Ryan's Dad

When I finished up “The Color Guy” sequence last week, I got a comment from my good friend Alan Crabtree, musing on the nature of reality, philosophy and Descartes. My smart-aleck response was to quote a line from Steve Martin’s “Death Of Socrates.”
You can find that strip, with commentary, here.

I did that mostly ’cause I knew it’d get a laugh from Alan (right, Big Al?) but also because his comments reminded me of back when I was in college (Ball State University for those of you who are abnormally curious) and took an Introduction to Philosophy class.

For years I thought I’d gotten a “C” in that class. But recently, I had to get my transcripts for a new job and discovered I’d actually gotten a “B”. I have no idea why I had the faulty memory (I’m sure there’s some philosophical reason but I don’t know what it is, which is probably why I didn’t get an “A”).

The class instructor was a very nice lady, and I ended up lending her a tape I had of Steve Martin’s “Death Of Socrates” skit from his “Comedy Is Not Pretty” tv special. I was curious about what her reaction might be.

I’ve long since lost that tape, but here’s a version that I found on YouTube. A couple of disclaimers, however: For some reason that I don’t understand, this clip has a laugh track. I’m fairly certain that the original didn’t. Also, the very end is cut off. But even with those caveats, I think it holds up:

If you haven’t seen it before, the part that was cut out at the end was the revelation of Socrates’ final words to Plato (“Come mister tally man / tally me bananas / daylight come and me wanna go home”).

When the instructor returned the tape to me, she said she liked it and commented that it was funny while reflecting a little bit of the reality of Socrates (though I doubt that he ever actually ordered Chinese food).

That Intro to Philosophy class did give me an important insight, though probably not one the instructor intended. On the first day of the class, she stood in front of us and declared that, “Philosophy is the attempt to answer, or at least examine, questions that cannot be answered using standard empirical means.”

The first thought that went through my head was: “Well, that leaves guessing.”

And that has stayed with me ever since.