The topic of the class was jokes. The three of us laughed uproariously, but it was all quite deliberate. Not all jokes work even when well told, and not everyone gets or appreciates every joke. Yet when you're receptive, there are many that tickle the funny bone. We told jokes, laughing at our failures in telling (but got better with each rendition); remembered funny stories from our lives; laughed at our laughter.
Recently listening to an audiobook version of Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar, philosophy illustrated by jokes, a little world of assumptions poised to be violated in the interest of some conundrum. The rug pulled out from under us so often, a session of jokes is a gymnastics of pratfalls.
Comedy is often peppered with jokes but it need not make us smile; rather the genre pays respect to the joke in the sense of highlighting the strangeness of a world that persists in surprising us. The Divina Commedia ends to the return to Dante to his normal life after adventures in hell and heaven. Tragedy by contrast confirms what we always knew was the things would turn out: badly. Comedy seems to turn doom on its head, if only long enough to open a window of moments in which to make our escape. The humor tragedy inspires is sardonic and bitter, but of comedy gleeful and wondering.
God-in-love, is this world a comedy, tragedy, or both? What I'm sure is that as life unfolds, mine, ours, we'll regularly be caught up short by strangeness of it; maybe jokes are our homage.
Ladies, let's do more.
Recently listening to an audiobook version of Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar, philosophy illustrated by jokes, a little world of assumptions poised to be violated in the interest of some conundrum. The rug pulled out from under us so often, a session of jokes is a gymnastics of pratfalls.
Comedy is often peppered with jokes but it need not make us smile; rather the genre pays respect to the joke in the sense of highlighting the strangeness of a world that persists in surprising us. The Divina Commedia ends to the return to Dante to his normal life after adventures in hell and heaven. Tragedy by contrast confirms what we always knew was the things would turn out: badly. Comedy seems to turn doom on its head, if only long enough to open a window of moments in which to make our escape. The humor tragedy inspires is sardonic and bitter, but of comedy gleeful and wondering.
God-in-love, is this world a comedy, tragedy, or both? What I'm sure is that as life unfolds, mine, ours, we'll regularly be caught up short by strangeness of it; maybe jokes are our homage.
Ladies, let's do more.
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