My mum asked me why I described myself as a comedian here when I do more creative things than just comedy, and whether it might not be more appropriate to describe myself as an artist.

This is a fair question because I also write, make music and create digital art (some with generative AI tools, which would definitely disqualify me as an artist with some of you misinformed reactive snobs) and fulfil my creative drive through various other platforms. So, an artist?

Well, I’ve always been careful using that term. When I made music it was common (and still is) to refer to the people who write and create music as “artists” and that’s never felt comfortable to me. In that context the word differentiates the people who create the content (they’d also describe us as “the talent”) from the other people in the industry who did not.

This idea has since birthed the progeny term “content creator” which is equally cringe because it now encapsulates “influencers” and people for whom their art is their face or brand, and because it devalues the idea of art to content for consumption. That’s not acceptable to anyone who really is engaging in a creative process.

But artist? It sounds pretentious and it’s hard to summon the level of self-esteem you need to call yourself one, unless you are literally taking a paintbrush to canvas and its your sole income source.

Artist? What does it even mean? My whole life – and especially since AI art has become a thing – I’ve witnessed every many and his dog offer their bullshit two-bit definitions of they reckon art is and I’ve had to say that most of them are so uninformed, representative of cognitive biases and just plain stupid that I don’t consider them qualified to speak on the topic.

And who the hell am I to evaluate other’s opinions? Well, mostly nobody. Except that I have studied art theory and invested a significant portion of my life to seeking and considering ideas about it. It doesn’t make me any kind of authority on the topic, but it’s more than the most vocal detractors seem to have.

Most of the attempts at authoritative definition don’t seem to have heard of Found Art, Dada, Contemporary Art or seemingly anything that’s happened after the invention of the camera. How does Tracy Emin get to be one of the worlds’ most respected and bankable artists by letting you look at her unmade bed? Why is everyone OK with Damien Hirst, a literal billionaire, making a fortune from coloured dots that he openly plagiarized from less-known artists before him?

Do the opponents of generative art really believe that these “real artists” are doing anything more legitimate and original than someone who’s painting with precisely-chosen text? Maybe, just maybe, most people’s prescriptive definitions of art are little more than their ignorant biases and bullshit feelings.

But I digress…

I’m not here to define art. Just to say that the term is sufficiently obfuscated, at least in most people’s perceptions, that I’m not confident to use it as a primary descriptor for what I do. I feel a lot more comfortable describing myself as a writer, musician, comedian, than putting a nebulous term like “artist” on my mental business card.

But for what it’s worth, I consider comedy an art-form and the comedian an artist. If you’re an artist for writing a haiku then you’re an artist for writing a economical well-structured joke. If you’re an artist for getting on stage and singing lines written by someone else, then you’re an artist for getting on stage and performing the lines you wrote. If you’re an artist for writing a story about your infantile frustrations then you’re definitely an artist when you write a comedic set about them.

Given this, I don’t consider describing myself as a comedian as any kind of conflict with “artist.” Comedian is a subset of artist, just as poet or potter is. But for me, I align and identify more with the philosophy of comedy that I would with whatever the singer’s or origami crafter’s philosophies are.

The philosophical values of the comic – personal resilience, bravery, a commitment to originality, thinking outside of convention, a commitment to processing negative feelings and circumstances into humour, freedom of expression, calling out the world on it’s absurdity or injustice and, most importantly, “undeniability” or committing to improving oneself instead of comparing or projecting expectation, and others that I’ve described in a separate post – are extremely important to me.

They’ve been an essential survival tool for me, in fact. And even when I’m doing another kind of art – painting or playing guitar (both of which I do terribly) I’m doing so with the mindset of a comedian. So even though I write and made visual art., I identify more as a comedian in terms of the lens through which I process stimuli and create.

Plato’s catch-all term for artists was “poets” and he hated them. Plato was obsessed with Truth and he thought that artists who just make stuff up are committing the crime of spreading disinformation. He said that the first step to creating the perfect society (The Republic) is to kill them all, or at least kick them out and leave them to fend for themselves in the wilderness.

About Plato: His body or work is mostly fan-fiction of his teacher Socrates in which he wrote made-up conversations in which the Socrates character owns everyone else with facts and logic (well, everyone except Parmenides who turned out to be the better troll in a couple of these fake arguments).

I’m hoping your spider-sense is already tingling at the fact that Plato was basically writing fiction. Like an artist. And a hypocrite.

Hopefully you’ll also agree that when you’re manufacturing both sides of an exchange it’s pretty easy to make one side look stronger or smarter than the other. You might even consider that these arguments never actually happened, and that Plato was the biggest bullshit poet of them all.

It’s pretty easy to put shit on dead people who can’t argue back, and I don’t want to indulge too much of that. He and the Socrates in his series (Xenophon also wrote Socrates fan fiction, but he’s nowhere near as witty or smart in Xenophon’s series) actually gave us some really groundbreaking important ideas…. especially for the time. There’s no question that their contribution is important.

