What Does Too Many Cooks Say About the Meaning of Life? | Idea Channel | PBS Digital Studios
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Adult Swim's "Too Many Cooks" is awesome, bizarre, and like so many other things on the internet, ABSURD. The video is perfectly suited for internet obsession, because the internet LOVES it some meaningless and irrational content. So how does this meaningless video connect to Sisyphus, Albert Camus, and Alex from Target?!?! Watch the episode and find out!!
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I've learned that it takes a lot to make a stew.
A pinch of salt and laughter too.
Constipated_Llama
A scoop of kids to add the spice
A dash of love to make it nice
What is your avatar from? I've seen it before.
MrJetairliner100 friendship is witchcraft 8.
Ok, 2 points:
1- generally, absurdism isn't the acceptance of life's absurdity and thus transcending it. It was a rejection of surrendering to a higher being/order. Camus was saying that the only way for Sisyphus to fight back against his punishment by the gods was to push the boulder with a smile on his face and enjoy his torment. So in order for us to accept life's meaninglessness and brutality we should both celebrate it and rebel against it through art. I think Too Many Cooks has the same intention as absurdism as it acts as both a celebration of nostalgia for 80's sitcoms and TV shows but also as a critique of the homogenisation of 80's TV and how those sitcoms have so greatly influenced TV since (which is kinda what adult swim is all about; loving nostalgia + critique and subversion).
2- The presence of 'uncle Ziezek' is to act as the ultimate perversion of innocence. Systematically brutally murdering these idols of nostalgia, at one point the metaphor goes far enough to have him eating our nostalgia, destroying any feelings of warmth and safety, it is a complete subversion and intrusion on the comforting tranquility of childhood memories. Perhaps uncle Ziezek is just there to be a twisted perversion for comedic purpose or perhaps it's an effort to detach us from our rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia so we can analytically deconstruct it. Also, is your attaching of the self proclaimed Pervert Slavoj Ziezek with the pervert of Too Many Cooks a sly joke, or am I overthinking you're overthinking?
Great episode as usual!
I like your interpretation. There was something strangely haunting about the uncle Ziezek scenes, beyond the gore factor, and I think you hit the nail on the head about how he represents the deconstruction of the safety of nostalgia. I mean, there's arguably nothing more innocent and innocuous than 80s sitcom intros, but as with anything else in life, there's really only a thin facade keeping us safe from the horrors that lie right underneath the surface.
There's something similarly unsettling about the Smarf scene too. I found myself rooting for him to push the button, and the realization that he stopped the infinite loop was genuinely satisfying and cathartic, but isn't that kind of strange? Cheering for a fictional bloody puppet to restore our false sense of comfort in the nostalgic?
The video is absurd, sure, but in this particular case I don't think the video became as popular as it did on absurdity alone. I think there's something about it that's truly unnerving, and I don't think anything can be unnerving unless there's some truth hidden in it.
You’re the reason character limits exist
The Internet is srs business, Mike.
Too many melons
Hi
Since Camus talked about embracing the absurd being an act of revolt, if the characters in Too Many Cooks really wanted to be absurdist they could stop running away from the Antagonist and surrender! That'd take away his fun in killing them if they just said 'Come at me, bro!' That's why I think Welcome to Night Vale is the best embodiment of absurdism I've seen: all the crazy meaningless stuff happens and Cecil (for the most part) totally accepts it and is chill with it, even part of it - he's the Absurdist Hero.
UGH. MAY-MAYS. Lol
+taitorock lol i cant take anything this guys says seriously after that
So much cringe at the beginning, I had to pause the video a few times from reeling at the stupidity of some of the "jokes," maybe it's the way this guy delivers them in the most obnoxiously smarmy way possible that I feel the urge to punch his infuriating fucking pseudo-intellectual face through my computer screen. I'm still not entirely sure what the point of the whole discussion was, I think it had something to with Too Many Cooks highlighting the absurdity of the assumed order we assign to an orderless universe, but then went into some vague spiel about the endless cycle of viral content circulated through the internet being similar to the myth of Sisyphus. Ironic because PBS's "Idea" Channel is churning along into this same exact recycling machine of mass-consumed, attention-diverting noise devoid of actual content that constitutes viral internet videos and "maymays"...UUUUUUUGH, GOD HELP ME IF I EVER HEAR THAT UTTERED ALOUD AGAIN. Like why the fuck did they think that Alex From Target nonsense was even worth mentioning, other than to capitalize on whatever hot topic is trending on twitter that week and to get a reaction from the horny teen girls creeping on this kid by the millions. Maybe if the second half of the video was actually spent clarifying that point instead of on pointless comment bullshit, I could have actually learned something from this video.
