Fuck comedians like that. I did standup comedy for years. I wasn’t a modern day philosopher, I was a guy that (hopefully) made you forget about the shitty week you were having for 5-15 minutes depending on the set (I was never a headliner).

I spent a lot of time crafting my jokes, I did a lot of rewriting and honing and testing of material. I wasn’t a philosopher, I was a joke engineer. That’s really the best way to look at most standup. It’s joke engineering.

At first I thought this was unrealistic because the comedy portion was so bad. Then I realized it is probably about Joe Rogan, in which case this checks out.

The shitty ones like Joe Rogan say their philosophers. The good ones that should get that credit. Will be the first ones to tell you their not. It’s always the rule if you have to tell someone you’re deep you are probably not.

“And that’s why if an audience doesn’t laugh at my jokes, they’re wrong.”

This was my issue with comedians in cars getting coffee. Felt like being talked down to by rich spoiled celebrities.

I miss George Carlin

Then you have Bill Burr who walls up on stage to thundering applause and opens with “Settle down people! Let’s See if Im good first.”

And then there’s Conan O’Brien, who’s just generally hilarious.

I always thought of comedians as degenerates. Like you can’t be a good comedian if you never had a serious drug problem before or never fucked a hooker in a bathroom.

Not to defend all the idiots we see, but I have to say; the people who do any sort of creative work tend to want to explore a deeper meaning. Not that the aesthetic or technical skill isn’t valuable, its probably harder to have great technical skill.

I write, both poetry and short stories (just for myself not as a career or anything) and I don’t want to do the shallow stuff either. But that doesn’t mean your rupi kaur like ‘poets’ are ‘bad’. Clearly strike some form of emotion for the readers.

A lot of comedians do have some deep material, both philosophical and emotional. Not talking about your clap comedians, Trevor Noah etc whose ‘jokes’ are meant to make them seem righteous and nget claps and cheers instead of laughs. (Not saying Trevor Noah doesn’t have the capacity to pull laughs, he can be funny too).

But look at someone like Steven Wright, a postmodernist sense of humour that builds upon that kind of art.

“I have a map of the United States… Actual size. It says, ‘Scale: 1 mile = 1 mile.’ I spent last summer folding it. I hardly ever unroll it. People ask me where I live, and I say, 'E6.”

Here’s an example, I love this joke, it builds upon the Borges story On Exactitude in Science and elaborates on a concept in Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno Concluded: a fictional map that had “the scale of a mile to the mile.” One of Carroll’s characters notes some practical difficulties with this map and states that “we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.”

Italian writer Umberto Eco expanded upon the theme, quoting the story as the epigraph for his short story “On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1”, collected in his How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays.

French philosopher Jean Baudrillard cited “On Exactitude in Science” as a predecessor to his concept of hyperreality in his 1981 treatise Simulacra and Simulation.

(I copied the last bit from Wikipedia)

So we can explore massive themes and ideas as comedians. And quite a few do.

PS. You can read both SUPER short stories on !shortstories@literature.cafe and I post my poetry on !originalpoetry@literature.cafe

And what’s the deal with cab drivers? I’m thinkin’ hey!

Every dumb hack comedian has mixed themselves up with Lenny Bruce.

On the other hand we have had some that we called comedians who spoke about the ridiculousness of people and society they observed, and we found that funny. Then we saw those comedians got bitter over their lifetime.

It’s entirely possible.

George Carlin probably would have had similiar contrasts if he had podcasts as well