Factually! with Adam Conover - Why Philosophy is like Comedy with Quill Kukla

Episode Date: July 22, 2020

Philosophy isn't exactly a science; so what is it? In this fascinating interview, Georgetown philosopher Quill Rebecca Kukla argues that it's more like comedy than you might think, and explains what being an amateur competitive boxing has taught them about how to think. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello, welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. And look, earlier this year, before the big everything, I had a philosopher on the show named Scott Soames. And to introduce him, I talked about the relationship between comedy and philosophy, about how they're similar and about how my pursuit of philosophy led me to a life in comedy. guest today is a super smart, incredibly fascinating philosopher and scholar named Quill Kukla. And they have specifically written about philosophy and comedy and their relationship and where they overlap. So for my opening monologue today, I want to return to that topic, the connections between comedy and philosophy. See, here's one important thing that's true of both of them. To do them, you need other people. You need an audience. In other words, a joke isn't funny

if no one laughs at it. And a philosopher with no one to listen to them philosophize. Well, that's just a hermit muttering at the clouds. And of course, an audience is not something that's guaranteed in either discipline. When you start out as a comic, chances are you're going to be at open mics where your audience is just going to be other aspiring, bitter stand-ups staring at you, refusing to laugh. And similarly, in philosophy, your audience through grad school, and hey, maybe if you do wind up being a professor, is mainly other philosophers who are probably, I'm going to guess, based on the state of the academic job market, even more bitter than your average comedian. And that can be a problem because if you're a comedian and you're only

making jokes that other comedians can understand, if that's the only crowd you're playing to, well, you're probably not going to be telling jokes that travel very far. Ideally, you should be doing comedy about things that average people relate to, right? Well, in the same way, I believe that philosophy should also be relatable. It should be about the real world that real people live in. Now, I say that it should be. Whether or not it is as commonly practiced, especially in the academy, is another question entirely. Another similarity between comedy and philosophy is that neither have endpoints, neither of them ever complete. You can't make the joke to end all jokes or the insight to end all philosophy.

They're both ongoing kinds of investigations. For instance, after Nietzsche declared that God is dead, we didn't stop doing philosophy about God. We said, hey, that's interesting. That's a very influential thought. But now let's listen to my spin on it, right? Likewise, with comedy, we don't stop writing jokes about airplane food just because other comics before us have done it. No one ever completes a topic. We all have our own take. I mean, after Jim Gaffigan's famous massive chunk on Hot Pockets, I don't think I have much to say about

them personally. I think I'll take Ludwig Wittgenstein's advice and say, whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. But see, Wittgenstein himself thought he had figured out all of philosophy nearly a century ago. He thought philosophy was done, and he was wrong. That hasn't stopped people from pursuing philosophy since. There have been new philosophers with new takes who've integrated his insights and his style into a new way of doing philosophy. So in that way, neither philosophy nor comedy are sciences, really. You know, a science is something where we're trying to find out a fixed number of answers to a fixed number of questions. Once we have found all those answers, we're done.

We can move on to the next realm of science, right? Well, philosophy and comedy don't work that way. Instead, they're there to help us make sense out of our lives and our circumstances right now. The true goal of both comedy and philosophy isn't to lay out a definitive truth that we accept forever. Rather, it's to question our reality, undermine what we think we know, what we take for granted, and to separate the truth from the bullshit and critically to inspire the audience, the people listening to do the same thing in their own lives. But those are just my dumb thoughts on the subject.

On the show today, we have someone who has put a lot more thought into this than I ever have. Their name is Quill Kukla. They're a professor of philosophy at Georgetown University and senior research scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics. And look, this is one of the most fascinating people we have ever had on the show. Their work covers a wide range of topics from sexual ethics to street art. They even run a philosophy class based around a close reading of BoJack Horseman. And they are also a competitive power lifter and an amateur

boxer. I cannot tell you how excited I am for you to hear this interview. Please welcome Quill Kukla. Quill, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. So I'm a comedian with an interest in philosophy. You're a philosopher with an interest in comedy. I feel like this will be a fun conversation. I'm excited. comedy. I feel like this will be a fun conversation. I'm excited. You recently wrote a piece, which I read just before this interview, called Philosophy, Comedy, and the Need for Good Material, where you draw some comparisons between philosophy and comedy that really resonated for me. Could you

fill us in on those? Yeah, I've actually been thinking about this a lot for the last year or so. I think that the similarities between philosophy and comedy are very deep when it comes down to it. Some of the most noticeable comparisons between them are neither one has a topic. If you study biology, there's a particular body of knowledge that you're supposed to master. If you study metallurgy, there's a particular body of knowledge that you're supposed to master. If you study metallurgy, there's a particular body of knowledge you're supposed to master.

If you studied 19th century French literature, you're supposed to get to know 19th century French literature. But you can do philosophy or comedy about absolutely anything in the world. They have no determinate topic, which raises a really interesting question about what makes them what they are, what makes philosophy philosophy and what makes them what they are, what makes philosophy philosophy and what makes comedy comedy, given that they can be about absolutely anything.

They're both extremely open-ended. Another obvious similarity between them is that they don't have any shared, strict method. Different philosophers do philosophy in deeply different ways and find their own voice and different comedians do comedy in different ways and find their own voice. So if you don't have a topic to learn and you don't have a method to learn, what is it that you're learning when you're learning how to do philosophy or learning how to do comedy? And I got to thinking about this question and I realized that one thing that they both do is they make the everyday ordinary world seem extraordinary and non quirky or worth thinking about why that's the way that things are the way that they are. And the last point I'll make is given that that's their job, they both need good material, right? Both the philosopher and the comedian need to find really juicy parts of the everyday world to have insights about. And that to me means that both the philosopher and the

comedian, more so than the biologist or the 19th century French literature person, needs to be really immersed in the everyday world, really grappling with it, really trying to understand it, really trying to be in it in all of its messiness, because otherwise those insights about how the ordinary is extraordinary just aren't going to pop out. So if either the philosopher or the comedian sort of sequesters themselves in their office and tries to just sit there and write without being engaged in the world, their material is quickly going to get stale and uninteresting. And that was really the punchline that I thought was deeply between the two, as it were. Now, that's an interesting, actually, first, I want to, I would just ask you before I ask all my questions about that, where does your interest in comedy

come from? To tell you the truth, my interest in comedy comes from my earliest, earliest childhood. So my father was also a philosophy professor and he was a very quirky, odd philosophy professor, really interesting guy. He was a Holocaust survivor. He spent the Holocaust hidden away in a basement in Europe and came out of it just completely unassimilated to the everyday world and completely brilliant. And he always maintained an identity as a philosopher and an identity as a sort of amateur self-styled comedian simultaneously. comedian simultaneously. And when I was, I think, four years old, he and I together invented, invented with quotes around it, because I was four, so whatever, but invented a discipline that we named Laugh-O-Matics, which was the logic of what made things funny, which was supposed to be a crossover between philosophy and comedy. And he wrote comedy short stories on the side and was