If you want clarity then ask for clarity, but you opted for a pretentious tantrum. Conjuring fantasies of violence and spewing vitriol whilst accusing some other of being "pseudo-intellectual."
"Hmm, this particular show does not appeal to me. I think I'll write an overly long rant about how I hate it that reveals that I haven't really gotten what the point of this show is"
Also the comments start at 7:00 so if you stopped as soon as you heard about alex, it goes on a bit further to explain why it was relevant... sort of... you know I can't really explain, but whatever.
Zyga 1) See, now YOU get what the point of the show is.
2) Please don't use homophobic slurs in your comments
3) Mike is saying 'may-mays' in the same way that people say 'interwebz'.
You really didn't watch this video did you......or are you being ironic? Am I being ironic?
Damn, this man takes the use of facial expression to a total art form that even the best Japanese thespian would be jealous of! I could almost watch him with no sound and still enjoy the way he expresses himself!
You just made my day.
Timothy Domingo Why thank you - I'm happy to share e love! :-)
The only thing that Too Many Cooks tells me about life is that there are too many cooks, and that they will spoil the broth.
Somehow I knew there would be an Idea Channel video about Too Many Cooks when I watched it. haha
It's less, "does anything have meaning" and more "what does this strange thing mean to my current state of being." Humans are animals and we fixate on the novel, the absurd, because we _have_ to figure the thing out. What is this thing, what does it mean? It doesn't fit into any known boxes. Is it something? Nothing? Danger? Prey? Once we have somewhat of a handle on the thing we move on to the next thing. We're rather more in the moment than what we like to thin-SQUIRREL!
After watching too many cooks 12 times, my wife threatened divorce and kicked me out of bed for a week. It's now my ringtone for her.
From beginning to end, this video is incredibly well thought out and produced. Top quality, y'all've outdone yourselves. Hats off to you sirs!
Did.... did you just pronounce "meme" "Meh-meh"?
He doesn't know how to pronounce "Albert Camus" either.
Its a joke.
William giguere Uhm, what? Okay.
William giguere I love how people who don't live in the US say everyone here is stupid. I'm not going to argue that a lot of people are, seeing as how I live in north GA- but it's completely fucking rediculous.
Benjamin Martinez He's pretty close, actually: upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Albert_Camus.ogg
You always manage to throw something so obscure that it makes me smile. Uncle Zizek gave me a big smile.
I ended my life when he said May Mays.
For anyone wondering the book that crashes the table at [2:40] is called "The Math Book: From Pythagoras to the 57th Dimension, 250 Milestones in the History of Mathematics" is a wonderful book on mathematics. Clifford A. Pickover is a great writer on the subject.
Sometimes I feel like this show is a conveyer belt of references and I have to pause and rewind in order to catch it all. I get a warm feeling inside when I can keep up.
I like the idea of "idea people".
I thought the creepy dude was kind of an unconventional hero in a way. Preventing the spread of the intro virus by killing off the infected and eating the remains. He is immune to it, so the captions don't work on him
Just finished watching the entirety of Idea Channel over the last few days; these are great for listening to while grinding in games! Got my RSS feed set and will be watching each new video. And now I move on to Game/Show; thanks for making me aware it exists. :3
Why do you do this to me? I just got it out of my head and now It's back.
***** That was the goal!
It takes a lot to make stew (come one everybody finish this song so he never forgets).
pineconeman7910 A pinch of salt and laughter too!
try unhearit.com/
Too Many Cooks worked for me as it goes into one direction and one joke ("Gee, isn't this long?") and then deviates to "Gee, isn't this Nostalgic" and then completely different directions. Absurdism works best when it surprises you. Even with the case of Adventure Time, you KNOW it's absurd, but you are often surprised enough as they like to go into a completely unexpected direction.
I saw the title...and I wanted to say something about but...I'll just say that:
Life has Meaning, No Meaning, and both.
