Ep. 89: Laughing at the Emperor

Young Heretics

Spencer Klavan

Society & Culture, Education

4.9 • 4.5K Ratings

🗓️ 25 January 2022

⏱️ 70 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Experts hate to be laughed at, especially when they have something to hide. Aristophanes, the genius of Old Attic Comedy, shows us how it's done in Clouds, his goofy satire of an education system in decline. In this episode of Young Heretics, Spencer Klavan explores the question, was Socrates part of the problem—or part of the solution?

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Young Heretics Poop Jokes Edition.
0:09.8	I'm not kidding, this is the Poop Jokes edition of Young Heretics. We're talking today about
0:13.1	Aristophanes. I don't think that you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think we've ever
0:18.4	really talked about Aristophanes on this show. In general, I don't think we've done enough
0:23.7	comedy, and I think that one reason for that is that when you start talking about, you know,
0:27.1	look great works of the West, you instantly want to talk about like tragedy and philosophy and
0:31.3	history and big, serious things. But of course, comedy can have serious points as well, and the great
0:38.3	comic poet dramatist, Aristophanes is a perfect example of this. It's also, I think, important for us
0:46.0	now today to be laughing, to be talking about funny works of art, in part because when life gets
0:53.1	absurd, and when society starts breaking down, fraying around the edges, one of the best things
0:59.9	that you can do is laugh at the absurdies from the best antidotes, to ridiculousness. Remember,
1:05.6	Thomas Moore and Luther both pointed out that the devil cannot bear to be mocked and see us Lewis
1:11.6	and the screw tape letters repeats this. There is something about evil which dissolves in the face
1:17.3	of laughter, especially absurd evil of the kind that's being pushed upon us day in and day out
1:22.8	believe the absurd, believe 20 impossible things before breakfast. We spend a lot of time
1:29.3	waving our fists at that. We spend a lot of time getting really mad about it. But one of the
1:33.6	things that the internet has taught us is that a better thing to do than to get mad is to laugh,
1:37.6	right? The reason that people say on the internet, you mad bro, you mad is because that taunt suggests
1:42.8	that you're too bothered by something you need to go out and touch grass and take a deep breath and
1:48.4	have a good laugh. This is something that Aristophanes understood because he too lived in a time of
1:55.7	social turmoil, transition, even decay. His career really spanned over the heat of the Peloponnesian
2:04.0	war, which is something that we've talked about, right? This was this brutal, protracted conflict
	...

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