Interview with Bob Odenkirk
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Most of timeless comedy simply describes the mundane reality of the audience in a way that they realize the absurdity of it.
Such people have different perspectives on life, success and happiness, for better or worse.
IIRC, I've heard it said that comedians are not happy people and usually had pretty difficult childhoods where "being funny" was a coping mechanism.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qFHLfmoLchI&list=PLRT5PdjVF-ip...
Interesting, I wonder how common this is and how the interviewees feel about it.
yea yea we get it
[article authors don't write these headlines, you guys - let alone interview subjects]
Once you realize that life has no meaning, except that which we arbitrarily assign, you can only go a few ways with it. Of all the 'ism's you could choose in that moment, absudism is perhaps the least worst.
"Credo quia absurdum est."
My understanding has always been that Absurdism says that while the search for meaning is absurd we should search anyhow if we feel like it (our happy friend Sisyphus). Whereas Nihilism's answer was more along the lines of Bukowski's "Don't Try." They both recognize that Sisyphus's job is pointless, but the absurdists suggest we keep pushing the boulder anyhow.
Am I missing something?
Nihilism gives you nothing more. Absurdism claims you must embrace this lack of meaning and thrive in spite of it. Existentialism claims you can create your own.
Camus thought Existentialism was "cheating" and trying to deny the correct conclusion that life is meaningless. Also, he diskliked Sartre a lot.
> "Do it, then," said Lambert, swinging his stick impatiently. "It would be funnier than the bosh you and Barker talk."
> Quin, standing on the top of the hill, stretched his hand out towards the main avenue of Kensington Gardens.
> "Two hundred yards away," he said, "are all your fashionable acquaintances with nothing on earth to do but to stare at each other and at us. We are standing upon an elevation under the open sky, a peak as it were of fantasy, a Sinai of humour. We are in a great pulpit or platform, lit up with sunlight, and half London can see us. Be careful how you suggest things to me. For there is in me a madness which goes beyond martyrdom, the madness of an utterly idle man.
Bill Hicks
Fixed name
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-10-06/recycled-wa...
only difference is, in real world there may be consequences that you may not be able to undo so you may have to be little careful while riding.
I truly dislike this recent trend of making people feel bad if they have learned to just slow down and be content with life. "It's privilege being able to take a break and smell the roses, I'm too busy for this nonsense" is protestant crab mentality that I find revolting.
You'll have a hard time finding more suffering than in Wall Street. Meanwhile I haven't found more content, relaxed people than when I visited my distant family in sub-Saharan Africa, taking life as it comes. My point still stands.
You seem to be arguing against the point "only happy people can be rich". This isn't what the GP comment said. It said only rich people come out with things like "life is a farce". Which I think is true. Are any of your sub saharan african relatives giving interviews to press pontificating on such things? I assume no.
No, but the first thing they say to a Westerner like me is "what are you fretting about? You white people are always stressed and busy. Just take a breath. The world isn't going anywhere."
It takes a lot of energy and effort to be rich and to chase money; these are not the people that say "life is a farce".
Your comment is borne from the idea that money does create happiness, so only rich people can enjoy life and have a laugh about it. This is not a universal maxim, just a cultural artefact of the protestant ethos that finds in maximum expression in the American capitalist society. In the rest of the world, it's the complete opposite.
Only rich people are unhappy and suffering is such a ridiculous point, frankly.
Including in Africa for that matter. In fact, you will find plenty of people there that go to extremes to avoid or minimize suffering ... including making other sub-africans super suffering in the process. That happy take life as it comes sub-Saharan Africa includes Sudan and Congo full of people who are not happy and very active in trying to change thing around them (not necessarily in the positive sense).
I've met "too busy for this" people in every line of work, regardless of their pay band. When you get to know people, you will see that pretty much everyone has their own trenches, and slowing down is a matter of priorities, not privilege.
"too busy" is arguing for ignorance, which is defensible but not agreed on
See perhaps Viktor Frankl on this:
> Man's Search for Meaning (German: ... trotzdem Ja zum Leben sagen. Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager, lit. '... Say Yes to Life nonetheless: A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp') is a 1946 book by Viktor Frankl chronicling his experiences as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps during World War II, and describing his psychotherapeutic method, which involved identifying a purpose to each person's life through one of three ways: the completion of tasks, caring for another person, or finding meaning by facing suffering with dignity.
> Frankl observed that among the fellow inmates in the concentration camp, those who survived were able to connect with a purpose in life to feel positive about and who then immersed themselves in imagining that purpose in their own way, such as conversing with an (imagined) loved one. According to Frankl, the way a prisoner imagined the future affected their longevity.
If that was the case, how better off we'd be.
Using it for translation would be different though.
