Local Luminary: Daniel Klein

by Timothy Cahill and photographs by Timothy Cahill, September 28, 2007

From late May into August, the New York Times Best Sellers list was occupied by a most unlikely summer read, a book of philosophy. Then again, Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy through Jokes is a most unlikely approach to what the Greek in the title once called “the highest music.” What Great Barrington, Massachusetts, author Daniel Klein created with his writing partner, Thomas Cathcart, might best be termed “Borscht Belt Philosophy”—the great ideas of Western thought filtered through the humor of old Catskill comedians. Here, for example, the book introduces the logical fallacy Post hoc ergo prompter hoc (“After this, therefore because of this.”): “Every morning, she steps out onto her front stoop and explains, ‘Let this house be safe from tigers!’ Then she goes back inside. / “Finally, we said to her, ‘What’s that all about? There isn’t a tiger within a thousand miles of here.’ / “And she said, ‘See? It works!’ ”—OK, so it’s silly, but that’s the idea. Because, by riffing on jokes rather than singing the praises of wisdom, Klein and Cathcart manage to make the intellectual heavy lifting of their book somehow less weighty, and the wisdom more accessible. The authors met at Harvard in the 1950s, where they both majored in philosophy. Klein went on to write for TV and for comedians Flip Wilson and Lily Tomlin, and has published 20 books, including 10 novels. Platypus began as an e-mail exchange between the two friends. As the idea took shape, the men were determined, between the yuks, to get the philosophy right. “Tom wrote the explanations—he’s smarter than I am,” Klein says. “I put in the pixie dust.” The 68-year-old author says he remembers hundreds of jokes: “It’s part of being Jewish. Seventy-five percent of the jokes in the book are Jewish. I knew the guys who wrote for the Borscht Belt.” Who woulda thunk all those gags were really about metaphysics, epistemology and existentialism? The book was rejected by 40 publishers before it was finally accepted; now it’s being translated into 17 languages, and a sequel, Aristotle and an Aardvark Go to Washington, will be out in February. Such is the essence of irony.

—Timothy Cahill