Great computer scientist Marvin Minsky argued that the humor reaction in humans evolved as a kind of guardrail to help our neural networks halt rather than follow bad chains of reasoning and thereby “learn” false things.
If that’s accurate, then comedians are, collectively, in the business of mapping the boundary that separates reason from mere combinatorics. They identify the off-ramps that would lure us away from sound thinking.
I’ve long felt that George Carlin was a pretty good proof of that hypothesis. When he said, “they’re not ‘pro-life,’ they are anti-woman,” he wasn’t just being funny. He was demonstrating how to pierce the veil of language games and double-think that misogynists of a certain stripe have learned to hide behind in their war against our mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters.
George Carlin was basically a legendary hunter of Logic Hallucinations, and his career ended up being just as much about teaching the rest of us how to hunt and fell those beasts as it was about making us laugh and getting paid.
RIP one of the greats.