You see it's Meaning(less) in everyday things and once in a lifetime events.
Everything does and doesn't have Meaning.
But what is the Meaning of Meaning(less) of Life?
Its Meaning(less) that we search for that fills purpose in our lives.
We look for Meaning even when it seems Meaningless to.
We can never know the true Meaning of Life in Life (pretty ironic)
It's something that we have to keep searching for,
For if we don't have something of Meaning, why do we go on?
This channel survives by that simple fact, finding the Meaning of things.
But this is yet another interpretation on Meaning,
It's all really just Meaning(ful)(less)
I am rather fond of such pondering...
Zero can be nothing but it can
also be everything - Jaden Smith
Yes, existentialism can be confusing, it's tagline is generally 'existence precedes essence[/meaning]', it's up to individual people to create meaning in their lives, it gives people great freedom because there's no inherent meaning imposed on them. Absurdism and Camus takes this to be a more positive thing than mainstream Existentialism with Sartre which is where the emphasis on angst comes from (I think a large amount of the angst comes from how he wrote it just after WW2 in Paris), There is no true meaning in life, searching for it will come up empty, meaning is something you have to create.
Then again there are plenty of other theories about meaning if you don't agree with this.
Shauna Blake I suppose religion also can have inherent effects on definitions and opinions of Meaning as well.
The meaning of life is change.
Why do we die? The world needs a change.
Its staring us right in the face and no one sees it. Its the thing that makes everything interesting, every food taste good. Makes the hours be different. What makes the dessert boring. What makes space interesting. And what makes people either even worse or makes people a lot better. Change never goes away. It is constant. Thus why change has to stop to Be a change. That is the meaning of life. Its possible. Its the only common thing I've seen.
aidan doyle I can agree with this, the meaning of life is in constant re-evaluation, being the most relevant. I think meaning is very localised though, through our different feedback loops that is communication. This gets into the ego and superego though, culture holds a lot of meaning anyway.
Absurdism is an Existentialist theory, which is one of my favourite areas of philosophy. It gets misrepresented so much, existentialism is about freedom, there is no inherent meaning so it's up to you/you get to make your own meaning, with Camus this is a good thing, Sartre's is angst ridden sad breed of existentialism. For Camus the absurd, the tension between the chaos in the world and the reasonable way we like to see it, was something we should live aware of, he calls it living in revolt, the tension is important, it's like the tension of a bow. And just shrugging off the absurd isn't what Sisyphus is about, he claims his destiny of rolling the rock up the hill as his own, it's a metaphor for the mundane parts of life, we're supposed to be aware of the absurd not just when watching a show like too many cooks but when we're grocery shopping, commuting to work, etc, Sisyphus can also represent death, it's the only thing that is certain and we all know it's going to happen but have no control over it, ignoring our lack of control in that is living in bad faith.
I haven't seen Too Many Cooks, but from the sound of it there is some Absurdism in it, the people trying to live their perfect ordered sitcom lives have taken a leap of faith, they're actively ignoring the chaos of the universe, pretending everything is reasonable (see also; "God works in mysterious ways, everything happens for a reason"), and the other guy is the absurd, crashing into their lives to disrupt that image of the world.
memaeS? did you say memaes? it's memes not memaes.
Meaning only reflects how much meaning you put into anything, and how much you want to find.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
A smell is personal to you and yet is personal to someone else also.
A touch can make you feel comfort but also fear.
A taste can take you back years or mark a favourable moment.
You hear music and you are full of emotion.
Perhaps because we can perceive and communicate we have meaning that we can share that otherwise didn't exist in this expansive sandbox we call the universe.
I kind of agree with Renegade Cut's take on it: that it's a critique of oversaturated media perpetuated by idiot network executives and focus groups. The cat is kind of the giveaway, he's the exact type of thing a network would shoehorn into a show to attract kids and sell merchandise. That's why he tries to kill the "murderer", he's an embodiment of the network itself, while the murderer is a facsimile of us, the normal people, the unbeautiful ones who are sick to death of this mass-produced saccharine crap.
"Several things together, that, until they meet, you would never guess could exist in harmony." (0:47)
This reminded me of a quote by the French poet Comte de Lautréamont (1846-1870) that I originally found in a highschool textbook: "As beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table." This quote has afterwards been used to describe Surrealism, a cultural movement that began in the 1920s (that is 20 odd years before Camus' "The Stranger").
can every episode end like this pls?
