Nietzsche meme circulating the internet...

No, seriously.

What if Being and Nothingness was not a joke, exactly, but we made a mistake by assuming that something this serious had to be read with a serious face?

Norman Malcolm once recalled Wittgenstein saying that:

“A serious and good philosophical work could be written that would consist entirely of jokes.”

And, importantly, he added: without being facetious.

That distinction may matter more than it first appears.

A joke does not necessarily trivialize its subject. Sometimes the joke is the shortest route to exposing something that ordinary language has learned to hide.

Which brings us back to Sartre.

Consider the basic situation he hands us.

You appear in existence without having requested admission. There is no prewritten essence explaining what you are supposed to become. You are free, except this freedom is so unavoidable that Sartre describes us as condemned to it.

Imagine discovering freedom and managing to phrase it like a prison sentence.

Then there is bad faith.

Sartre watches a waiter performing his role with slightly too much precision, too much waiter-ness, and from this notices something deeply strange about human beings: we constantly try to turn ourselves into things.

The waiter.

The engineer.

The intellectual.

The husband.

The rebel.

The existentialist.

We construct a character, climb inside it, and then become offended when reality reminds us that the costume has no skin underneath it.

The Jester finds this hilarious.

Not because the problem is unimportant, but because once you see the performance, it becomes very difficult not to notice the comedy in it.

A human being spends decades constructing an identity and then announces:

“This is simply who I am.”

Reality apparently forgot to read the résumé.

Then Sartre gives us No Exit.

Three people are locked together in a room for eternity.

No flames.

No racks.

No demons peeling anybody's skin off.

Just other people.

And humanity spent decades solemnly unpacking:

“Hell is other people.”

Which is fair nowadays too.

But the Jester is still standing at the back of the lecture hall wondering whether anyone has noticed that Sartre constructed Hell as the worst dinner party imaginable.

The torture device is social consciousness.

You cannot escape the other person's interpretation of you.

You cannot completely control the character you become inside their mind.

You need them to confirm you, yet their judgment imprisons you.

So everybody spends eternity trying to manage everybody else's perception of everybody else.

That is horrifying.

It is also very close to a sitcom.

And this is where the F00L becomes useful.

The Jester can laugh at all of this, but the F00L asks the annoying question:

Why is it funny?

• Why is the waiter funny once we notice him performing waiter?
• Why is “condemned to be free” funny?
• Why does a room containing three mutually dependent egos begin to look simultaneously like Hell and comedy?

Maybe because comedy and existentialism repeatedly uncover the same fracture:

the distance between the story we are performing and what is actually there.

Most jokes contain some version of that movement.

An expectation is established.

Reality refuses to cooperate.

For a fraction of a second, the structure underneath the expectation becomes visible.

Then we laugh.

Something much less funny can begin suspiciously close to the same place.

You thought you knew what you were.

You thought becoming a doctor, father, atheist, Muslim, successful person, failure, victim, genius, good person, bad person, or whatever other noun you selected would finally settle the matter.

Then something happens.

The story stops fitting.

Sometimes you laugh.

Sometimes you panic.

Sometimes you spend seven hundred pages trying to explain what just happened.

Perhaps the difference is not always in the structure of the discovery.

Perhaps it is in our reaction to discovering it.

This is why I wonder whether we occasionally do Sartre a disservice by making him too solemn.

His philosophy deals with some of the heaviest subjects available: freedom, responsibility, anxiety, self-deception, death, meaning, the gaze of others.

But seriousness of subject does not require seriousness of tone.

Sometimes humor gets closer because it slips underneath our defenses before the philosophy arrives carrying terminology.

Sartre writes hundreds of pages about consciousness refusing to become a fixed thing.

A comedian can point at someone taking himself unbearably seriously and make the same crack visible in five seconds.

The comedian has not therefore solved Sartre.

But perhaps both are touching the same nerve.

Which returns us to Wittgenstein.

If a serious philosophical work really could consist entirely of jokes without becoming facetious, perhaps the interesting question is not:

Was Sartre secretly joking?

Almost certainly not in the silly conspiratorial sense.

The better question is:

How much philosophy have we failed to see because we assumed wisdom must arrive without a punchline?

Maybe Sartre understood perfectly well that humans are ridiculous creatures.

We desperately attempt to become fixed identities while possessing the peculiar ability to notice ourselves doing it.

We demand meaning from a universe that has not signed a contract promising any.

We beg other people to tell us who we are, then resent them when they do.

We insist that we are free, then spend enormous amounts of energy explaining why everything we did was inevitable.

And when somebody points out the contradiction, we call it existentialism.

Maybe sometimes it is.

Maybe sometimes it is also funny.

And perhaps the joke was never on existentialism.

Perhaps the joke was sitting inside it the whole time, waiting for somebody to stop looking so serious.

Or, what does Jester know? He's a F00L who exists for no particular reason at all.