Alain De Botton
speaker
1,037 appearances
5 recordings
5 series
first heard Jan 2024
last heard 1 Jul
Alain De Botton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
A tragic example of just this in relation to the marriage of Great Britain with the European Union.
You know, Britain was married to Europa and looked around and thought, you know, all my problems are Europa's fault.
So I'm just going to divorce her and off I go.
And now Britain is on the couch and it's drafty place.
And, you know, all sorts of things have been blamed on this partner that wasn't really to blame for everything.
I think ultimately politics sits on top of emotional life and there are so many correspondences and marriage is this kind of crucible where we learn about love and relationships.
But yes, on a bigger scale, you find many of the same dynamics out there in the world.
entertainment was not a choice.
It was a necessity.
They needed to entertain because someone around them, maybe many people around them, couldn't quite bear certain things.
So I've noticed just sort of empirically that people who are very funny
often grew up in circumstances that were not funny at all and where the humor that they're excellent at deploying is essentially a way of diffusing the rage and the difficult moods of people around.
So it's not so much just a skill like any other.
It's a survival skill that people have honed.
in order to manage the very difficult people around them.
So, you know, I mean, we kind of know that in popular way, the melancholy clown, etc.
But it really does tend to have origins in humour being something that you learn...
Because otherwise people are a little too serious and often too angry.
Exactly.
I mean, very often the wit of the child is there to ward off the parents' depression.
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