Comedy and Philosophy: Irony, the Absurd and the Laugh

Philosophy and comedy have been rivals and allies for two and a half thousand years. Plato wanted laughter policed; Aristophanes put Socrates in a basket in the sky and made Athens laugh at him. But a long line of thinkers, from Zhuangzi and Montaigne to Kierkegaard, Camus, Thomas Nagel and Simon Critchley, have argued something more interesting: that humour and irony are not distractions from the hard questions but one of the best ways of living with them. This essay looks at what those philosophers actually recommended, how comedy works as a philosophical method, and the comedians whose work is philosophy by other means.

For the theories of why things are funny in the first place, see our overview of comedy research. For the moral questions, see the ethics of comedy.

The ancient quarrel

The first great joke about a philosopher is Aristophanes' The Clouds (423 BCE), which presents Socrates as a fraud who runs a "thinkery", studies gnat anatomy and teaches young men to win arguments dishonestly. Plato's Apology has Socrates complain, at his trial, that the comic poets had poisoned public opinion against him years before his accusers did. It is perhaps the first recorded case of a comedian's portrayal outliving its subject's defence.

Plato's suspicion of laughter followed. In the Republic he wants the guardians of his city to avoid violent laughter, and in the Philebus he analyses laughter at the self-ignorant as a mix of pleasure and malice. Aristotle was friendlier: he wrote that comedy deals with faults that cause no pain, and in the Nicomachean Ethics praised wit (eutrapelia) as a virtue, a mean between the boor who never jokes and the buffoon who can't stop.

And yet Socrates himself was, in a sense, the first deadpan. His method, professing ignorance and asking innocent questions until a confident expert contradicts himself, has the structure of a comic routine. "Socratic irony" names exactly that act. The philosopher and the comedian were doing the same thing from opposite sides of the stage.

The laughing philosopher

Ancient tradition paired Democritus, who laughed at human folly, with Heraclitus, who wept at it. In his essay "Of Democritus and Heraclitus", Montaigne sided with the laugher, on the grounds that mockery takes humanity less seriously than pity does, and humanity deserves no more seriousness than that. Diogenes the Cynic, living in a jar and heckling Alexander the Great, made philosophy into street performance. Far to the east, the Daoist Zhuangzi used talking trees, cooks and a famous dream of being a butterfly to undermine every confident distinction between useful and useless, waking and dreaming. It is one of the funniest books of philosophy ever written.

People searching for philosophers who recommend humour, irony or the absurd as a way of life usually want names. Here are the most important, with what they actually said.

Erasmus: folly as truth-teller

In In Praise of Folly (1511), Erasmus has Folly herself give a speech in her own honour. The joke is that she's right: the world runs on vanity and self-deception, and the wise man who refuses them is the real fool. It is satire as moral philosophy, and it set a template for every comedian who plays the idiot to tell the truth.

Kierkegaard: irony and humour as stages of life

Søren Kierkegaard wrote his dissertation On the Concept of Irony (1841) and returned to comedy throughout his work. In Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), written under a pseudonym, he treats irony as the boundary between the aesthetic and ethical ways of life, and humour as the boundary between the ethical and the religious. Humour, for Kierkegaard, is what a person develops when they fully see the contradiction between the infinite things they care about and the finite life they have to care about them in.

Nietzsche: laughter as liberation

Nietzsche titled a book The Gay Science (in the sense of joyful wisdom) and made laughter one of the virtues of his ideal philosopher. He distrusted the spirit of gravity, the heaviness that turns every value into a commandment, and treated the ability to laugh at what one holds most dear as a sign of strength.

Bergson: comedy as social corrective

Henri Bergson's Laughter (1900) argued that we laugh at people who behave like machines: rigid, repetitive, absent-minded, failing to adapt to life. Laughter is society's way of correcting that rigidity. It is a philosophy of comedy rather than a prescription to laugh, but it gives every comedian a working rule: find where the living person turns mechanical.

Camus: the absurd and revolt

Albert Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) defined the absurd as the collision between our need for meaning and a universe that offers none. His answer was not jokes but revolt: lucid, defiant living without appeal to false hope, summed up in his conclusion that we must imagine Sisyphus happy. Camus wasn't a comic philosopher, but the absurd gave comedians a vocabulary, and the Theatre of the Absurd that followed (Beckett, Ionesco) turned his metaphysics into very funny plays. Our guide to absurdist comedy traces that line.

Thomas Nagel: irony instead of despair

The clearest contemporary recommendation of irony comes from the American philosopher Thomas Nagel. In his 1971 essay "The Absurd", he argued that absurdity arises because we can step back from our lives and see them from a cosmic point of view in which nothing we care about matters, while still having to live them from the inside, where it does. Unlike Camus, he thought defiance was overdramatic. If nothing matters from the cosmic point of view, he reasoned, then that doesn't matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony rather than heroism or despair. It is perhaps the most quietly comic conclusion in modern philosophy.

Richard Rorty: the liberal ironist

In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), Richard Rorty described an ideal citizen who knows her deepest values are contingent, products of history and chance rather than eternal truths, and who holds them anyway. Irony here isn't sarcasm; it is a permanent awareness that one's own vocabulary could have been otherwise.

Simon Critchley: humour as modesty

Simon Critchley's short book On Humour (2002) is the most direct contemporary case for humour as a philosophical attitude. Drawing on Freud and Beckett, he argues that humour reveals the gap between what we aspire to be and the clumsy, bodily creatures we are, and that laughing at that gap is a form of acceptance rather than evasion. Humour, for Critchley, recalls us to the modesty of our condition.

Other contemporary thinkers worth reading include Ted Cohen (Jokes, 1999), on jokes as a form of intimacy; Alenka Zupančič (The Odd One In: On Comedy, 2008), a psychoanalytic account of comedy as the physical leftovers of grand ideals; and John Morreall (Comic Relief, 2009), who argues that humour has real intellectual and ethical virtues.

Comedy as a philosophical method

Ludwig Wittgenstein reportedly told his friend Norman Malcolm that a serious philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes. It's easy to see why. Both philosophy and comedy work by exposing the hidden rules we follow without noticing. Several comic techniques are philosophical methods in disguise:

Reductio ad absurdum. Take a premise and follow it, logically and relentlessly, until it becomes ridiculous. Swift's A Modest Proposal (1729) is the classic; so is half of I Think You Should Leave, where a man's refusal to admit a small mistake escalates past all sense.
The thought experiment. "What if..." is the opening of both a philosophical puzzle and a sketch premise. Nathan Fielder's The Rehearsal is essentially an extended thought experiment about whether life can be prepared for.
Ordinary-language analysis. The observational one-liner, from Steven Wright to Demetri Martin, notices the strange logic hidden in everyday phrases. That is what Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin did for a living.
Defamiliarisation. Describing something so familiar that we no longer see it as if for the first time. Phenomenologists and observational comics share the technique.
Self-reference. Jokes about the joke, shows about the show. Stewart Lee's stand-up, which constantly analyses its own structure and the audience's reaction, is a sustained essay on what comedy is. See our guide to Stewart Lee.

Comedians doing philosophy

Some comedy is philosophical because it borrows philosophers as characters. Monty Python's "Philosophers' Football Match", with Greek and German thinkers on a pitch failing to notice the ball, and the Bruces' drinking song about philosophers are affectionate in-jokes. Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979) is a sharper work about belief, crowds and the human need for messiahs. Michael Schur's NBC sitcom The Good Place (2016–2020) went further, building its plot around moral philosophy, from Aristotle to T. M. Scanlon's What We Owe to Each Other, with philosophers Todd May and Pamela Hieronymi as advisers.

The more interesting cases do philosophy without naming it:

Samuel Beckett. Waiting for Godot is built from music-hall routines, hat swaps and failed exits. It is also the most famous dramatisation of a meaningless universe. Beckett proves the comic and the metaphysical are the same material.
Andy Kaufman. By refusing to signal where the act ended, Kaufman made his audiences confront an epistemological question: how do you know what's real?
Bo Burnham. Inside (2021) is a meditation on self-consciousness and mediated identity, a performer unable to stop watching himself perform.
Maria Bamford. Her shifting voices raise questions about the self that would interest any philosopher of mind: which of these people is the real Maria?
Nathan Fielder. His work stages social experiments that reveal how much of ordinary interaction is scripted. Sociologist Erving Goffman, who analysed everyday life as performance, would have recognised it at once.
Julio Torres. His surreal stories about objects with inner lives are gentle exercises in seeing the world from impossible perspectives.

What comedy gives philosophy

Philosophy distrusted comedy for centuries because it seemed unserious. The case for comedy is that it does three things academic philosophy struggles with.

It holds contradictions without resolving them. A good joke keeps two incompatible frames in view and enjoys the clash. Philosophy tends to want one frame to win.
It reaches people. More people have thought seriously about the absurd because of Beckett, Python and The Good Place than because of journal articles.
It is embodied. Critchley's point: laughter happens in the body, at the body. It reminds philosophy, which tends to treat people as minds, that we are also clumsy animals who trip over things.

And what philosophy gives comedy is a reason to take it seriously as art. That argument is the subject of our essay on comedy as art.

Where to start

Frequently asked questions

Which philosophers recommend humour or irony as a response to the absurd?

Thomas Nagel argued in 'The Absurd' (1971) that we can meet the absurdity of life with irony rather than heroism or despair. Kierkegaard saw humour as a stage of mature existence, Montaigne preferred the laughing philosopher Democritus to the weeping Heraclitus, and Simon Critchley's On Humour (2002) treats laughter as a way of acknowledging our limited, bodily condition.

Did Camus think life was funny?

Not exactly. Camus's absurd is the clash between our demand for meaning and a silent universe, and his response is revolt and lucid acceptance, captured in the line that we must imagine Sisyphus happy. Comedians have found the idea fertile, but Camus himself prescribed defiance rather than jokes.

What did Wittgenstein say about jokes?

According to his friend Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein once remarked that a serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes. The point is that jokes, like philosophical puzzles, work by exposing the hidden rules of our language.

Is there a philosophy of comedy?

Yes. The philosophy of humour is an established field covering why things are funny (superiority, relief, incongruity and benign violation theories), the ethics of jokes, and the aesthetics of comedy. Noël Carroll's Humour: A Very Short Introduction and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry are good starting points.