Stephen Colbert and Philosophy - Aaron Allen Schiller [88]
The comedian shows us a different way of looking at something, a different way of thinking about it. Stephen Colbert is exceptionally good at making these connections. Stephen Colbert’s coinage of truthiness—feeling with our gut rather than knowing with our mind—shows us another aspect of our culture that has stemmed from the information age and could arguably be attributed to the dumbing down of America.
Wikiality is a term coined by Stephen Colbert to address a growing trend of democratic knowledge where, if enough people agree to it, it becomes a fact: “any user can change any entry and if enough users agree to it, it becomes true… . if only the entire body of human knowledge worked this way.” Wikipedia is a portmanteau of Wiki, a type of software that allows users to generate and alter content, and the term encyclopedia. The term wikiality, is another portmanteau combining Wikipedia, the on-line research resource, and reality. Using wikiality, Stephen Colbert is creating an aspect change in how we think Wikipedia may be influencing our reality.
Stephen Colbert has hit upon a growing trend in this country to use one resource, such as Wikipedia, for the only resource on a subject, taking for granted that if it is stated by an authority, or is in print, and other people agree to it, then it must be true. Stephen Colbert explains this current trend in our culture, “what we are doing is bringing democracy to knowledge… . Together, we can create a reality that we can all agree on—the reality we just agreed on.”150
There Are Forms, and then There Are Forms of Life
Though it gives us a story explaining how humor works, aspect-change alone does not tell us why we laugh. What I mean by this distinction is that there can be many reasons for why people laugh, as stupid as they may be, that are particular to their tastes and dispositions, but that the mechanism that allows this to happen, the change of aspect, remains the same. And not all aspect changes are funny. What makes an aspect change funny depends on the circumstances under which the dawning of an aspect was made; the form of life, the humorous attitude, and lastly, an avowal.
We need a Form of Life—a web of shared human relationships, a commonality of everyday life. A form of life is different for humans than it is, say, for lions. Wittgenstein says if a lion could talk, we could not understand him.151 A lion interacts and communicates with other lions in ways that are obviously different to the way that a human interacts and communicates with other humans. Lions, for instance, never interrupt each other when consuming the still-warm carcass of an antelope, unlike my brother Irving. Even if a lion had a language that was similar to English, the colloquialisms and ways of expressing himself would still be foreign to us. At best, he would be misunderstood.
In order to have a language, we need a shared set of rules for the language. What also comes with these rules are non-speaking verbal cues and a social context that helps us understand the meaning and intention behind every speech activity. The green Starbucks logo centered on a white paper to-go cup is part of our form of life. It represents the coffee conglomerate Starbucks and we associate the cup and logo with mass consumerism of specialty coffee and the tempting aromas of free-trade, cage-free, grass-fed Sumatran Honey-Dragon Blend.
In order to understand the humor in the last scene of ‘Threat-Down’ mentioned earlier, the shower scene, one would have to be able to recognize the logo on Stephen Colbert’s cup as a Starbucks logo and immediately make the connection that the black liquid Stephen Colbert is pouring on his head is indeed, Starbuck’s coffee. The Kalahari bushmen in Africa who don’t have a concept of to-go coffee or know about the addictive nature of caffeine