I don’t believe that everything you need to know in life you can learn from New Yorker cartoons. But that’s only because our need to know far exceeds our ability to know. Even so, some New Yorker cartoonists never rest in trying to answer to life’s persistent questions.

I was reminded of this a few weeks ago at a conference of the International Society of Humor Studies, hosted by the College of William and Mary, where, among consideration of such topics as “Responses to Failed Humor in Mixed Gender Interaction” and “Andy Warhol and Comic Nomadic Culture,” the humor scholar Mary Ann Rishel gave a presentation called “New Yorker Cartoons and Friends: What They Know You Don’t Know, and How They Know It. An Epistemological Study of Cartoons.”

As a closet epistemologist myself (I’m out now), I really enjoyed the presentation, especially because the cartoonist featured most prominently was everyone’s favorite cartoon epistemologist: our own Charles Barsotti. I thought I’d share the enjoyment by letting Mary Ann do a guest blog on the topic. Take it away, Mary Ann.

Among cartoonists, I don’t think anyone tackles the Great Questions better than Charles Barsotti. His cartoons approach the “essence-existence” question with characters like lovable philosophers, cute dogs, or St. Peter reviewing the credentials of nervous supplicants pleading entry into Heaven. The epistemological premises of these drawings invite us to laugh at our human yearning to “know.” They’re classics.

Our universal quest, as Barsotti reminds us here, is an arduous tragi-comic journey, illustrated by this lovable, ancient philosopher with childlike proportions, little feet, floppy sandals, and a single drop of sweat. We know from his well-fed midsection that he has enjoyed a good appetite, although his threadbare garment, creased with little markings, indicates a hard life. Our philosopher grimaces from the labor required to move a conveyer belt on creaky wheels, but ironically, unlike Sisyphus, his “climb” only parallels the flat line in the background. The cumulous cloud and the free-floating birds in the sky are both hopeful and mocking. The narrative encapsulates our eternal struggle for truth, hinted at by road signs that may or may not be truthful.

This cartoon offers a post-modern variation on the searching-for-truth theme, with the ancient philosopher on the right—scruffy, hunched, hirsute—returning wearily from his journey, defeated in his quest. The cartoon captures the moment he meets an earlier version of himself. The graphic frame suggests a vaudevillian pantomime (see Abbott and Costello, Harpo Marx, Lucille Ball, and others) with a mirror image as illusion and reality. The philosopher on the left registers a double take on the significance of this meeting, and the wit, housed in existentialism, comes from the paradox that the dejected philosopher has discovered the truth—which may be, alas, that truth cannot be found. A Barsotti Great Question cartoon finds its welcome homecoming in the epistemological puzzle. In this terrific one, at least five different jokes conflate into a dazzling philosophical prism.

Here, a group of men in formal business suits sit at a conference table. The stark black-and-white shading signals an air of authority as the speaker informs the men that “Nobody knows anything.” At first, when we read the thought balloons, the mood is relaxing, as the three men reveal hidden insecurities now diffused by group inclusion. We can also read the joke as a simple statement of fact regarding the specific setting of the business world. “Learn this: In the business world, nobody knows what they’re doing, and therefore don’t worry so much about your vulnerability.” But because the visuals are so strongly defined, the artwork in this cartoon offers a third narrative. In bold strokes, the speaker and his subordinates establish themselves as godlike figures positioned above the world, overseeing their domain. The inked line for the conference table mimics the curve of the earth, which is echoed in the lines of the men’s shoulders, the foregrounded arm, and the chairs, projecting a dizzying pinwheel of intellectual vacuum. We can also interpret the speaker’s tone as existential frustration, i.e., nobody knows anything now—or ever—including the speaker, and this simple, unfortunate fact is fact. As a post-modern declaration that knowledge will never be achieved, the cartoon can claim that achieving knowledge is tragi-comic. All that—but there’s more. Because the cartoon’s cognitive structure operates in a comedic matrix, readers savvy in mathematical logic can take it a step deeper. The underlying Great Question joke is the conundrum articulated by the “Barber paradox” in pure logic. As soon as the speaker says “Nobody knows anything,” he cancels that statement, since he places himself both inside and outside that group. If “Nobody knows anything,” then the speaker is saying he knows that he himself can’t know anything. Reasoning from, for example, the first-order logic of David Hilbert, Bertram Russell, or Kurt Gödel, if a statement is true, the statement can’t be both true and false. In pure logic, you cannot have both completeness and consistency. First-order logic requires the system to be consistent or complete, not both. There’s another syllogistic joke buried here, too. If knowledge functions only within a human-made set of rules, all thought is game playing, a.k.a. joking. My favorites, yes. But Barsotti’s pup doesn’t let people like me off the hook.

Gosh, maybe the pups are right. You never know.

Right you are, Mary Ann—or, applying fuzzy logic (the only logic I’m capable of), at least rightish. And, now, students, for further epistemological study, here’s a deep-thoughts slide show of New Yorker cartoons: