Rustle in the Bush

I had a thought about irony and the dedication it has to negation. If I’m not misappropriating these terms. I would like to know if what I say is nonsense. School has a regulatory function. Knowledge grows in a noble isolation, not solipsism, we all need a strong foundation to work from. If not subjectively, be it a pragmatic principal.

I was think about offensiveness and jokes. Does good joke making just taking good sense? Obviously, if we apply the Will to Power (Ha ha, is this stupid) to humor, good jokes would have to be in style, no? Does it just take one to find stupid jokes? Does the jokers intention matter?

I’m disappointed by much of comedy after philosophy. Perhaps this is the reason I’ve grown out of fashion from Pop Culture lately. (Even among the best of joke writers and witty humorists) ( I personally think of Theo Von, Katt Williams, Nick Mullen, and Tim Dillon *before his former producer Ben left*).

I just closed my eyes and has a fantasy about becoming renowned. I don’t know what for. It’s odd. But really it’s not. There’s so much we don’t remember on a day to day basis. I was listening to an analysis and summary fo the Wolf Man case file at work. I’m embarrassed because I think it’s a waste of time in light of the fact I don’t know a lick about freud’s process of dream interpretation or his structure of the unconscious. I remember sitting outside a tree with my first girlfriend doing school, writings down Ego, Id, and Super Ego, and watching the upperclassmen change classes. Converse, and beat up vans mostly. A few kids do semi-professional skateboarding, and one at least does hardcore professional surfing these days. It’s hard to imagine a Southerner knowing what it’s like to wake up to slopes of gray mist along the tides, and coffee steams cutting through the fog. Cold toes. Being grateful, is taking action.

How far can we take irony when it comes to offense? If offense works off of social standards, being broken only suggests a poke in the status quo. If there is no standard other than judging good sense and pragmatic principle (Groundless, hence pragmatic) should it not be enough in habitual practice to recognize a convention of agreed upon ethics? It doesn’t necessarily imply a strict moral code, or reason. I guess that’s where free will vs determinism creeps in. Or “Nature vs Nurture”. Or “rationalism vs empiricism”, or whatever you wish to call it.

However, despite the haters, Incipit (Z)… I think Deleuze constantly delivers his message of Difference over Identity, and that’s what separates him from Marx, truly and with consistency. If you can adapt Marx enough from Spinoza enough to take what you need there should be no reason venerate him. Beneath his beard he’s no bigger than Nietzsche. They both boiled. AO deserves as much emancipation from Marx’s goal as it does from Freuds. Like with Kant, it’s a Copernican Revolution. There’s major differences between the implications drawn from Marx and Deleuze’s projects.

I digress…. back to comedy. Without true grounding for moral conventions and “things you can’t say” (I’m crucially aware this is a first world country problem) gauging offensiveness by topic doesn’t make sense. You’d have to make a quantitative judgement (This joke -Holocaust for example- This topic is So Much… How much? Who knows.. Worse than this topic) . Some are more offensive to others (Others?). Some damage social priorities more than others. In idea, only mind you. All comedy participants are willing. The ‘contract’ and understanding of the comedic process comes in cash form, and is left at the door. Like most usual circumstances I think ethical considerations fall down to personal values or utilitarian considerations. (Utilitarian in a more practical sense, not the ethical implications of J.S. Mill or Bentham and the hedonistic characterization of happiness). Generally when most ‘good’ humans act they take into account another’s suffering.

Is stand-up comedy as a way-of-life (Temperament/Perspective in action) just the genetic outcome of a critical self awareness of meaning? Not a challenging of the status quo, but a mirror. Standups are like the Hegel. They do nothing with their contradiction, they build up its image. I’m also annoyed how often (Fuck Tom Segura! He’s an awful comedian) most popular stand up do nothing but blabber on truisms or dichotomies in their culture. Listen to most stand-up and you’ll see it’s littered with borrrring as hell truistic commentary on social norms, then crafting dualisms off of them.

I think I’m wrong at the same time. If ‘Abolish your Venerations’ means all of them, then shedding postmodernity must be extra difficult. Sense and value are what Nietzsche brings to us, according to Deleuze. Double-awareness of this seems to be even harder than it was for Him (Nietzsche), to restore to man, the feeling-of-the-Greeks. Liberation and emancipation fall short. I believe I will begin reading Saussurean semiotics soon for school. Wish me luck, faceless dark hole of the infinitesimal web.