For a long time I had the opinion that a philosopher was nothing more than a comedian who no longer cared about getting laughs or being the center of attention. Lately I have come to see this perspective as an illusion of evolution.

To understand this we are going to overlap two concepts. The first is the cycle of feast and famine, and the second is the evolution of comedy. With every cycle of feast and famine comedy begins again fresh from the start as we come out of the famine; as people are able to relax again and laugh. The purpose of comedy is to release people’s frustrations safely. This is not beneficial during a famine, people need to act on their frustrations during a famine. As we go into a feast, it becomes best to let go of the minor frustrations so we can go with the flow.

As time goes by, and we ascend further up into the feast, people have more free time and comedy becomes more well structured and cerebral, more intellectual. This is driven by the audience’s need to understand a world growing in complexity and confusion. Slowly, comedy becomes less funny and more thoughtful. An important moment in comedy is when a society starts descending down into the next famine and people become increasingly desperate.

In truth, it is not comedy every time around the feast and famine cycle. It can be dime novels to literature, science fiction to futurism, or anything that starts out simple and grows more complex as the public needs better context. Comedians, philosophers, and other artists all do the same thing. They take experience and current understanding and play with it; pulling things apart and putting them back together in different ways. The difference is that comedians do this to get laughs and attention, and philosophers do it as an effort to understand the world they are living in.

In this cycle we are currently living through, it is comedy that is clearly playing the role. From the simple one-liners of Henny Youngman and Joan Rivers, to more structured criticisms of George Carlin and Richard Prior, to where Dave Chappelle and James Acaster changed the format of comedy to offer new perspectives. At the same time, we can also see the corporate attempt to use and control this development. (As evolution is always a battle.) It started with Jon Stewart and Bill Maher, and now continues with Jon Oliver, Jimmy Kimmel, and Steve Colbert. But theirs is a distorted attempt; corporations and white male millionaires telling a very two dimensional story that leads to a preconceived outcome. In other words, propaganda or sophistry.

When the line of feast and famine descends and crosses the ascending line of comedy to philosophy (B), people no longer wish to laugh. They want someone to tell them what is going on in modern terms; modern vernacular and examples. They are not interested in reading the old windy works from the past. They don’t want to be told what to do, they want a perspective that allows them to make better choices for themselves. They want more accurate contextual understanding to their current situation, which requires new philosophers with new writings and stories.

At the end of the line, when society begins to come out of the next famine, philosophy trails off (C). Philosophy is left to people who get lost in examinations and ruminations about what had happened; not what is happening. And, quietly, in the cafes and bars, with friends huddled around tables or sitting around on a stoop, the cycle begins all over again (A).