hilarious his whole life and really valued being funny and instilled in me this idea, which has remained my whole life. Sometimes I worry this makes me a bad person, but that being funny is the primary virtue. Being funny is more important to me than being kind or being intelligent and i very much got that from my father so the connection goes way way way back i mean a lot of comedians will tell you the same thing like if you tell someone hey that you know in a green room we're talking about comedians we're like oh well that guy's a piece of shit like you hear what you hear what he did and they're like yeah he yeah, he's funny, though. Right. Like, right. Used a lot to justify shitty behavior on the part of comedians. It really is. And I'm now I'm the

parent of an undergraduate age son. And I realized sort of with something verging on shame, but not quite that I was mostly proud that he had turned out funny. I felt like I had raised a good kid because he turned out funny. That turned out to be more important to me than whether he was academically successful or successful on any other measures. I hope I don't use it to justify bad behavior, but it's a really good value for me. So it's convenient that it turns out that this thing that has always been of poor value for me turns out to be deeply related to my career goals. Just luck, I guess. Yeah. So let me ask you this. You said comedy and philosophy both depend on engagement with the real world. I agree with that entirely. And that's something the comedians say to each other,

like a phrase I've heard. I forget which comic i heard it from or if they coined it so so apologies to the person who might have said it but um is that you know comics stop being funny when they stop riding the bus yes and and i you know i think i do think it gets harder the richer you get like i think uh you know jerry seinfeld probably has to spend a lot of time like thinking about like what do non-fabulously wealthy people care about um in order to in order to stay relevant at all and so comics know this but i feel like this is more of a revelation for philosopher i don't think you know i again i studied philosophy as an undergraduate and that wasn't like a big emphasis in you know my simple four years of training. And I, I don't think that's a big emphasis in grad schools currently. Why do you think that is? Sadly, I think it really is a

revelation. It shouldn't be, but it is. In fact, if anything, I think that philosophy as a professional discipline has had the opposite value for a long time. Yeah. Yeah. Has been, if you're really dedicated to philosophy, if you're really going to be a good philosopher, you should really spend 100% of your time doing philosophy. You should be in your office with the door closed, by yourself, reading other philosophers and thinking about philosophy and writing down your arguments.

And any time that you do anything else, that's you being frivolous or uncommitted. And the result of that is that what we've gotten is a bunch of incredibly dry, abstract philosophy that's completely not engaging for anybody other than other professional philosophers. And then it doesn't do the work that I think philosophy is inherently supposed to do. If you go back to its roots and you look at the kind of philosophy that Socrates was doing, he was famously out there in the marketplace arguing with people about their lives. He wasn't just like stirred away in a study. So I think it's really has

harmed philosophy in every sense. It's harmed our public image and it's harmed our impact and it's harmed the quality of the philosophy that we've done that we've built this image of the philosopher as just sitting there completely by themselves responding to other philosophers rather than going and living a life and getting material out of living that life that's uh yeah i mean so much of the philosophy that i uh was trained on was you know sort of, you're supposed to be like Descartes sitting with your eyes closed next to the fire thinking about, you know, coming up with like a priori truths that are not dependent on any particular experience, sort of like,

like mathematics almost like it's why I suppose mathematics. Well, now we're getting into philosophical. Do you learn it from the real world or is it like or not? I'm not trying to get into that. But yeah, I mean, that's so much of what I don't know that I felt like that was the tradition I was I was trained in. And I really had this sense that I've talked about this on the show before. But, you know, like when I was when I was an undergraduate, I wanted to go to grad school and continue studying philosophy.

I also just, frankly, wanted to live on a college campus the rest of my life. That was part of it. I like my professors and I was like, oh, I want to be you. Yes, that's not a great goal because, oh, my God, so, so few of those jobs exist. And and, you know, like what is that really to want that? And so but as I it was time for me to make that decision in my life, you know, my sketch comedy group started picking up and I ended up doing comedy instead. And I had this sense that I remember thinking, oh, this is the same thing. Like I can do a lot of the same thing that I liked in philosophy in comedy. And that was because of I sense that first point that you raised what you call in your essay denaturalization, the idea of saying something that we perceive as being normal, saying, wait, why do we do things that way?

Why is that really a universal characteristic of human society that we should accept? Or is this something we should unpack and undermine? And I really had the sense that, yeah, comedy and philosophy both do that same thing. It's that continual process of undermining and holding up things to the light and saying, well, this is weird, isn't it? So that really related for me. Yeah. I think our job is basically to say this is weird, isn't it? That's in essence, that's what our job is as both philosophers. I mean, you could summarize that whole long spiel I went on by saying that both philosophers and comedians have the job of saying this is weird,

isn't it? But if we get too rich or too cloistered on an academic campus or too cut off from the world, we don't run into anything weird anymore. I mean, literally, you just stop seeing weird stuff because you're seeing the same things over and over again and so you just don't you you run out of material but i did i um became a philosopher also because i wanted to spend my entire life being a perpetual student and living on a college campus for my entire life i think that's probably what drove a lot of us to do it it's a good life for sure did you ever have the desire to go into comedy? Yes, but I'm terrified of it. Honestly, all the- What terrifies you?

Not being funny. Seriously, I can't- You've made me laugh a couple of times so far. Yeah, thank goodness. I think, so I have considered trying to get into comedy writing because I think that if I have the time in my own room to polish and think about and workshop what I'm writing that's less terrifying to me but the idea of getting up in real time and trying to be funny in real time it's completely terrifying I'm in total awe of people who do that for a living. But you know, I mean, philosophy is, it doesn't quite have the real time effect, but philosophy is terrifying to a lot of people in a very similar way. Because if you're doing, again, like biology or French literature or something, it's very clearly defined what counts as having made a

discovery. But in philosophy, whether you've said something that is worthwhile, whether you've come up with something worthwhile, is really in the eyes of the audience. It's a matter of whether they find this insightful and illuminating. And you can't guess always in advance whether your writing is going to land that way. So in a similar way, it can be kind of terrifying to put, you have nothing to offer to the world other than your own thoughts. There's no sort of pre-fabricated problems sitting there to solve. And so it can be really scary to sort of lay your thoughts open to the public and hope that they find them valuable in that way. Yeah, man, that, that connection between comedy and philosophy that you're making it seem even closer than I thought. Um, let me say, let me say, first of all, though, just in

terms of your, your point about getting into the world, what I always encourage people who are scared of doing comedy to do is like, go do some open mics, right? By the time you do three of them and you've bombed by the time you bomb really badly twice and you're humiliated and your face flushes and you're like wow this is a really bad experience you do that if you do it like one more time you realize oh that's not gonna kill me like i can i can do it again and and it's it ceases to become frightening i mean that's that's not entirely true i'm still frightened sometimes um but uh you know it is i don't know for whatever reason uh i always uh i feel like encouraging people no who like i feel like i'm encouraging people go for a run give it

a try you know what i mean see what it feels like um uh so i encourage you to to one day hit hit the open mics come to uh once the country opens back up again come to la and one day hit the open mics once the country opens back up again come to LA and we'll hit some open mics together I would be extremely tempted and extremely terrified but what you're saying about just live through the pain and realize that you can survive it and it's not that bad is what I always

