor. And there’s nothing distinctively philosophical about it. Before dismissing all philosophical humor as just this, look at some of the other examples in this thread. Or better yet, look at some of the famous work of George Carlin or Emo Philips or various other comedians who have a kind of philosophical astuteness in their humor that doesn’t depend on any knowledge of philosophical literature.
“Before dismissing all philosophical humor as just this, look at some of the other examples in this thread.”
I think it’s pretty clear that Nick is referring to a specific kind of philosophical joke–e.g., punning on obscure technical concepts–rather than philosophical humor as such. Witness:
“Philosophers can be super funny (Helena your McSweeney’s essays are hilarious!) but not when they’re telling these jokes.”
I’ll go out on a limb and guess that the “work” of comedians like George Carlin is not what Nick had in mind…
Okay, but Nick begins with a generalization. He finds “specifically philosophical humor depressing and awful. The reason is that *it is often little more* than an inside reference to some philosophical idea.”
Yes, and “specifically philosophical humor” could mean different things. The rest of Nick’s comment rules out the implausible reading on which it means “all humor with philosophical content, broad enough to include people like Carlin.” Principle of charity.
The confusion stems from Nick’s last two sentences: “Prove me wrong, DN. Tell me a philosophical joke that is funny and doesn’t just rest on some disciplinary inside reference.”
This suggests that it’s hard to find funny philosophical jokes that don’t “just rest on some disciplinary inside reference” and that finding such jokes would “prove” his position wrong. In fact, such jokes aren’t hard to find.
Those last two lines seem to conflict with other parts of Nick’s post (specifically the statement that philosophers are “super funny” when telling jokes that aren’t like “these jokes,” the ones that rest on an inside disciplinary reference).
Hmm, yeah maybe those last two sentences do cause more trouble than I realized.
Anyway, I think it comes down to this: “specifically philosophical humor” just obviously wasn’t meant to cover Carlin or other broadly “philosophical” commentary. It was meant to cover humor specific to the discipline that at the same time wasn’t just a wink to others in the know—something actually clever, albeit still about or within the range of academic philosophy.
I think Morgenbesser’s double positive joke, mentioned in a comment above, is a candidate for this. The setup for that joke (“natural language double negatives are often positive, but seemingly never the other way around”) wouldn’t normally arise except in the context of an academic discussion. Yet the cleverness of the joke’s punchline derives from an overlooked feature of language that anyone can see (i.e., that “yeah yeah” can be a sarcastic “no”). This is specifically philosophical humor of a sort, something other than “remember that thing we had to read in grad school?” but still far away from a Carlin aphorism.
Now I’ve violated my sacred rule about not dissecting jokes philosophically, so I’m out. Cheers.
SCTV’s “Philosophers at Work” https://youtu.be/CIC0a7gvI70?si=QN3aFdeqxNVLkEJc
If you haven’t read Raymond Smullyan’s “A Planet Without Laughter,” why not now?
https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/smullyan.html
How did the logician die? Explosion.
That’s a classic.
Irrelevant.
Gerald Dworkin posted philosophy jokes in three installments on 3Quarks: “Short Takes”
(Nov 9, 2009), “More (and longer) Shorter Takes” (Dec 7, 2009), and “Philosophy and Humor” (July 29, 2013). He includes one quotation from Ambrose Bierce’s *Devil’s Dictionary* but not the jokes under the entries for “Cartesian” and “Monad.”
Much of the early modern humor is in satire. E.g., Moliere’s joke (in “The Imaginary Invalid”) about the “dormitive virtue,” ridiculing an Aristotelian doctor, Voltaire’s targeting of Leibniz in Candide, and La Mettrie’s sarcastic ridicule of Albrecht von Haller.
Some philosophical witticisms from before the 20th century strike me as not even intended to be funny. E.g., G. C. Lichtenberg’s best aphorisms have a “makes-you-think” impact; they produce in me an “Oh…” but not a smile.
Hazlitt pokes fun at Bentham in a few places. Bentham had evicted Hazlitt from a rented accommodation after Hazlitt fell behind in his rent. Hazlitt later wrote of Bentham’s “usual bonhomie.” In his essay “Jeremy Bentham,” Hazlitt says, “Mr. Bentham writes as if he was allowed but a single sentence to express his whole view of a subject in, and as if, should he omit a single circumstance or step of the argument, it would be lost to the world for ever, like an estate by a flaw in the title deeds. This is over rating the importance of our own discoveries, and mistaking the nature and object of language altogether. … Mr. Bentham relieves his mind sometimes, after the fatigue of study, by playing on a fine old organ.”
“It is worth noting that Wittgenstein once said that a serious and good philosophical work could be written that would consist entirely of jokes (without being facetious). Another time he said that a philosophical treatise might contain nothing but questions (without answers). In his own writing he made wide use of both. To give an example: ‘Why can’t a dog simulate pain? Is he too honest? ‘ (Philosophical Investigations, § 250).”
Norman Malcolm et al., Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, 2nd ed (Oxford University Press, 1984), 27–28.
In 1963, Herbert Feigl prefaced his APA Western Presidential Address with this remark:
“To my dismay I had come to realize that Occam’s Razor mobilizes the castration complex of the metaphysicians.” (“The Power of Positivistic Thinking: An Essay on the Quandaries of Transcendence.” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 36: 21–41. https://doi.org/10.2307/3129534)
In that address, Feigl says he was told by W. T. Stace that Stace’s article “The Refutation of Realism” (1934) was “intended as a joke” (Feigl, n. 11). Stace’s paper appeared in Mind, v. 43 (1934): 145-155. Add Stace’s article to the list of philosophical pranks.