But it’s also too easy to revere historical characters too much. Lots of people venerate Plato and talk about The Republic like they’re the greatest and wisest thinking of all time, without knowing that they promoted slavery and eugenics and racism and all kinds of silly unworkable ideas that couldn’t possibly be true.

This included an epistemology that completely rejected empiricism (you know, that thing that Science is totally based on). So much of his philosophy was built on the “World of Forms” idea which Parmenides easily ripped to shreds at the time, and Wittgenstein drove the final nail into centuries later (The short version of Wittgensteins’ argument is that there are only individual instances, that master templates can’t be found because they don’t exist). It didn’t stop Christianity from borrowing the idea, calling it Heaven, and the idea subsequently becoming part of the world’s discourse ever since.

Perhaps the best response to Plato was from his peer, Aristophanes. Aristophanes thought of Socrates as a pretentious word-salad spewing historical cherry-picker who promoted irrational conservatism with bullshit just-so stories and tried to win his arguments by bluffing with pretentious fancy-sounding bullshit that’s really only convincing to people who don’t analyze it critically.

Given this, maybe Jordan Petersen really is like a modern Socrates.

But I digress…

Aristophanes’ lampoon of Socrates in his play The Clouds is pretty fucking funny. In fact, The Clouds is considered the first actual comedy in Western civilization, so we should probably pay some attention to that.

Something else that should trigger our spider-sense about Plato is that his own student Aristotle disagreed with him about almost everything.

Aristotle achieved a lot. It’s amazing how much stuff he did. For a start, he invented the science of biology, creating comprehensive taxonomies of all plants and animals (he managed this because his own student was Alexander the Great. Alexander went on a bit of a world tour, and sent Aristotle samples from all the exotic places he visited).

You’ll noticed that you can only really create the science of biology by embracing empiricism, which goes against everything Plato tried to argue with his Cave allegory (if you haven’t read it, just watch The Matrix. Basically the same).

To Plato’s claim that The Republic (basically, an “ideal” planned community that you’d never actually want to live in) should be run and attended to by neutral dispassionate people who have no direct emotional ownership (for instance, Plato thought that children’ should be raised by the State instead of their parents), Aristotle cried “Bullshit!” and argued that emotional connection and investment is exactly why we do stuff, that it makes for better parents and governors.

And, to Plato’s horror, Aristotle wrote books arguing against everything he was taught. In response to Plato’s “The Republic”, Aristotle wrote “Politics.” And in response to Plato’s call to kill all the poets, Aristotle wrote “The Poetics” where he analyzed it and taught us how to do it better.

And yes, we should care because Aristotle was the first guy to come up with theories about comedy. His ideas still hold up 2,000 years later. Not bad.

But importantly he told Plato “You’re wrong. There is value in art. We can learn stuff from fiction. You of all people should know that – look at how much fiction in is your IMDB profile!”

And he was right. There is. I like non-fiction as much as anyone else, but I believe I learn as much or more about the world and the human condition from insightful fiction as I ever could from manuals and textbooks.

And we come back to comedy. So if art has an important didactic component, how truthful should jokes be?

There’s a lot of talk in the comedy scene about authenticity, but no comedians actually believe that factual accuracy is the most important quality of our jokes. We’ll dispute or dispense with details in our jokes for a number of reasons. Sometimes the details just fuck with the speed or rhythm of a joke, undermining it’s effectiveness with virtual speed bumps and roadblocks we don’t need. And sometimes it just fucks with the punchline, invalidating it.

We need to remind ourselves that we’re not teachers, that we present amusing (hopefully hilarious) fiction that might have roots in reality, but that it’s more important for our audiences to laugh than it is to learn about us or the universe. It’s more important to present something consistent than accurate, and to be funny than to be truthful.

Comedians don’t owe you all their data, and if you came to a comedy show to learn facts you’re looking for love in all the wrong places.

Don’t get me wrong. authenticity has it’s place. I’ve decided to more or less embrace it, mostly in the service of consistency. I’m not hiding behind a mask or character. I’m not presenting views dramatically opposed to my own, unless it’s in an ironic way.

But authenticity isn’t everything. You can be an authentic asshole. Martin Heidegger, the godfather of Authenticity in philosophy, was authentically a Nazi. Literally. I think a lot of people would have preferred him to focus more on being good than in authentic.

It’s fiction, folks. That’s why people need to resist the urge to take offense at it. Nobody assumes Margaret Atwood is a misogynist just because awful things happen to nonexistent female characters in her fiction books. But I guarantee that a comic telling the same fictional story will be challenged and maybe cancelled, which is peculiar. Do people believe that comedian’s stories are factual and endorsed?

It’s fiction. It’s art and it’s fiction, which according to some of the planet’s greatest thinkers, means it’s still valid and has a lot to offer. Comedy is art, art is fiction and fiction has value.