tell people about being punched in the face it's very important to be punched in the face because it really sucks, but then you're fine afterwards. Because you're an amateur competitive boxer as well. I am, yeah. And learning to get punched in the face and learning both how much it sucked and that ultimately it was fine and you could do it again

was a really important life lesson for me. It really was. As someone who works with your brain, though, you aren't concerned about concussive trauma at all when you get punched in the face? I'm a little bit concerned about it, but I'm an amateur boxer, but I'm a very, very tiny one. I fight in the smallest weight class that there is. And generally speaking, there's only so much damage that people who weigh less than 105 pounds can do to one another. And I think if I were 200 pounds, I wouldn't have this hobby. But I should also say, amateur boxing and pro boxing are very

different. When you introduce a profit motive into an activity, it really changes the incentive structure. Pro boxer, you know, people who sponsor pro boxing want to get the most exciting fight that will make the most money out of their boxers. Amateur boxing is much more sportsmanlike and referees and coaches don't want people hurt. They will stop a fight. If the fight is really unequal and somebody is really at risk of being hurt they will just call it a take tko and stop the fight whereas in pro fighting that's what makes the big money is when you can watch somebody getting slaughtered up there so i actually have a lot of respect for how amateur boxing is run and i feel pretty safe with it but yes there's always

that edge of fear for sure because i can use use my brain for a living. But so coming back to philosophy and experience, like has, for instance, boxing informed the philosophy that you've done at all in any particular way? Have you come to any philosophical insights that you would not have come to had you not been punched in the face in a boxing ring? I don't know that I've come to philosophical insights specifically by being punched in the face.

The epistemology of being punched in the face. The epistemology of being punched in the face, a short monograph by Quill Kukla. Well, actually, I was asked by an agent to write a book on philosophy and boxing, and I decided that I didn't have enough material at that moment to say yes to it. So I said no. But apparently, the epistemology of being punched in the face is a thing that people want to know about. I wouldn't say that I've come to philosophical insights specifically from that, but I would say that boxing has been important for me philosophically for at least two reasons. One, this relates directly back to what we were talking about to do with the comedy and philosophy paper and the idea of having material. It gets me outside of the range of people and issues that I would be dealing with if I were spending all of my time on a college campus. It just gets me into a whole different subculture with a whole different set of values and a whole different set of activities and a whole different set of people. And so it gives me a lot of material and

breadth to my experience that I wouldn't have if I didn't have that hobby. I've also gotten kind of fascinated by what we might call the geography of boxing gyms themselves. I'm really fascinated by the way that they are little worlds with their own pacing and their own sets of social roles and their own materiality. And the form of life that can happen in a boxing gym really can't happen anywhere else. It happens because of how the boxing gym is arranged as a space and what's supposed to go on there. And the fact that it's broken into, you know, there's constantly a bell going in the background, which breaks time into three-minute

chunks, followed by one-minute chunks, followed by three-minute chunks, followed by one-minute chunks. And so the entire pacing of how you live your life in the boxing gym is completely different than anywhere else. And that got me thinking a lot just in general about how the different spaces that we occupy with all their sensuous materiality deeply shape the kinds of activities that you can do in them, the kind of experiences you can have in the kind of interactions you can have in them, the kind of experiences you can have in the kind of interactions you can have in them, the different kinds of social roles they support. And so that actually has been really influential on my work. I've been thinking a lot about space and identity and experience for the last

few years. That takes me so directly back to comedy because one of my favorite things about, about specifically standup comedy is that the space determines so much about a comedy experience. It's amazing. Like the space of the room that you're in. And a lot of, like after you've done comedy for like even just like six months, you start to get a sense for this. And it's a strange thing because it's like comedians know it, but audiences don't know it. Like I can go into a room as a comic.

Someone says, hey, we're having a show here. Will you do the show? I show up at the show and I'm like, wow, this show is going to be bad just from stepping into the room. It's like the ceilings are too high. The room is too brightly lit. The relationship with the stage, the audience is bad, right? Yes.

And just somehow you can tell that the audience is not going to get into the right headspace in order for the magic trick to happen. Absolutely. That's exactly what I'm talking about. I love that. Yeah. Your body learns,

once you've done an activity for a while, your body learns what kinds of spaces suit that activity and what kinds don't. And it's a powerful kind of, speaking of the epistemology of boxing, it's a powerful kind of knowledge that you can only get through having a lot of experience. And it's not a kind of knowledge that you can give to somebody just by telling them a set of rules or trying to explain it in words. It's a kind of bodily know-how that you develop. And

I'm super interested as a philosopher in what kind of knowledge is that? It's not traditional knowledge of facts. It's not traditional knowledge of arguments or logic, right? It's a different kind of inherently spatial knowledge. And I had never thought about the comedy case, but that makes perfect sense. I feel the same way about teaching. You know, at the beginning of every term, you go and see what room they've assigned you for your teaching. And you can walk into a room and be like, this is going to be a terrible class. Yeah. It's the wrong room. There's also.

OK, so here's something else I think about with comedy a lot, because let me be honest, like on our show, on on Adam Ruins, everything we often have, you know, we have experts come on the show. And I find that teachers actually usually do pretty well because they're kind of used to performing in a way like in terms of their comfort. And so something you experience, like one of the magic trick of comedy is that all these individual people become an audience. Right. They all sort of like all their minds combine into one mind. They sort of lose themselves in the group mind to a certain extent. And then the comedian is now having a one-on-one conversation with them, right? And trying to like manage their joint mind. And you

start having like this sense of if something clatters in the back, you know, a waiter drops a glass, you realize, oh, that's going to distract them. And I need to like draw the draw the attention back. Or if a if a part of the audience is getting disinterested, you can like feel it even if they aren't making sound, you know. And that's something, again, you can only get through doing it. And I wonder if you experience the same thing as a teacher. Absolutely. And I would just point out that what we're talking about now is space, but also time, right? We're talking about the spatiality of the room that we're doing our thing in, but we're also talking about pacing. So as a comedian, I'm sure you develop a feel for how long you can stretch out time before you need a laugh line. time before you need a laugh line, right? And that's not going to be fixed. It's not going to be like, well, every three minutes I need a laugh. It's going to depend on the internal pacing of the bit that you're doing. And sometimes you need them quickly. Sometimes you can string it out a little

bit longer. And all of that is about being responsive to what you're doing, but also to how what you're doing is interacting with how the audience is receiving it. And I think teaching is exactly the same way. So I can feel the room in that way, and I can feel when they're getting distracted. And I also get a sense of, you know, how long can I talk for before I need to give them a take home punchline that they can write down in their notes. Turns out I use comedy metaphors a lot. Yeah. How long can they go before they go, oh, this is why she's telling us all that and write it down. Yes.

