Ayight, so what I'm thinking about now is one of my favorite intellectual formulas, if not the idea I came up with I'm the most proud of, which I sweated over to find, which is that jokes, and humor everywhere outside the formal formula of a joke, come about from a psychologically inconceivable union of two things that are, separately, psychologically conceivable. This explains why people's laughing at things can be revealing or offensive: it shows that on an unconscious, instinctive level they find what was revealed to them to be psychologically inconceivable. So you might not even be joking and they think you're joking because they can't conceive of how you'd be serious, it violates their psychology. But within the sphere of comedy as such, jokes given and known as jokes, an example of this that's easy to make is to take two contrary emotional states, and take the words from one, and the voice from the other, and combine them. "I love you from the bottom of my heart," screamed at the top of your lungs, with every indication of fury and violence in the voice-- it may not be the funniest thing in the world, but I believe it reveals what's basically going on in every bit of comedy you can find, a fish out of water situation, or shall we say, to pick one alien environment to "water," a Saraha desert invaded by sharks situation. Those are cheap bits of absurdity, and you can also see, logically, why some work better than others, cause more comedy to occur, in short, the jokes are funnier the more inconceivable they are. So as we look at "I love you" said with the tone of "I hate you," it's not the best example, because that's actually somewhat conceivable, our mind goes through a little loop of imagining the context for that. The wider the gulf crossed, the more insane the unification seems.
A joke I was making to myself lately was making fun of the tendency to converge technologies (which incidentally I'm thinking about because of the focus here on the concept of unification), just the big futurist, technocratic sales pitch it makes to consider: oh, this is the fucking future, the television and the computer are becoming ONE. I have at least heard that from what passes for public intellectuals, this brave new world where TV and computers are merging, and sure, yeah, plenty of signs of that. But as I was in my room in Delaware, I really liked the division of a computer area from a television area. I liked a formal screening area for movies and shows, and a desk with a computer to work. And I thought about how there's this "unification" bias, that unification is always such a good thing, when sometimes, separation works wonders. Separation, yeah, I know, it sounds so bad and anti-spiritual and anti-utopian, but that's because you're not thinking about all the things that are fantastic if kept separate. I'm not filled with scenarios about why to mix electricity and water, I was told that was bad news when I was a kid, and that truism has not seemed worth experimenting with. But I thought of a comedy bit, first of like a hammer, which has a tiny screen on its handle where you can watch movies or play touchscreen games while you're hammering nails. Then I thought about the feng shui principle, or whatever it was, who cares, it's too boring and self-evident to waste time looking it up, that you don't put a bathroom close to a kitchen when you're designing a house. You don't have people crapping next door to where you chop celery. And you know what I'm saying is I don't have to believe in unquantifiable energies in order to see the value in that, if only as a matter of aesthetics and pragmatism. So, here's the joke-- a bathroom/kitchen where you can chop celery while you're taking a crap, and boil water, et cetera, hardy hardy har. For the productivity junkie.
What makes these bad ideas bad ideas is that they take two reasonable ideas and bring them together in a way that makes you see that they are better off separate. I don't need to watch movies when I'm hammering a nail, and I certainly have no interest in preparing food while I'm taking a crap. And I'm fine with the television and the computer being completely separate modes of life-- hey, that they play nice with each other, and I can send things easily back and forth, that's cool-- but one's still a TV and one's still a computer. There's a plurality, a modularity, that's an important part of life and not everything needs to sublime into the Absolute.
But here's where these ideas get a bit interesting, is because I'm in this Jungian program, and Jung is all about transcendental equilibrium, the overcoming of being too one-sided. You identify too much with thinking and feeling is relegated to the unconscious, you see yourself as light, and you're dark, and vice versa. Your consciousness undergoes a transcendent function and you arise from the dialectic a new and stronger person, more of your transcendental self, via individuation, and that's Jung's point of view on psychological transformation. And I'm starting to get sick of this idea because I'm thinking of all these ways in which going halfsies is wrong, and I'm not inclined to say anything good about what I've read of Hegel, and I just think dialectics sounds crazy the more I think about it. It's like that joke in Spinal Tap, the bassist says his two guitarist-songwriters are like Shelley and Byron, Fire and Ice, and that he has to be a negotiating force between them, like "lukewarm water." Hey do you like porn? Are you interested in Schopenhauer? Check out this Schopenhauer porn; while they fuck, the performers recite key ideas from the World as Will and Representation. It's like Breaking Bad meets Lord of the Rings! OMG, says the studio executive, those two made killer bank. But then they get this avant-garde film in which wizards, hobbits, and elves are cooking meth and murdering each other with gangland scenarios in Middle-Earth, and the trailer gets millions of views but no one actually watches the movie, because the trailer is as long a running time as that idea should be exposed to the human brain. Sketch comedy is the showcase for a talent for intentionally making stupid ideas.
