“I’ve got good news and bad news,” he proclaims. Space permits me to cite only two brief examples: To illustrate the concept of divine law, they tell of Moses descending from Mt. No matter your sense of humor, it’s likely you’ll find stories and quips that will make you howl, chuckle, and occasionally groan, but all in the service of illuminating some often abstruse philosophical concept. What the philosopher calls an insight, the gagster calls a zinger.” In just shy of two hundred pages, they support that thesis with a grab bag of jokes, as they race along on a whirlwind tour of the world of philosophy, from metaphysics, to logic, to the philosophy of religion. But those diverse experiences gave them the ideal grounding to produce a breezy survey of the history of philosophy filtered through the prism of humor.Cathcart and Klein’s thesis is that the “construction and payoff” of both jokes and philosophical concepts are “made out of the same stuff.” Philosophy and jokes “proceed from the same impulse,” they assert, “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. Cathcart worked with Chicago street gangs amidst several stints in divinity school, while Klein wrote for standup comics and designed stunts for Candid Camera. Be prepared to shed those stereotypes after reading these two irreverent excursions into the philosopher’s realm.Though Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein both majored in philosophy at Harvard their credentials to write Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar aren’t exclusively academic. Or perhaps you picture a dotty professor wandering the campus muttering incoherently.

If you’ve never studied philosophy, you may have an image of its practitioners as pipe smoking men in tweed jackets with elbow patches.

Plato and a platypus jokes