Or how long can I go before I need to stop and say, okay, are there any questions or get input from the class? And that kind of managing the pacing of it is integrally wrapped up with managing the spatiality of it. And it's all this very embodied kind of knowledge. And I'm glad you said that about teachers being performers, because we don't think of teachers as performers. But my goodness, I mean, we spend more hours performing than almost anybody else does. We get up there and get performances with no script for hours a day, several days a week. It's kind of an amazing thing that we managed to get through that. So you have to be able to just get up there and talk and manage room. And that's not just a matter of having enough stuff to say. It's a matter of having this skill that we're talking about right now. I mean, as a performer, we call it stage presence, right? Or, and, and yeah, you're managing it.

I remember like my, my only experience teaching was teaching sketch comedy classes at an improv theater. But I remember like having to make that adjustment of being very terrified at the beginning and then realizing, okay, there's a three hour class. I'm just in charge of what happens here and I need to keep the pace up. And that started, then it started to feel like I was hosting a show for three hours and on the days where I would have two classes back to back, I would leave absolutely wiped because even though I was only talking, you know, it was a class, there's a lot of group discussion.

I was only talking 25% of the time, uh, in sometimes, but still just the keeping the ebb and flow going. Um, you're the MC in that situation. Yeah. And managing that is completely exhausting, which again, just to tie together all these threads is also part of the reason why a three minute round during an actual fight is easily 50 times as exhausting as just doing three minutes of punching during the workout, right? Because it's not the punching. You know, if you're in good condition for a fight, you can punch for three minutes.

That's nothing. That's not exhausting. But managing the ring for three minutes and managing that pacing and spacing and keeping the fight moving in the right way for three minutes while punching, that's exhausting, especially when the penalty for getting it wrong is that you get punched in the right way for three minutes while punching, that's exhausting, especially when the penalty for getting it wrong is that you get punched in the head. It adds extra stakes

to not messing up the pacing. But I really think that that aside, it's the same thing we're talking about. You've got to manage the speed, you've got to manage the sort of choreography of it, and you're doing all of that with no seconds of break. And that's what's exhausting about fighting much more than just the moving of your body. Can I get back to the classroom point and say something a little more serious? I think please do a bit to edit out. But I don't want to take us in too serious of a direction, but I had a more serious point to make about that. That's okay. Please do.

Yeah. This is part of what has been really weighing on me and a number of my colleagues trying to think through what we're going to do in the fall about the COVID pandemic and bringing people back to campuses. Almost every university is in the middle of trying to figure out whether there are going to be in-person classes or not. And there's been this kind of assumption on the part of administrators that in-person classes are better learning experiences than online classes. And generally speaking, that's true. But one of the things that they're really not taking into account is that if we're teaching in person, all of that spatial knowledge that we have is going to be disrupted. We're going to be sitting in different positions, six feet apart. We're going to have masks on. We're going to be physically distanced from our students. We're not going to be sitting in different positions six feet apart we're going to have masks on we're going to be physically distanced from our students we're not going to be able to use our bodies in the same way and i feel like the experience of teaching in person quite aside from the health

risks which is a whole other issue that's you know not my area of expertise it's obviously an important issue, but health risks aside, just the physical experience of teaching is going to be completely disrupted if we do it in person. And I don't think any of us have any reason to think we have that skill. It's not a skill that anyone has ever had any reason to develop to do socially distanced, any reason to develop, to do socially distanced, masked teaching. So just like, if you imagine giving a comedy show right now, imagine somebody said to you, okay, you can do a comedy show, but guess what? You need to be behind plexiglass and wearing a mask so nobody can see your facial expression. And everybody else has to be at least six feet from everybody else and they can't laugh too hard because laughing is a risk go be go be funny i mean if they did if if they had that many restrictions it might actually

be safe to be in comedy clubs but unfortunately what they're doing is oh we'll wipe down the microphone and then individual tables will be six feet apart and that's basically it and the and the servers are masked but the comedian and the audiences are not at some clubs, which I find to be continue to be a health risk. And so that's just what I just described. That's just a bad show. What you're describing where you're actually taking the precautions you need to is like not comedy at all. But yeah, but I also feel that, you know, there's a lot of people doing Zoom comedy shows, for instance. And while I think that's it's not like that's nothing right to do a zoom comedy show um yeah but it's not stand-up comedy like like an like an interesting thing about stand-up comedy is if it's not a

person with a microphone in front of an audience of people in a dark room it just doesn't work it's something else like the rhythm doesn't happen. The, the experience that the audience expects of I'm going to laugh this often. And my attention is tuned in, in this way. And I'm going to join this group mind. It just doesn't occur. You can have it's maybe it's at best, like listening to a comedy album, but we know that listening to a comedy album is not like being at a comedy show. Um so I'm wondering, like, do you actually feel that teaching in, you know, teaching socially distant is worse than running a class over video conference or? It's an excellent question. I mean, I guess we'll find out.

I think we have only bad options right now. I feel like the pandemic has disrupted academic interactions and academic exchange in ways that aren't being talked about because people don't focus on this very ground level embodied level that I'm so interested in. this very ground level embodied level that I'm so interested in. I agree with you. I don't think the solution is just to go to zoom. I think the only point I was trying to make is it's not clear to me that we can save the experience by doing it in person with proper precautions. It may be either way that we do it. We have lost the core of what it is to have that teaching encounter with our students.

I guess this is a very speculative point. I guess for me, the loss of facial interactions is huge. So at least on Zoom, if they can see my face and I can see their faces, that to me makes a huge difference in terms of how much I can capture that rhythm and hold their attention and judge their distraction. So in that one sense, but it might not be enough, I guess I feel more comfortable on Zoom than teaching with a mask, but I don't feel like we're having these conversations about this embodied dimension of our job because we're, you know what, this actually ties back to the very beginning of our conversation. It's because people are used to thinking of our job as this purely abstract endeavor that isn't planted in the world. And once you see it as an embodied job where you have to be

out there in the messy world, then all of these embodied factors in terms of how we can do it well come back into play. It reminds me of how in the, I believe, early 2000s, there was all this talk of massively online colleges, right? Where you'd have one teacher broadcasting to a thousand students over a super Zoom, and that that would make college more affordable and everything. And I, I I'm sure some things like that still exists, not like online education, isn't the right choice for some, but I think we sort of realized that,

well, no, actually teaching is something that does happen in a room that happens that is embodied, right. That it's not so easily portable. Like if that wasn't the case, well, we could all just, you know, listen to audio books and that would be it. You know, we wouldn't actually need to go to college. But there's something more to it. If our job were just to impart information, then we can do it in that form.

But that's not our job. Our job is to interact and interacting is something we do with our bodies. Well, I have so many more questions for you about comedy and philosophy, but we got to take a quick break. We'll be right back with more Quill Kukla. Okay, we're back with Quill Kukla. I want to ask you this thing that came to mind when we were talking about similarities between comedy and philosophy. I read an essay years ago. I might have been the New York Times.

It was written by a philosopher. I'm sorry. I don't remember who. But it was sort of depicting philosophy's great shame as being the fact that it never makes progress, right? That if you look at mathematics, chemistry, physics, these are fields where, you know, practitioners have ideas, they make advancements, the advancements are either proven or disproven, and, you know, it builds upon its past work in sort of a single direction, right? And that philosophy doesn't do that, that know whatever i mean we still read

kant today but kant's discoveries aren't like isaac newton's discoveries where like everyone agrees okay here's where they were right and here's where they were wrong um and you know this was depicting this as a problem for philosophy um what's uh what i think is interesting about the comparison you make between philosophy and comedy is well well, that's true of comedy, right? It's also true of other art forms. It's like, yeah, there are movements. There are trends. There are, you know, people say things that are strike audiences, either philosophically or comedically, and stick with us and influence future work.