Breaking chacter for a minute, it really annoys me every time a blatantly obvious LLM comment is called out, it's flooded with replies like "No, I akshually write like that - people have always written exactly like that" as if its not obvious lol
it might be the latter, because i always got the title of this paper https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.02175 backwards. i used to write it adversarial examples are features, not bugs (which is apparently not correct in english language 0_o)
regardless, ive started editing it out when i notice ive done it now.
Sounds like a typical mid-life (identity) crisis?
Contrast this with the life perspective of Stephen Colbert, who lost his father and two brother to a plane crash when he was 10:
> “It was a very healthy reciprocal acceptance of suffering,” he said. “Which does not mean being defeated by suffering. Acceptance is not defeat. Acceptance is just awareness.” He smiled in anticipation of the callback: “ ‘You gotta learn to love the bomb,’ ” he said. “Boy, did I have a bomb when I was 10. That was quite an explosion. And I learned to love it. So that's why. Maybe, I don't know. That might be why you don't see me as someone angry and working out my demons onstage. It's that I love the thing that I most wish had not happened.”
> I asked him if he could help me understand that better, and he described a letter from Tolkien in response to a priest who had questioned whether Tolkien's mythos was sufficiently doctrinaire, since it treated death not as a punishment for the sin of the fall but as a gift. “Tolkien says, in a letter back: ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’ ” Colbert knocked his knuckles on the table. “ ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’ ” he said again. His eyes were filled with tears. “So it would be ungrateful not to take everything with gratitude. It doesn't mean you want it. I can hold both of those ideas in my head.”
> He was 35, he said, before he could really feel the truth of that. He was walking down the street, and it “stopped me dead. I went, ‘Oh, I'm grateful. Oh, I feel terrible.’ I felt so guilty to be grateful. But I knew it was true.
* https://archive.is/https://www.gq.com/story/stephen-colbert-...
His interview with Anderson Cooper, where they go over this (amongst other things), is worth checking out (see ~12m43s):
> Then you have to be grateful for all of it. You can't pick and choose what you're grateful for. So what do you get from loss? You get awareness of other people's loss, which allows you to connect with that other person. Which allows you to love more deeply and understand what it means to be a human being, if it's true that all humans suffer. […] It's about the fullness of your humanity: what's the point of being here and being human if you can't be the most human you can be? I'm not saying 'best', because you can be a bad person but a most human. […]
Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?
And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?
When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.
-- Kahil Gibran
The perspective that affords that life is cruel to some and kind to others, and it's just random and meaningless really doesn't sit well with the people who have to struggle to survive without the chance for joy in life.
If I am just going to suffer endlessly while others enjoy a life of luxury, why not burn the whole thing down? There is a disturbing goal for some people who want equality, and that is universal suffering and misery...
Comedy presupposes meaning, because comedy hinges on the absurd, but the absurd is a departure from meaning or a deviation from it. Something is absurd when it fails to be meaningful and fails to satisfy the rational in the broader context of rational meaning.
There is no laughter in the utterly meaningless. There cannot be silliness without an overarching context of seriousness.
Rich and succesful people try to forget that, which is their hubris.
You can also use “this too shall pass” if you want a lighter version
>There’s no question that the security that you feel from not being afraid of a health issue or housing is a great comfort and helps you to be more at peace with life. It’s just not as much help as you think it should be.
Security of housing and healthcare is an enormous boost in life. I avoided playing sports when I was a kid because my dad told me a broken arm would set the family back (there were no out of pocket maximums back then).
The government paid if you were dirt poor and had no prospects, or employer or government paid if you were a white collar/union or government employee, but for immigrants invested into their 24/7 small business, they had assets that could be seized but very little cash flow to be able to pay unexpected bills.
If you do think too much about everything, and you survive this, you will land somewhere and this somewhere will be content.
I'm thinking about happiness and what I want for so long, that I now have crossed my half life point.
You also need to have a certain amount of freedom to even have this problem which makes it weird for others not having this. Oh you are not happy? But you have money?! I would be happy with money, i'm struggling.
Its weird if you sometimes think it would be interesting to struggle.
If you're working every day in a coal mine so you can feed your children otherwise they will go hungry, then you don't have these kind of thoughts.
Similarly, if you're fighting in a war so your family isn't raped or murdered then you don't have these kind of thoughts either.
Basically, you're lucky if you live in a situation that gives you the leisure and time to sit around and think about life being a farce. Probably he should be sitting around thinking, "boy, i'm so lucky I get to sit in this nice coffeeshop with no reason to work, no threat to my life, just chilling, so I can ponder on what a farce life is"
Edit: Because some people start criticising my comment, here's an addition:
How many people who were living in the 1700s do you think sat around thinking life is a farce?
Ponder on that question. Out of everyone living in the world today, how many people do you think sit around thinking life is a farce, who are those people? Why do you think they are thinking this?
