This is Philosophy versus Improv, where two sages try to teach each other a thing or two,

and maybe you, the audience, gets something out of it as well.

I'm Bill Arnett, an improv, ace, or king, but merely a deuce or a tray when it comes to philosophy.

Wow, this is Mark Linsonmeyer.

I think that reducing even analogically my skill in philosophy to, okay, fine, I'm a three of clubs.

Fine, fine.

We have a special guest here.

Nessa, introduce yourself.

Tell us about you.

Hi, I'm Nessa Voss, and I teach philosophy at Lone Star Community College, and I do

philosophy of humor because I want to ruin everything.

Yes, philosophy of humor books you might read because you like reading humor books, but they're

usually not, like reading that Freud book on jokes of the unconscious, not funny. Those jokes, I still don't get it. I've published on

them. I don't get them. So you have to get me up to speed here. Are you saying that Sigmund Freud

included jokes in his work? Like, here's a sample of something funny, and I'll break down why it's

funny, like that? Yes. Okay. Maybe you just had to be there.

Maybe it had to be in German in that time period. Yeah. There'd be a specific kind of German.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Okay. So if I remember sort of the high level, the main theories of humor in

philosophy, there's like superiority. Yes. We laugh at people because we

think we're superior. It's the unexpected or more precisely like Berggrosone wrote about the

mechanical. So when we see somebody moving, doing the robot, then like, well, that's not how

humans move. So there there something unexpected about that?

...