I second this
Agreed. It was a brilliant ending to a brilliant episode.
This might be my favorite Idea Channel episode.
I had to pause the video for a moment to get this off my chest, or else it would distract me the entire time. It's pronounced "meem" ... Meeeeeeeem ... Not "maymay" or anything else ;,; I cringe so hard when I hear it any other way. The word existed well before the internet took control of it, hah. Ok! Back to watching and not being a lunatic with twitchy eyes. xD
And then you go on to say it right ... I knew something was fishy!
In a sense, yes. However, we, also as mankind, devised a structure to the words we created in order to create a conformity of sound so that we could easily understand our community with whatever language was developed in that region. If everyone said every word in a different way, the purpose of language would lose much of it's intent. That's why we have grammar and pronunciation in school.
Critical Hit It's a joke genius. Like the way he pronounces .gif as /ʒaɪf/.
You're a little late to the party, buddy.
in Semantics, language is what people makes of it, Etymology alone doesn't dictate meaning or pronunciation... anyway, English is not even my native language so what do I know?
Mike! I'd watch Idea People! One of my favorite parts of this show is all the perspectives you give from all manner of smart people, so episodes talking exclusively about those smart people seem right up my alley!
As soon as I realized that this was a vid about absurdism... UNF. And then you threw in Rick and Morty too? Have me.
Fun fact: did you know that there is a really weirdly large number of direct references to absurdist theater in anime? For instance, a stage play of Waiting for Gotdot in a recent episode of Shirobako, a stage performance of Rosencrantz and Gildenstern are Dead in Haruhi, and a myriad others. I should really go out and collect them all just to like... have them.
Digibro love you, dude, but is anime the only thing you can talk about? Or was this an early attempt to advertise your channel?
Digibro is a Japanese anime about an online video sharing service and the community that uses it. The manga was better, and they shouldn't screw up introduction of new characters.
Haven't watched more than 3 episodes here... I'm hooked! Great channel.
If we're discussing Adult Swim's brand of absurdism, I think this channel is ready to take on Don Hertzfeldt. Being that he is often credited as the codifier and aggrandizer of pre-RUclips absurdist culture, his position in animation history, as well as a purveyor of the emotional inwardness as a beautiful and horrifying reality, is too important to ignore. Like Hertzfeldt's contemporary David O'Reilly and horror novelist Arthur Machen, Hertzfeldt pulls the veil off of unwanted abnormal elements that we are not fully privy to, yet feel in belief and justification they are temporary reality. The difference is their execution in the message, and the ultimate reaction the audience emotes.
That, or you talk about Gravity Falls and Over the Garden Wall because...they're good. Like super good.
Well, I may not be an awesome theater nerd but I am a classical music nerd! Absurdism has some interesting connections with the music of Erik Satie. Satie was a 20th century french composer who is often seen as a forerunner to a variety of artistic movements, including minimalism and the theater of the absurd. Like Too Many Cooks, Satie makes use of repetition and absurd content (like Air du Chat, a musical setting of a poem where someone is baby talking to their cat) all while still somewhat grounded in convention. Too Many Cooks uses the conventions of the sitcom and Satie uses the conventions of tonal music in order to contrast with and heighten the absurdity. The use of convention also sets up an expectation for meaning which brings the audience's attention to that expectation and the, well, absurdity of that expectation that everything has inherent meaning.
Both highlight the futility of a search for meaning, but approach this realization in different ways. TMC takes a pessimistic approach by condemning those who try to hold on to meaning in their life by murdering all the sitcom characters. In contrast, Satie's works are lighthearted and fun (his ballet Parade involves a pair of dancers in a two-person horse costume designed by Picasso). By breaking the listener's expectation to find meaning, Satie gives the audience permission to simply enjoy the piece at face value in all of its weird, clever, colorful, punny, avant-garde glory.
This probably sounds pretty random but has anyone else noticed that the kerning on the view count got wider?
You, sir or madam, are a sign painter at heart!
someone noticed kerning; I'm swooning over here
3 things:
a) That outro. ++
b)Patches ++
c)Alternate styles of episodes ++
Awesome as always!