And then after a while, maybe people go off in a new direction. And that almost makes me wonder if philosophy is closer to art form than science. Yeah. Yeah. No, I love that. And I think that the analogy there is really good. It would be bizarre to say that comedy hasn't progressed. Of course, comedy has progressed, but the form of progression that it's had has not been the form where we say, oh, well, it turns out that this was the true joke and this was the false joke. So we can all agree that this was the correct joke and forget all the jokes that came before that. That's just a bizarre way of talking about it. And I think the same is true of philosophy. Yeah, it is true that we don't have agreement on the answers to even our most

fundamental questions. And at a certain point, when you notice that, I think what you should be thinking is not, oh, well, philosophy is hopeless, but gee, maybe agreement isn't the thing that we're actually aiming at here, right? Maybe that's not the goal. I was saying at the beginning how philosophy doesn't have a delimited topic that it can be about anything. If you have a delimited topic, then there are true facts about that topic and false things about that topic, and your goal is to figure out the true ones and scrap the false ones. But because philosophy doesn't have a topic in that way, and a lot of my philosophy colleagues

are going to hate to hear me say this, in a way, I think truth is not the highest virtue for a philosopher. I mean, you do want to try to say true things. You don't want to say manifestly false things. But what makes a philosophical argument or discussion valuable is not that you got it right, but that it disclosed the world in a new light, that it showed up something in a novel way that it hadn't been shown up before. hadn't been shown up before. And in that sense, you can have two philosophers who contradict one another.

And yeah, you can't have a contradiction where both sides are true. So at most, one of them can be saying a true thing, but they might both, in the process of contradicting one another, be revealing something new about how we can look at the world and how the world can show itself to us as surprising or

curiosity-inducing. And I think that we've actually made tons of progress in philosophy. There are, not because we've decided what's true, but because, well, a few things. Over the course of the centuries, certain ways of approaching problems have played themselves out and we've realized that they're dead ends. That's one way that we can make progress. We can come to the conclusion that this is no longer a useful way of talking about a problem. Another way that philosophy has made progress is by opening up new questions that hadn't been asked before at all. Another way that philosophy can make progress is by making our approach to the same questions more sophisticated, more rich, taking into account more perspectives, more kinds of arguments, more ways of thinking about the problem so that the

progress is not so much in terms of what the answers are, but in how rich our approach to the question is. And because we can make all these kinds of progress, sometimes when you read And because we can make all these kinds of progress, sometimes when you read philosophy from past eras, not all of it, some things are classics, right? But sometimes when you read philosophy from past eras, it's not so much false as just cringy. Like you read it and it's just awkward.

You're like, oh, that's just an awkward, cringy way. We're past that way of talking about. Yeah. And it's like watching the dick van dyke show or something right you can see its value but it doesn't hold up i think i think i have a good i think i have a good comparison you know one of my favorite comedians when i was starting to get into comedy was george carlin i was listening to like his later work in his later life um in the mid 2000s and i went and got some old george carlin records i listened to a record of his from the 70s um and he and his material back then was like i'm not gonna do justice but he was like in the mid 2000s. And I went and got some old George Carlin records. I listened to a record of his from the seventies.

And he, and his material back then was like, I'm not going to do justice, but he was like, yeah, it was basically you ever fart and people go nuts. They're like, why he's talking about farting.

And then he's like, and then you blame it on the dog. And I was like, and they go nuts at that. And I'm like, that's the oldest thing I've ever heard. Like that was a revelation to people at the time like I guess I guess yeah like just the acknowledgement of farting as being something that we're going to talk about was uh was stunning to people at that moment but to me

doesn't give me that revelation but the work that he was doing or and that other comedians were doing in you know in those years at their best moments would make me say, oh, yeah, this is something that I have always suspected is true, but never really thought about. Or this is a new way to look at holding the world up to the light and like a new beam of light refracts through it. That experience. Yeah, yeah, precisely. And so some of it holds up and some of it doesn't hold up.

And we all know we've all had the experience of remembering a movie or a tv show or a bit from our childhood and having thought that it was fantastic and then going back to it and finding it just awkward and unhelpful and not standing the test of time um and you're watching caddyshack with your dad and like i don't get it and your dad's like oh no it was really we thought it was really funny i don't know i made the mistake of you know i did the thing that gen xers do of trying to introduce my son to various things that have been important to me as a kid and some of that worked out great but i made the mistake of showing him things like revenge of the nerds and animal House, boy, are those not funny

anymore at all. It was intolerable. They were unwatchably unfunny. So yeah, standards change, and there's evolution. And I think that I'm happy to say that philosophy is in most ways more like an art than like a science. But I don't think that that means that there isn't progress. It does mean that we can value things from the past that are classics in a different way than we can in science. So in science, once a theory has been superseded by a more supportive theory, then the old theory is not interesting anymore,

except as a kind of a relic. You just get rid of it. In philosophy and in comedy, things can be classics and we can find value in them much later if they did something really special that was really irreplaceable and really contributed to the conversation. So that's one of the values of treating it as an art rather than a science but it's a funny art because we do care about truth yeah i don't i i wonder a lot about how much i care about truth but it's sort of part of the game that you have to be trying to say true things in a way that is only metaphorically so at most for painting or for music. Although even painters and musicians will talk about what truth there is in their painting or in their music. Right. Yeah. A little bit more metaphorical.

And that's a big part of comedy as well. I mean, it's not the only reason something is funny, but I think that for me and for many other comedians, the best reason for something to be funny is that it's a, a truth that no one else has remarked upon before, that you're saying something true, that that just the shock of experiencing the truth will make people laugh. Yes, absolutely. and comedy that I want to pull out is, I'm going to quote you if that's okay, that people with identities, social positions, and bodies that are different from the dominant norm are especially well positioned to denaturalize norms and ideas, to make them seem, you know,

to hold them up to the light in that way. And you say that's true for both comedy and philosophy, and I wonder if you can expand on that a little bit. I'm nervous about expanding on it with respect to comedy because I feel like I'm talking past my area of expertise, but I'll do my best. But I can talk about it for philosophy. And then look, I give you permission to talk about comedy in this. But I'm happy to say how I think it connects, because I think it does. Sure. I'd like you to expand on it first because it's your idea. Sure. Fair enough. Yeah. So I think I mean, there's a lot of different ways that I could go with that question, but I think that the most straightforward and important thing to say about

this is part of what it means to have social power and social privilege and to be the social norm is that the world is more or less built to suit you and your needs, because that's what people in power do, understandably, is they build a world to suit them and their needs. What else can they do, right? So if you have a normative body and identity, the world doesn't give you very much friction. It's kind of made to work for you, right? So think about the fact, for example, I'll just give you a couple quick examples. If you're an upper middle class person living a standard upper middle class person's life, you might well live in a suburb designed for other upper middle class people and work in a downtown office designed for other upper middle class people to work in.

