The authors couldn’t be any more blunt when they observe that they’re “perplexed and intrigued by subtler stuff: words that have been cunningly fashioned to sound like they mean something - something important and compelling - but that on careful inspection can revealed to be bulls**t.”And there’s no shortage of examples here of the worst offenses in the world of public discourse, summed up in the pithy observation that, “It is often said that all of life is high school - over and over again. Aristotle and an Aardvark Go to Washington is a stinging attack on the almost infinite species of doublespeak that infect modern politics. We just tell them they’re going to die.” To help readers keep it all in context, there’s even a highly idiosyncratic chronology of “Great Moments in the History of Philosophy” that manages to mention Plato, Kierkegaard and the Marx Brothers in the same timeline and an only slightly more serious glossary for the compulsive sorts desiring extra credit.Given the success of Plato it’s understandable that Cathcart and Klein would want to extend their franchise. The bad news is adultery is still in.” Or this one, to bring into focus the notion of existential anxiety: To the restaurant customer who asks the cook, “How do you prepare your chickens?” the cook replies, “Oh, nothing special, really. “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 walk into a bar