So I think Jung's emphasis on one-sidedness being a problem is a bit of a stupid idea, or at least an idea which points in a direction different from he intends, not towards some transcendental horizon, but actually towards a profound playfulness and insincerity. Comedians, for whatever their psychological limits are, are quite adept at understanding the rules that jokes break, the unspoken assumptions of social being and how we might amusingly fall short of those codes and conventions, or, also, the issues with a code and convention, what it excludes, which makes it seem sort of silly taken to a certain extreme or given a certain context. Most bad ideas have a narrow context in which they appear to work, like a demo for an execrable invention that reveals it working under artificial conditions, or a chess move that has not been thought through to even one move beyond itself. When comedians make fun of things, comparisons are made that are often about extrapolations of something in its narrow context in which we socially find it, sent out to an extreme caricaturing example of the same thing where it becomes self-evidently false. "If it was true that we could inject light, we could plug electric bulbs into syringes." Not that great, but you get the point. We show how something's inconceivable by pushing its contradiction further out of its initial, present context, which made it socially acceptable-- to the morons listening to Trump. And this is what connects the formula of all jokes, the combination of two conceivabilities in inconceivability, to the practice of parody, and illustrating the rational appearance of jokes, rooted in rational failures which have a rational appearance, rooted in the experience of seeing the subtly insane go under the name of sanity.
Jokes practice this habit of negation, of shooing away bad ideas, and you see how my ideas of bullshit 21st century technological inventions just take a popular concept to a ridiculous extreme to make very vivid my questioning of some attitude, some fixed idea of "synergy" that seems to permeate a lot of tech trends. Perhaps it's because every mistake the human mind can make is about bad combinations, that to err logically is to make a bad combination. I.E. 1 + 1 = 3. If A is 1, then A is 2. No, no, bad combination of numbers, bad combination of mutually contradictory conclusions. That Jung mystifies contradiction has really started to bother me: what the fuck is so elevating about contradiction? A low standard for paradoxes, hey, I get MC Escher paintings and hypnotic haikus, but contradiction? That there were no WMD's in Iraq was truly, truly fucking sublime, and spiritual. Again I'm extrapolating to show how its nuts to mystify contradiction as something transcendent as Jung does. In the narrow context of his writings it seems to make sense, but thrown out to another context it looks like what it is, a bad idea, and in fact a worshipful stance before the ultimate bad idea itself, the logical fallacy, as some oracle of Delphi.
The enjoyment of certain things thrives on their being discreetly entertained; I don't want to have a snowball fight while I'm getting suntanned, please don't try to make that a real possibility for me. It sounds cosmic but ultimately useless. But this phrases comedy as this sort of faux-dialectic process, in which bad logic is routinely mocked and warned against, which generates playfulness out of the insincerity of context, and makes a sincere logical commentary in exclusion, in complete inversion, like a game of suicide chess. Images and phrases are tossed around from popular culture in comedy in a transplanted way, in a context that is completely groundless of the sincerity in which those tropes would be initially invented and propagated. So comedy balances two separate things within itself, within a psychologically inconceivable synthesis, a synthesis that should not be, that is in fact impossible, an idea turned to play, and then itself makes a pair with tragedy, with the serious, in which we can feel one or the other are too one-sided, too much insincerity or too much sincerity, too many gags or too much drama.
But comedy and tragedy don't exactly "contradict." Nor are both emotions they embody impossible to feel at the same time. They both ultimately center on failure, except in comedy we cheer the failure on, and in tragedy we are sad it happened. In tragedy we see failure in its human form, and in comedy we see failure in its logical form. The pain of living, and the stupidity of living. Comedy very often fails because of the audience feeling a bit too much of the tragedy of life for it to be especially funny that an idea is wrong. Many people might not be amused when I make fun of Jung, since he's a religious figure for them, and their love of him is rooted in a tragic feeling. And I can be polite about it, but I can't hide the fact that my respect for him is at an all-time low, and I'd advise such people to develop such feelings about poets and musicians rather than doctors with shamanic pretensions. To return to comedy's failure, likewise, tragedy often fails as an art form, as drama does, for taking itself so seriously, that melodrama is the result and the credulity of the suffered grandeur is questioned under a more everyday consciousness. And in this world I have known, what seems to succeed is not comedy with dramatic tendencies, but drama with comedic tendencies, not some neat dialectical fusion, but simply the serious life we all live with a sense of humor about it, proteins over carbohydrates. But humor, where missing, perhaps always indicates that there are some bad ideas lurking around, some things working in narrow contexts, a tragedy consented to. However--seriousness, where missing, perhaps always indicates that there are no good ideas going on whatsoever, only a contrarian stance taken on the bad ones, and one of those ideas includes one's own existence and self. You can be a playful human being, or two kinds of jokes: the funny one who knows it, and the sad one who doesn't.
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