And the transit system in your city will have been built specifically for people like you to easily take you from where you live to where you work and back again, sort of frictionlessly, right? Or if you have a normal sized body, if you are not especially fat or thin, if you're not disabled, if you have a normally size and shape body, things like seats in airplanes and cars and so on are going to have been built to fit you so that when you sit in them, they fit your body. The point I'm working my way towards is this. When things fit you without friction, it's hard to notice that they could have been otherwise. It's hard to notice that this is the product of a set of social decisions made with social power behind them to suit a specific set of people and not other people.

And so it's hard to get that kind of critical distance from the world around you to say, hmm, well, why are things like this? This is non-obvious. How could they have been otherwise? And that curiosity moment of why are things like this and how could they have been otherwise is that motivating moment that we were talking about for both philosophy and comedy, I think, right? That's that moment that lets you show something in a new light. And it's not that you can't do it

if you have a privileged position in a normative body. I think it's just harder in certain ways. Whereas when the world doesn't fit you perfectly, it's more natural to ask questions about why it is the way it is. So if you need to walk three miles to get to a bus, to get to another bus, to get to your job, you're more likely to say, well, who made this decision? Who decided to put the buses here and not there? Why am I stuck with this? And does this maybe have something to do with the fact that I'm poor? Does it maybe have something to do

with the fact that I'm not liked? Whatever it may be. Whereas you're just, you're not as likely to even ask the question when the world just automatically suits your needs in a very easy, suits your needs in a very easy, unreflective way. Does that make sense? Yeah, it absolutely does. I think that, and I think that's true. I think that's true of comedy as well, that I think people who differ from the norm, like the jokes that it can often be easier

to find an original take is how I'd put it, right? Yeah, exactly. It's it can often be easier to find an original take is how I'd put it. Right. Right. Exactly. Of yeah. The question of why is the world organized this way comes a little bit more easily. I also think it's a habit you can get into, though, that you can like, you know, inculcate in yourself the habit of asking why is the world this way and looking for those disjunctures. But when they're impacting you on a daily basis, it's like much more present. Absolutely. So I totally think that people who have privileged identities and statistically normal bodies can be great philosophers and great comedians and have been great philosophers. I mean, I'm in that privileged category. And yeah, no, absolutely. And I mean, tons of philosophers are privileged category. Yeah, no, absolutely. And I mean, tons of philosophers are and tons of comedians are. And so, yes, absolutely, you can train yourself into it.

But one thing that I think is interesting to notice is that even if you train yourself into it, you're not going to catch every possible insight and every possible instance of it, right? So there's still room for somebody else who has a different perspective to come along and throw something into relief that you didn't even think about or notice. So an example for me, and I think I mentioned this in the paper, actually, because it was a really powerful example for me. I think of myself, you know, in some ways, I have that privileged identity. And in some ways, I don't. I'm a mixture of privileged and marginalized identities. But I think of myself as somebody who has trained myself to take this denaturalized perspective on the world around me. And then I heard a talk by an architect who works specifically on deaf architecture. He's one of the people who designed buildings for Gallaudet University, which is the deaf university here in Washington, DC.

And he pointed out that when you do architecture for deaf people, you need much wider walkways. Because if you're deaf, you need to be able to see the person next to you in order to keep talking to them. And you need to be able to see in front of you, obviously. So you can't really walk. If you're trying to walk single file, if you're deaf, you're not going to be able to have a conversation. So it's completely disruptive. So one of the things he does is design buildings

that have just much wider spaces to pass through so that people can have conversations as they move around. That's a very simple point. And as soon as you hear it, it is completely obvious. Yeah. But it had never occurred to me to question why halls have the width that they have. That had seemed to me like a completely, in my lingo, a completely natural fact. I didn't literally think it was natural. i didn't think it was like biologically necessitated or anything but i just thought it was part of the way that the world is that a hallway is about the width of an average

size person plus a little bit on each side right it's just that just seemed to me like how the it's not even like i'd ever thought about it but But if I had been, if I thought about it at all, it was just in this sort of vague, well, that's how you build a hall, right? You build a hall for a person. is based on assuming normal capacity. And if you try to think about how to design space for people with different capacities, it's going to look really different. And all of my training at denaturalizing my environment didn't give me that insight. Now, that doesn't make me a bad philosopher or a bad comedian,

but it means that there's a real value for, for example, deaf people to be in the conversation because they're going to be denaturalizing different things that I had just never even thought about before. So the more diversity we can get in there, the more insight we're going to get, I think for both philosophy and comedy. Yeah. I mean, this is, this is absolutely true of comedy that, you know, I've seen. I mean, I can't. There's no joke that I can pull out of my mind right now to repeat that someone else told that, like, gave me a similar insight.

But I've seen plenty of, you know, comedians who had backgrounds or identities different than mine who said something that, you know, oh, I can't believe I never realized that. But now I remember that forever. Right. And, you know, for instance, I'm in the position where I put together writers rooms and, you know, I am involved in the hiring process because it's my show. And one of the reasons we strive for diverse hiring is not simply to meet some kind of quota or to keep up appearances or to like do some social good by giving someone a leg up. It's because, well, there are things that we couldn't write about if we because they would

not come up in the room. There are so many topics, especially, you know, our show, Adam ruins everything is based on common misconceptions and unpacking like unexamined truths about the world. And like if we just had all of one type of person in the room, a lot of unexamined truths about the world would not get brought up in our writer's room. We would be missing out on those topics. And, you know, that is the important, like that is the true importance and value of like having diversity in those spaces. Absolutely. I absolutely agree. I mean, this is one of the most vivid examples of this in philosophy, I think, is that it used to be, it's still the case that philosophy is very dominated by men.

It used to be much more dominated by men. And it also used to be the case that there were very few mothers, even among the philosophers who weren't men. It was just not a thing you did if you became a philosopher. And so one thing that never got talked about in philosophy that wasn't even seen as a philosophical topic was pregnancy. And as people who had been pregnant started to become philosophers, they said, okay, wait, this is a person with another thing inside it, which is kind of a person, but not really a person. What the hell is that? Right? All of these

questions immediately, like just classic philosophical questions about things like autonomy and personal identity and the boundaries of personhood. Good old fashioned philosophical questions just suddenly emerged as obviously pressing, right? What do you mean by autonomy for a person who's got another person in them? Yeah. Or who's got something in it, which isn't yet a person, but can become a person. And what's your responsibility for making that thing be a person or not making that thing be a person?