Chile's the same. We love when people mention Chile btw, keep doing it ;)
Señor Diego, you steal the words from my fingers.
Dude, we only need to say one word about our country in this topic: jaidefinichon.com
Extreme theater nerd here, currently teaching a part-time drama class I take about the very idea of theater of the absurd. TMC to me speaks on so many Absurd levels, that we see in the likes of Pinter's Dumb Waiter, the forever relevant prime example of Godot, and even more twisted examples such as shown by Williamson's The Revivalists. This notion of our characters being stuck in a meaningless situation, with meaningless directions, and the presence that everything we do in time is just to fill in our lives until we die, is so apparent and obvious in the short film that it practically screams 'theater of the absurd" because in the first four or so minutes where nothing happens, we as an audience member think "well nothings happening this is boring" thus reflecting on our own lives at that current time. It makes a mockery of us, as well as our existence. Which is what any good absurdist piece should do.
Have you considered talking with the Crash Course people about doing something akin to Crash Course: Philosophy?
Totally agreed, and now totally possible, because PBS digital studios now colaborates with crash course.
That's *mah* jahb.
I'm amazed at how much "A very Potter musical" extracts there are in your videos ! A great show !
I think the idea that "there is no inherent meaning to the world and the things in it, therefore no meaning exists" is false. There is no inherent meaning in the sight of a planet turning away from its star and night being the result, but a sunset can bring up many feelings for any number of reasons. Meaning is not inherent in the sunset, but is there anyway because of how the sunset is processed by our brains based on the experiences we have had.
Meaning does not come pre-packaged with physical objects or concepts, but meaning has ended up paired with those things either accident or by the intentional choice of someone who wants it there.
The idea that "meaning does not come pre-packaged with physical objects or concepts" is, I think, exactly the point being argued. What Camus is arguing is that any meaning we find in the world is what we project onto it.
I think you've got absurdism wrong. It's not that no meaning exists in the universe, it's that there is no INHERENT meaning in the universe, so any meaning you find in, say, a sunset, is projected onto the sunset by you and your feeling about sunsets.
Basically, it's that you find your own meaning, and that there is no universal meaning given by some creator of the universe.
no, your argument is that "clearly objects don't 'contain' value but we create value and meaning fairly objectively in objects we perceive."
the argument skirts around the fact that how we perceive things isn't objective unless we can consistently and without fail get the same meaning every time. if meaning is manufactured then it's meaningless.
Definitely the best pensive ocean look I've seen in a while...
Existentialism one week and absurdism the next, my lit major ass is happy.
This is one of the best episodes I've ever seen! Definitely do that 'idea people' video
the meaning of life is to give life meaning
0:57 Did he just say.... "May-mays"? KILL IT! KILL IT WITH FIRE! ITS PRONOUNCED MEEME!
Life IS absurdity and we can only find meaning in the most absurd. The most perfect love story, the biggest Transformer's explosion, Bruce Willis being dead at the end of Sixth Sense. The madness that is reality mirrors the madness of the internet and art. As Lucy Hawking (daughter of the alwways amazing Stephen Hawking) put it best when she said, “Normal life is random and scary and unpredictable, but that’s the satisfaction of fiction, isn’t it? It gives you a sense that there is some kind of resolution."
Not gonna lie; that satire ending was actually super cute
At the end of the day, it's all about Entertainment (capital E). It's not about some vaguely defined pursuit of "meaning". Too Many Cooks was effective because it was entertaining. It used absurdity very well to this end. Absurdity works by presenting us with the unexpected, which is the key ingredient in Comedy and Horror, aspects of entertainment which Too Many Cooks succeeded in fulfilling. It's also why I see Absurdist theater and "high art" as complete failures. They do not entertain. They exist for themselves. They are absurd for the sake of absurdity. They are selfish and uninteresting.
Are you saying that absurdist theatre and "high art" are failures on a commercial level or on a intellectual level? Because it doesn't matter if they fail on a commercial level, because they are not created to entertain. They are created to point out absurdity and the meaning/meaninglessness of life. They are supposed to be viewed intellectually, not as entertainment. So the fact that they fail to entertain you is completely irrelevant.
I believe the "intellectual level" of success is an arbitrary and meaningless label, and merely a term people use to self aggrandise. Purely personal expression without the intention or ability to move an audience is nothing more than public masturbation.
