Andrew Doyle

speaker

253 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard 4 Feb

Andrew Doyle’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.

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The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast · 506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan · 12 Dec 2024 podcast

Aren't we good guys?

Well, that's the thing. It's even better than the best kind of laughter is when you're ashamed of yourself for laughing. Or for saying it. It's like, oh my God, I can't believe I said that. But it was like necessary.

Yeah, that's right.

Montreal, too, by the way. Really? Yeah, horrible. Oh, God, yes.

Well, that's the reestablishment of a consensus of truth. Like, you know, you notice that it's much harder to make 10 people laugh in a crowd if there's only 10 than 1,000, right?

And so there's something about the anonymity of a crowd, but there's also something about the fact that when everyone laughs together, it's the establishment of a new consensus of the previously unspoken based on the self-evident truth because everyone wouldn't be laughing if it wasn't true, right? It has to... and if that wasn't a true response. And it's also sudden and uncontrollable.

You know, there's another weird thing about laughter. I used to do this as a joke with a couple of my friends when we were lifting weights in the gym, because if you make someone laugh when they're in the middle of a bench press, They'll drop the weight on your chest. You'll kill them.

Well, you lose all your muscular control when you laugh, which is also extremely interesting because it means that in the moment of laughter, you render yourself defenseless and vulnerable, which is also extremely interesting, right? Especially because it's also intensely pleasurable.

It provides an avenue to success for absolutely mediocre people. Right, yeah. right? And then they can say two things. I'm just as funny as Graham Linehan, for example, plus I'm definitely morally superior.

I can answer that, I do.

I know, I know. It's a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B. You never want to underestimate the, what would you say, the attractiveness of unearned moral virtue. Like in the gospel accounts, for example, The people who end up crucifying Christ are the Pharisees, right? It's Pharisees, that's religious hypocrites. Those are the people who are claiming to be good when they're not.

It's the scribes, those are the academics, right? Who use truth in the service of their own self-interest, and the lawyers, and they're the ones who use legalism as an alternative to morality. That proclivity has been around forever. The temptation of... See, one of the commandments is do not use the name of God in vain. And everyone thinks that means don't swear. That isn't what it means.

It means don't claim to be doing the work of the divine when you're pursuing your own self-interest. And it's really necessary to understand that that's a temptation. You know, so for example, when I said, just get the damn vaccine, Now, was I being good or was I signaling a kind of moral virtue? And I would say, I think I wasn't being good at all in that situation.

I think I was signaling a form of moral virtue. It's like, come on, all the sensible people like me are going to do this. And you can tell that in consequence of the fact that I've already done it.

Well, they're also no more interesting than anyone else's opinions. Absolutely. You know, I went and saw John Cleese, who, like, I love John Cleese. He was like a savior to me in my adolescence. All of my friends were John Cleese freaks, you know, and he's so funny. And I went and saw his live show five years ago, and he talked about making life of Brian and about –

Well, all the great movies they made. And that was so interesting. And then he talked about Trump, which was like not interesting. It was like listening to your neighbor talk about Trump. And it's, it's, it's, well. I suppose that's another one of the cataclysmic problems of this interconnectedness.

Well, can you imagine having that problem when you're a teenager? Yes. And having that follow you for the rest of your life?

Well, part of the problem here might be, and I've certainly had this problem on Twitter, it's like, Twitter is like talking to your friends or your roommates in college, except that it's not. Because it goes out to millions of people. So it's like seriously not that, even though it feels like that.

And so, you know, maybe one of the rules with X, for example, or social media in general, is if you play with fire, you're going to be burned. And you're playing with fire whether the match is hot or not on social media. You know, my son has told me, he said, Dad, you have to remember when you're on X that you're actually publishing.

And it's certainly the case that I spend a lot less time on any given tweet than I would on any sentence that's in one of my books.

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