And are you one person or are you two people? These are just like classic intro philosophy questions that are obviously philosophical questions, right? Yeah. But nobody had asked them because there had been sort of an assumption that hadn't even been brought to light that the person of philosophical study was, you know, a non-pregnant male independent person. So it's just like a really vivid example where you don't even have to get that creative to see the philosophical issues, but nobody had done it really. Yeah. Well, so we're in agreement that there is something that's brought to the table by folks of differing backgrounds to both philosophy and comedy. One thing that your piece didn't

address that I'm just curious if you have a point on is how that operates when the audience or the rest of the industry or the context, right, is still dominated by one type of person. Like I think about how, okay, like if there's a, you know, a queer person of color, right. Could, uh, have comedic insights that no one else is going to provide that are revelatory and amazing. Right. Um, but if you have an audience who themselves is stuck in one perspective, right. And it's like maybe a little bit more closed off and is like, it's going to be a little bit more difficult for them to be brought to that point. You're like, Hey, why don't you, why aren't you pointing the stuff that pointing out the stuff that's unusual about being a white guy in America?

That's what I'm used to. That's what I think comedy is. I'm very, you know, I laugh at that very easily. You know, there's there's like a little bit of extra work that needs to be done there. And I wonder if there's something similar in philosophy where it's like, yeah, the you know, even though those insights can be had, well, all the other people reading the papers are perhaps. yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I could go in either direction with this. On the one hand, I think that this is one of the

reasons why teaching is not just imparting information, particularly in philosophy. I think there's a lot of skill involved in working people slowly out of their perspectives and into receptivity to other perspectives. And I take that to be a big part of my job. And like we were talking about earlier, when we were talking about the shape of the room and so on, I can't give a set of rules for how to do that. But getting that sense of how to slowly work students from where they are to where you want them to be seeing from is a huge part of pedagogy. In a sense, academics are lucky compared to comedians because students kind of have to take our classes, right? I teach at Georgetown where everybody has to take two philosophy classes. So whether they think they're interested or not, I have a chance, you know, I have a term to try to bring them on that journey, whether they want to be brought on it or not. And it's up to my skill as a teacher to do it. but people reading my work, yeah, I mean, it's a huge issue. There are tons of philosophers who would disagree with most of what I've said during this hour and don't want to hear stuff from

another perspective and think of that as not really philosophy as some sort of vanity topic that doesn't really count as philosophical, which is part of why I am very worried about what philosophers call gatekeeping. I'm very worried about this idea of trying to establish in advance what counts as philosophy and what doesn't count as philosophy and what the boundaries are. Let me tell you, this is a huge problem in comedy as well, to say the least. And more important than I wanted to say, it's not just the audiences, it's the bookers, right? It's the people who have a limited notion of what is going to play well with that audience and prevents that audience from seeing those voices

that might give them a revelatory perspective. Absolutely. And the people who are doing the hiring in philosophy and the people who are editing the journals are in this gatekeeping position. And it's often an issue that where they are is not, is they're behind where other people are in terms of how inclusive their version

of it is i did want to say on the comedy end again you gave me permission to talk about comedy it's out of my official area of expertise but i think that in comedy that problem of getting of moving your audience who's in one perspective and stuck there to another one I don't know that it can be done well without causing intentional discomfort along the way. And I think that discomfort is a tool for both comedians and philosophers in an interesting way. To me, the paradigm of this is Hannah Gadsby's work. She really plays with that, right? She really plays with this gap between what her audience is ready to hear and what she wants to tell them.

And she brings them along through strategic, carefully paced moments of discomfort. And I think that good comedy and good philosophy both have to be willing to play with that discomfort and not just be insight, insight, insight for philosophy or laugh line, laugh line, laugh line for comedians, right? You have to know just how much discomfort you can get away with causing in your audience to use it as a strategic tool. And again, you know, Socrates famously blew it and he caused too much discomfort and they put him to death for it.

But this technique of, of, of, of, of strategic discomfort is I think the only way that you can pull people through to a perspective that you're trying to get them to. And it's really hard and there's no rules for doing it well. Man, that gives me so much to think about about my own work in the way the way i watch comedy that that yeah you you need to sort of be leading the audience along uh you're like putting out the pieces for them like an et like just just like trying to get them there uh and knowing what the barriers to them getting there are um yeah and yeah that's that's very true of that of that hannah gatsby special that like her she's engaged in so much audience management through a really difficult i mean all comedians are engaged in audience management but she's like leading them through a minefield um

but her that is a special that was also very polarizing and caused a lot of negative reactions especially among comedians who like you know uh had that reaction this isn't comedy it had a lot of negative reactions, especially among comedians who like, you know, had that reaction. This isn't comedy. It had a lot of that. This isn't comedy reaction in the same way that you said that this isn't philosophy reaction. Despite the fact that, you know,

yeah, it was one of those things I watched and I was like, this is very different than comedy I've seen before, but it is bringing me insights that I did not have before. It's making me think in new ways. And that makes me uncomfortable, but I think that's worth doing. I think the line between funny and uncomfortable is a really shaky one, right? Yeah. Uh, okay. I want to end with this.

Uh, I mean, I could, I feel like we could talk for hours, but I, uh, we can't, uh, and cause I have to go, I have to get back to my comedy job. But I want to make sure we talk about this. You teach a class called Bojack Horseman and philosophy. What do we know? Do we know things? Let's find out. I got a little connection to the show. I do do a couple of voices shows created by my friend from my old sketch group that I that I mentioned earlier. And yeah, I got to know about this class. What do you, what do you teach in the class and, and why do you find Bojack Horseman to be a object for philosophical inquiry? So I know we're almost out of time, which is a shame because I could say so much about this. Now I have to pick a select a few things.

Go for it. We're not, we're not, we're not under, we're not being timed. We're just at about an hour. So we should gradually come in for a landing. I want to spend time. I want to know your feelings on this. I am a huge, huge BoJack Horseman fan. I'm also extraordinarily proud of the title of that class, I've got to tell you. It's a great title. It was funny because the administrators at Georgetown kept on asking me to come up with

a shorter title. They were like, why do you need this long title? Because they didn't understand. I was like, trust me, you cannot take anything out of the title. Every bit of that title has to be in there. But what I love about that class, which I'm actually teaching it for the second time right now, there are other classes that use a TV show or use movies as a kind of a springboard for philosophical discussion. I know some people have used, you know, I actually ages ago taught a Star Trek and philosophy class. People have done, used movies like The Matrix to talk about philosophy, but in all of those classes, the idea is, oh, look, there are philosophical issues raised by this plot. Now let's go have a philosophical

conversation about them. And that's not how I teach the BoJack class. In the BoJack class, the show itself is literally our text. It's not a springboard for philosophical conversation. It is the philosophy work being done. And so I spent a lot of time trying to show them how there are philosophical questions and insights and conversations built directly into the show and into the visuals of the show and into the plot of the show. So I basically read the show as a very, very complex and brilliant existentialist text where each of the characters is grappling with some version or other of the fundamental existentialist question, the fundamental existentialist, sorry, the

fundamental existentialist question is typically, if meaning and value don't come into the world because they're given by God or given by the natural order, then where do they come from? They have to come from somewhere else. And there are different kinds of answers to this within existentialism. One answer is the absurdist answer that, well, there is no meaning and there is no purpose in the world it's all just a game but there are other there's you know the camus myth of sisyphus answer which is that you find meaning through the sheer act of doing something again and again and it doesn't matter what the purpose is you find meaning in the work itself i read princess caroline as basically having a fundamentally camusian version of existentialism. Another answer you might give is, well, the meaning that you find in your life is how your life is meaningful