If someone is using that art to point out meaninglessness, though, hasn't that art actually achieved meaning? Because the artist is saying something; it has meaning to them. In that sense, I think it's impossible for life to be meaningless, simply because we bring meaning to everything.
KrakenJack I think you are missing something that is also important at the end of the day beyond entertainment. There is this thing called Duty (capital D) that people need to fulfill in order to be happy and fullfilled, but which may not be fun at all. A person may be very unentertained by what they feel is their duty, but it would be difficult to get them to not do it.
Jason Wilkins This may just be me but in my experience it is far easier to get someone to forsake their duty than it is to convince them they shouldn't, there's only a small amount of truly dutiful people in this world. I feel like the concept of duty is one constructed by humans to have a functioning society, not that that's a bad thing. A society with too much freedom to be entertained, like too many cooks, quickly descends into anarchy and a net loss of entertainment in the end.
Well, I think an important question is what GIVES meaning. Does the universe have to give us meaning by making there be an ultimate meaning to everything? Do we give ourselves meaning by enjoying what we do or setting goals? Does natural selection give us meaning by making our meaning to survive? I think you choose an ultimate meaning, and all lesser meanings support that meaning.
Stopped watching after MAY-MAYs
I'm glad no one got stabbed at the end of the "too many cooks" spoof
Correct me if I'm wrong on this, but haven't you taken Camus' philosophy as a presupposition? Where I find the interesting discussion is in debating his absurdism with counterarguments, but here you've sidestepped the issue. A word on absurdism, though: what it is, is the logical next step in godless secularism which is so prevalent in our culture today. It's a shame that people don't fully embrace their atheism, rather than the half-hearted "new atheists" (Richard Dawkins for example). What I mean by this, is that without God, you've got to drop all of the things which comes with theism like morality. Yet so many people who oppose God claim religion to be morally evil! If you are of the atheist persuasion, don't be lazy about it; go the whole hog and accept that there is no such thing as right and wrong actions/thoughts etc. If life is truly absurd; totally devoid of meaning and purpose, you might as well follow up on that.
I do want to make the point that I completely and totally disagree with Camus. I don't want anyone to think I'm endorsing his silliness. So from my perspective, Too Many Cooks says nothing about the meaning of life; they got it wrong. Rather, I prefer the interpretation of it which goes something like this: the film displays absurdism, then everyone who takes part in it ends up dead (a bad place) as a result of their participation in absurdism. Therefore, if you subscribe to Camus' absurdism, you're basically a corpse-to-be. Thus, look elsewhere for true meaning in life, and don't waste your time believing in a fantasy of meaninglessness and the god of the self.
That's my take anyway.
This comment really seems pretty confused to me. Firstly, to jump to the idea that morality can only come from God is pretty ridiculous - the idea that it DOES come from God is equally problematic, an idea Plato explores through the Euthyphro dilemma. Divine command theory of morality has been more or less dead in the water since then. Neither virtue ethics, utilitarianism or deontological bases of morality require god.
Your counterargument also seems half-hearted. In Camus' account, you don't 'choose' to live in an absurd universe - quite the opposite. What you choose to believe has no bearing on the reality of the situation. So the people in Too Many Cooks have not 'chosen' to 'take part' in absurdism. They can't escape it, regardless of how hard they try.
You might say you're interested in discussing counterarguments but I see none presented, merely the assertion of the opposite of Camus' claim.
But because there is no God (if you want to believe that--I tend to) and thus no meaning to the universe, that means that you can project your own meaning onto the world. I can decide what is important and meaningful, what is right and wrong based on my own values. Just because you acknowledge the lack of meaning in the universe doesn't mean you must live a meaningless life.
Also, even without God's morals, natural selection and biology give us at least some "morals" like don't kill your own species, don't reproduce with relatives. Because more people survive in structured society, evolution also taught us to work together and share resources for the continuation of the species. So morals are not just religious, but biological too.
Niall Ward-O'Brien I think you're missing the the OP's point. It's not whether there can be a *basis* for a constructed morality, but *whether* morality is constructed -- whether morally is subjective or objective. Without a higher being that can see all ends and consequences, morality is necessarily subjective. It has to be a societal or biological construction. Some people (such as a lot of atheists) are okay with that. Others (like a lot of theists) are not, and see morals as absolute and universally intrinsic. The idea that *objective* morality can only come from a third-party being capable of foresight, is pretty well established in modern philosophical debate.