There’s a post on parody- and joke-philosophy articles on Leiter Reports: “An April Fool’s joke in the Journal of Philosophy?” (December 12, 2012).
More examples of jokes by philosophers mainly on philosophical topics:
C. S. Peirce apologizing for a joke: “I remember a lady’s averring that her father had heard a minister, of what complexion she did not say, open a prayer as follows: ‘O Thou, All-Sufficient, Self-Sufficient, Insufficient God.’ Now pure Self-consciousness is Self-sufficient, and if it is also regarded as All-sufficient, it would seem to follow that it must be Insufficient. I ought to apologize for introducing such Buffoonery into serious lectures. I do so because I seriously believe that a bit of fun helps thought and tends to keep it pragmatical.” (Pragmatism as a principle and method of right thinking: the 1903 Harvard lectures on pragmatism)
Frege ridiculing Mill, who had treated 2+1=3 in terms of our experiencing that “collections of objects exist ***, which while they impress the senses thus may be separated into two parts, thus ** *.’ Frege wrote, “What a mercy that not everything in the world is nailed down; for if it were, we should not be able to bring off this separation, and 2+1 would not be 3! What a pity that Mill did not also illustrate the physical facts underlying the numbers 0 and 1!” (Foundations of Arithmetic, trans. Austin)
Funny lack of funniness: Schopenhauer: “If we consider that an angle requires two lines meeting so that if they are produced they will intersect each other; on the other hand, that the tangent of a circle only touches it at one point, but at this point is really parallel to it; and accordingly have present to our minds the abstract conviction of the impossibility of an angle between the circumference of a circle and its tangent; and if now such an angle lies visibly before us upon paper, this will easily excite a smile.” (World as Will and Representation II, trans. Haldane and Kemp
If this was in the light bulb section Chalmers repository, I missed it:
Q: How many philosophers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: It depends on what you mean by light bulb.
Not quite jokes, but there’s the verse on Berkeley’s idealism, and the limerick on Ayers’ near death experience, and the famous ham sandwich proof.
Tom Cathcart en Dan Klein, did write about this
I enjoyed this piece, thank you!
“Inspired” by your request for jokes I came up with this one about Wittgenstein. It’s so bad it must be original:
Q: How did the early Wittgenstein undermine our pursuit of philosophy?
A: His tract ate us
Another odd one, this time from *Littlewood’s Miscellany* (by mathematician John Littlewood): “Schoolmaster: ‘Suppose x is the number of sheep in the problem.’ Pupil: ‘But, Sir, suppose x is not the number of sheep.’ (I asked Professor Wittgenstein was this not a profound philosophical joke, and he said it was.)”
In a bibliography in the book *Henry E. Kyburg & Isaac Levi*, Kyburg says his paper “An Interpolation Theorem For Inductive Logic” was a “philosophical joke.” The paper appears in the Journal of Philosophy 75 (1978). He characterizes an earlier publication (“All Generalizations Are Analytic”) the same way.
Agnes Heller used “philosophical joke” as part of her typology of jokes in her 2005 book, *The Immortal Comedy: The Comic Phenomenon in Art, Literature, and Life*.
Edgar Allan Poe’s prose poem “Eureka!” (1848) satirizes several philosophers (e.g., Aries Tottle, Hog [satire of Bacon], the Dutchman [satire of Kant]). Harriet R. Holman identified Hume, Mill, and Bentham as other targets in her paper “Hog, Bacon, Ram, and Other ‘Savans’ in Eureka: Notes toward Decoding Poe’s Encyclopedic Satire” (Poe Newsletter, October 1969, v. 2, No. 3, 2:49-55).
From Mel Brooks’ song, “Listen To Your Heart” in Young Frankenstein:
“As ev’rybody knows
If it’s sex they’re thinking of
Intellectuals are ineffectuals
When it comes to making love
Nietzsche always said he wouldn’t
Schopenhauer thought he shouldn’t
And as for immanuel kant
Ev’ry girl in town knew that kant
Couldn’t”
As a diehard McSweeney’s Internet Tendency fan, just a quick note that another philosopher who has published for both McSweeney’s ( https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/philosophically-legitimate-excuses-for-plagiarizing-philosophy-papers ) and JMP (cf. https://doi.org/10.1163/17455243-21050019 and https://doi.org/10.1163/17455243-17060003 ). So there’s another post for the list.
RIP Tom Lehrer, whose songs expressed philosophical humor, though his more explicitly academic lyrics concern math and physical science (“Lobachevsky,” “The Mathematician’s Song”). From his jaunty tune “Wernher von Braun”:
“Don’t say that he’s hypocritical,
Say rather that he’s apolitical.
‘Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That’s not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun.”
I wonder if Aristotle meant to be funny when he wrote in Nicomachean Ethics, “…the stone, which by nature moves downwards, cannot be habituated to move upwards, not even if one tries to train it by throwing it up ten thousand times…”
Scholars recently discovered an early draft of Hume’s Treatise where he wrote: “Have I got an idea that will make an impression!”
University managers love mathematics departments, because you only need to buy them a pen and paper and a wastepaper basket.
But they love philosophy departments even more, because you don’t even need the wastepaper basket.