to other people who are giving you recognition for what you're doing. And I think that's the basic dilemma for Bojack is that he wants to find meaning in his life through how he's seen and through the perspective that other people have on him, and it never works for him. There's another little voice in his head that's an anti-existentialist voice, usually taking the form of his mother, right, saying, no, it's just a natural fact that your life is useless and that you're inherently bad. In any case, I see each one of those characters as fundamentally in a whole series of complex and contradictory ways over the course of the six seasons playing around with different ways

of finding an answer to that existentialist question and finding themselves at various moments losing their answer and feeling like their life is purposeless and like it has no meaning and then getting it back in different ways. I also think that the actual visuality of the show and the conceit of using these animal characters and these non-standard bodies and the fact that in animation you don't have to obey the laws of physics and you can do a lot of creative things. We were talking earlier in this hour about spatiality. You can create these completely creative spaces using the visuals, allows all kinds of philosophical work to be done that just literally couldn't be done in the form of a traditional article. Another thing that I love about using Bojack as a philosophical text,

and this also relates to something we were talking about earlier, is unlike in an article where you're expected to propose a thesis and then defend that thesis as the true thesis and counter any objections to that thesis, in the narrative fictional form of the show, you don't have to have a single answer. You can let contradictory answers sit there unresolved. So I think that there is no answer in the end to, for example, is Bojack Horseman personally responsible for some of the horrible things that he does under the influence of drugs and addiction? Does he have free will at those moments or does he not have free will at those moments? The show, unlike an article, that's a classic philosophical question, but it doesn't have to take one position and defend it. It can show us ways in which, boy, the free will answer really feels right. And it can show us ways in which, boy, the free will answer really feels

wrong. And it could just make us sit there with that tension and that discomfort. And my students talk about it all the time. They're like, I feel like he's responsible, but I also feel like he's not responsible. Which one is it? And it's got this amazing potential that traditional philosophy texts don't have to just refuse to resolve that tension for you. So I found it just unbelievably rich as a source of philosophical insight. And I, to me, it's just a whole different modality for doing philosophy. And we've been talking this whole time about philosophy and comedy. I don't even know if it's philosophy or comedy, or if there's a meaningful distinction to be made in this case. I feel like it's equally operating in both of those media, and you can't even draw that distinction in this case. Yeah. The things are,

the things are merging, but, but what strikes me is that like, okay, like as a comedian, I mean, I have an explicit interest in philosophy, right. And one of my goals when I'm doing standup comedy is to try to find that nexus. Right. I don't know if that's Raphael's a good friend of mine. I haven't asked him specifically. I don't know if that's, Rafael's a good friend of mine. I haven't asked him specifically. I don't know if he has philosophy specifically in mind. I know he's trying to get something across, right? But the process is also so mediated in TV, right? It's like, it's him.

It's a room full of writers. It's executive producers. It's network notes, right? It's like this big group of people. It's this incredibly commerce-based, commerce based project at the same time. And so I find that really interesting that that you would find it to be like like a literal philosophical text that's doing philosophy, even though so many of the people who are working on it, either either that's we're not sure if that's their intention or it explicitly was not when they were creating it. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on that i i am i'm consistently unimpressed with questions about author intentionality um i think that what ends up in texts is usually so much more and so different than what authors intended.

There's a lot of, this is now not a philosophy point, this is a psychology point, but we have more and more empirical evidence that people do not actually know their own intentions. You can test this in various ways. It turns out that we're very bad at seeing inside of ourselves and knowing when we've made a decision or when we haven't made a decision or what our intention was making a decision. So if we can't

even know our own intentions, then we're going to be extra terrible at knowing other people's intentions where it's mediated in various ways. You know, you can't see into somebody's head and we can't even see into our own head. So seeing into somebody else's head is even more impossible. So I think that very little of what there is to be said usefully about the meaning of things is a matter of figuring out what was going on inside the private space of somebody's mind when they made it. I think figuring out the meaning of things, it's much more about looking at the product, the outcome, and saying, okay, what do we have here in front of us and what can we do with it? Which, by the way, is a good quality existentialist point, right? There's no given meaning just sitting there. So it doesn't really bother me or make

me worry about my interpretation of the show that there was nobody sitting there going, oh, let's make a philosophy text. I think that what happened is a whole bunch of really insightful, brilliant people got together, had really good chemistry, made this thing. And lo and behold, it's got a lot of philosophy in it. And it doesn't really phase me if they didn't mean it to. Although somebody on that show for sure meant for there to be at least some philosophy, because for example, Princess Carolyn actually quotes Camus. I didn't make up entirely that she talks about pushing the boulder up the

mountain over and over again. And there's a scene when they're filming Filbert, where in the background, there are Nietzsche quotes written out on the chalkboard. So somebody, I'm not taking back my first point. I don't really care that much how much philosophy was intended to be in there. But there's at least some writer somewhere involved on that show that's enjoying dropping philosophy bits into the show for sure but it's also the case that you know a bunch of comedy writers getting together and trying to write a very funny show that succeeds as a comedy are also doing philosophy which comes back to your point of the of the similarity between these two

things and and how they're merging and it comes back also to the point of why gatekeeping is a problem, because in some sense, BoJack is immediately recognizable as a comedy show and a very successful one, but it will sometimes go several episodes in a row not being funny, right? Oh, yeah. Just being very dark. So they were willing to play with the boundaries of what counts as comedy very successfully in a way that's really challenging. And I think that the more room

we can make for either comedy or philosophy to be boundary pushing in that way without saying, no, you're supposed to stick to these conventions and these goals and so on, the better the eventual product is going to be. Well, I can't thank you enough for coming on to talk. This has been such a fascinating conversation. And I hope we can, I hope we can like have you back sometime and just, and just keep talking about these issues. Okay. I would love that. Yeah, that would be really fun. And please come to LA sometime and come to some open mics with me. I'll try to get up my nerve. It would be a life bucket list goal to do it.

I'll try to get up my nerve. Well, as a student of comedy, what I tell people is, because people ask me all the time, how do I get into comedy? And I say, nothing can prepare you for doing it, right? Like to do it is to do it. And after you've done it twice,

you'll realize everything you thought you knew about how you would prepare yourself. You throw it out the window because now you've experienced it, which gets right back to your point. And I would love to help make that happen for you. It's a fantastic offer. Thank you so much for having me on.

This was a very fun conversation. Thank you so much for having me on. This was a very fun conversation. Thank you. Well, that is it for our show. Thank you folks so much for listening. Hey, if you like the show, please leave us a rating or a comment wherever you subscribe. Just pop up in that podcast app, that Google Play app, and give us that rating. It really does help us out so much. I appreciate you for doing so. That is it for us this week on Factually. I want to thank Quill Kukla again for coming on the show. I also want to thank our producers, Dana Wickens and Sam Roudman, our engineers, Brett Morris and Ryan Connor, Andrew WK for our theme song. You can

find me at Adam Conover wherever you get your social media or at adamconover.net. Until next week, we'll see you next time on Factually.