I think it's an important question to ask and think about. It's saying something about our society, way of life, way of seeing the world.
In my opinion, life is for living, being with people, engaging in the world, taking action, connecting with people, and giving back. When you stop living, engaging with the world, and spend too much time alone, you start thinking this way.
I think if Bob Odenkirk lived on a community farm where everyone had to work together to survive he would be far happier and think life is far more meaningful.
It's shows true ignorance about what happiness is and where it's found. You can probably find more smiles and hope for the future in the Ukrainian trenches than reading comments from Silicon Valley workers making $150k a year.
I mean, do you guys even know Buddhism any more? It was such a hip thing in the 70s over there.
"poor people don't think about it"
no other claims
But seriously think about it. Why doesn't your pet dog sit around thinking about what a farce life is?
How many people who were living in the 1700s do you think sat around thinking life is a farce?
Ponder on that question. Out of everyone living in the world today, how many people do you think sit around thinking life is a farce, who are those people? Why do you think they are thinking this?
I think it's an important question to ask and think about. It's saying something about our society, way of life, way of seeing the world.
How lucky we are to be the only generation in history capable of thinking and reflecting!
Miners suffered from hideous diseases due to breathing in huge amounts of toxic chemicals, so yes, that resulted in elevated risk of suicide and alcoholism.
But were they really sitting around discussing absurdism, nihilism, life being a farce? This sort of thinking is really much more of a modern phenomenon, a privilege of the rich and educated with lots of free time.
Yes they were talking about it while drinking beer and cheap distillate. What makes you think they could not possibly talk about it?
> This sort of thinking is really much more of a modern phenomenon, a privilege of the rich and educated with lots of free time.
Dude, we have history of nihilistic writings going on far far into the history. Including complains of rich people about poor having those attitudes.
> Miners suffered from hideous diseases due to breathing in huge amounts of toxic chemicals, so yes, that resulted in elevated risk of suicide and alcoholism.
Sure, depending on place and time, the health impact could be extremely serious. But blaming all alcoholism, depressions and suicides on that only would be absurd.
> There’s no question that the security that you feel from not being afraid of a health issue or housing is a great comfort and helps you to be more at peace with life. It’s just not as much help as you think it should be.
1. Life is meaningless: descriptive claim
2. You ought to appreciate life to the best of your ability: normative claim
Your argument has no bearing on the first claim.
So you think everyone was happier in the USSR? /s
I guess you don't really understand the USSR then...
Living in modern cosmopolitan Moscow yet still acting and thinking that way is so much worse than actually being born on a community farm without choosing that lifestyle and mentality.
The name for this view of the universe is "absurdism". It was first espoused, as far as I can tell, when the discourse of Qohelet was recorded in the book of Ecclesiastes. So yes, they had it in the 1700's although perhaps not by that name.
> If you're working every day in a coal mine so you can feed your children otherwise they will go hungry, then you don't have these kind of thoughts.
This is almost the opposite of the truth. Those with careers that do not occupy their minds do not sit around with their brains idling and empty all day. They spend much of that time thinking about exactly this sort of thing.
Unless you thought most people in the 1700s were sat around smoking cigarettes in cafes discussing the absurdism of life?
Hell, I was a teenager working at Taco Bell when I first read Camus' "The Myth of Sisyphus". Well before that though many a bean burrito were handed out the window while I considered the absurdity of life. Perhaps my thinking wasn't as nuanced as it would later come to be, but the concepts occurred to me quite naturally.
I would say, if you're reading Camus for fun and not a school assignment as a teenager, you're in the 0.01% of people or probably 0.001% of people in the world in terms of priviledge and education. And certainly, in the 1700s this group was much smaller as a percentage of the overall population as free-time was much more rare and books, education were much less common.
In 1750, the majority of France's population were peasants who lived in the fields, they weren't pondering the meaning of philosophical literature at weekends.
-William Shakespeare
easy to be a philosopher when you're forced to portray pathos and bathos, on camera, for years
Esau replied, "Behold, I am going to die; so why do I need this birthright?"
Interviewer: There’s a holistic observation I want to make about our conversation. You talked about how the best times in your life were when your kids were little. Those times are over. You said the art form you love the most, sketch comedy, is a young man’s game. That’s over for you. Life? It’s a farce.
Odenkirk: Yeah.
He quoted Shakespeare's MacBeth, "It is a tale, Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing." when talking about he thinks sketch comedy is the greatest form of self expression, even moreso than poetry from people like Shakespeare.
It's not that deep.
Interviewer: There’s a holistic observation I want to make about our conversation. You talked about how the best times in your life were when your kids were little. Those times are over. You said the art form you love the most, sketch comedy, is a young man’s game. That’s over for you. Life? It’s a farce.
Odenkirk: Yeah.