| Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar – Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes | |
|---|---|
New Penguin paperback Cover |
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| Author(s) | Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein |
| Cover artist | Paul Buckley |
| Country | United States |
| Genre(s) | comedy |
| Publisher | Abrams Image (hardcover) Penguin Group (paperback) |
| Publication date | May 1, 2007 |
| Pages | 208 |
| ISBN | 978-0810914933 |
| OCLC Number | 71312724 |
| Dewey Decimal | 102/.07 22 |
| LC Classification | BD31 .C38 2006 |
Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar – Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes is a book that explains basic philosophical concepts through classic jokes. Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein, graduates of Harvard in philosophy, collaborated on the book. After being rejected by 40 publishers, the book was accepted by Abrams Image, an imprint of Abrams Books, and immediately became a bestseller. It has been translated into 20 languages and appeared on bestseller lists in the U.S., France, and Israel.
Plato and a Platypus examines the classic categories of philosophy, with concepts explained or illustrated by jokes. The chapter titles -- "Metaphysics," "Logic," "Epistemology," "Ethics," "Existentialism," and "Philosophy of Language" -- are serious, but the approach is a mix of serious and comic.
The authors explain the philosophy behind their book this way: “The construction and payoff of jokes and the construction and payoff of philosophical concepts are made out of the same stuff. They tease the mind in the same ways…philosophy and jokes proceed from the same impulse: to confound our sense of the way things are, to flip our worlds upside down, and to ferret out hidden, often uncomfortable, truths about life. What the philosopher calls an insight, the gagster calls a zinger.[1]”
The book also features a conversation between two fictional ancient Greek philosophers named Dimitri and Tasso.
The Guy Goma interview is also used,[2] as an illustration of the vagueness of language.
"A guy comes home from a business trip and finds his wife in bed, a nervous look on her face. He opens the closet to hang up his coat, and finds his best friend standing there, naked. Stunned, he says, "Lenny, what are you doing here?" Lenny shrugs and says, "Everybody's got to be someplace." In this gag, Lenny is giving a Hegelian answer to an existential question. The question is about the existential circumstances in the here-and-now, but the answer is from a grand, universal vantage point, what the latter-day Hegelian Bette Midler called “seeing the world from a distance."