Virtue ethics, utilitarianism and deontological ethics are all theories of what makes something moral or not, but they don't deal with the more fundamental question of whether morality is objective or subjective. Whether it exists if we don't exist, or whether the universe is indifferent and we created morality ourselves.
Annabelle Barr By definition you do live a meaningless life, though, if the universe lacks meaning. Everything is subjective or constructed by society or biology. Like the video said, you have to construct your own meaning. If survival is that meaning, then great. I think a lot of people struggle with that, though, and don't really consider it enough for their sense of meaning and morality.
Flipped Physics I find the suggestion that "objective morality can only come from a third-party being capable of foresight" is an established one in philosophical debate pretty doubtful, especially given a significant proportion of philosophers are not even moral realists, never mind objectivist or subjectivist. I really can't see how it bridges the is-ought distinction, or in fact how it's relevant at all.
I'd also take issue with the idea that virtue ethics and deontological systems don't at least try to give an empirically founded account of ethics - that is, that in both, morality flows from some feature of people, namely rationality. While I don't buy either of their arguments, the existence of human rationality is an objective fact.
"The fact that nothing matters doesn't matter to me." This is what I tell myself to not only pull myself out of my depressive nihilism. I understand the meaning I assign to different consequences is meaningless, but I allow myself to recognize that meaning. Maybe that's because certain base wiring tells me to like certain outcomes and generally I am a happier person when I do. So, just because there is no meaning doesn't mean we shouldn't look for and enjoy it.
I think that over use of tropes has lead more adventurous content creators to dip from the well of absurdity. We have been inundated with so many cookie cutter sitcoms, the only thing that keeps us laughing is setting changes and laugh tracks. The fact that TV Tropes exists illustrates that. Absurdity lends an air of unpredictability to our entertainment and gives us an opportunity to find something unique in a sea of same-ness. Absurdity is our way of finding new jokes to laugh at where we can't by design predict the outcome.
The "Idea People"-idea is just wonderful, please do it! I'd LOVE a John Cage episode.
I really don't like Adult Swim's stuff anymore. It's trying to go too far into absurdism and it's just inane in a bad way. It's cringeworthy and it's annoying. I prefer to stimulate my brain and, while many absurd style jokes might claim to be deeper, they never were created with depth, the depth was only applied after the fact. At least, so it seems to me. I like a joke that's built up well or I like a show that will make me reflect on myself, on society, on the universe, on everything and anything. I don't think anything on Adult Swim does that anymore :\
Agreed.
You should check out rick&morty it's more of a deeper show while still being really funny.
I agree that alot of their newer shows are more lol so random hahaha.I just hope they move
their prime time line to have shows like rick&morty and black jesus(which is pretty good after the first few episodes)
and keep the hit and miss shows like this for the late night bracket.That being said i thought too many cooks was really
funny but then again i watched alot lot of those sitcoms as a kid and i can see why it's just stupid to most folks.
Disagreed The God Emperor , at least in the case of Too Many Cooks and the "Infomercials" series it spun off from go. The absurdism in Too Many Cooks and to an even greater extent in the rest of the Infomercials block serves a purpose, in that it invites the audience to think critically about the intent of a particular strain of advertisement or televised media is attempting to communicate, and what happens when that intent is laid bare, usually by some failure or calamity occurring within the Infomercial.
In the case of Too Many Cooks, while the audience are all having a laugh at the retro-references or cringing at the machete wielding maniac, they're left to wonder what it all represents. I thoroughly believe that there is a message here, a critique of the cookie cutter family comedies/TV dramas, and that critique is not just that it's outdated to the point of silliness or that it is lame. The critique is rather that their purpose is to attempt to invoke a sense of safety and comfort in the familiar, but no amount a nostalgic familiarity is going to keep out the creeping sense of dread (represented by the machete killer) that exists in life. Too Many Cooks argues that this state of comforting nostalgia in TV sitcoms and dramas has worn on for so long that rather than combating this despair, (which it cannot even comprehend, as suggested by the blurred out title beneath the maniac) it only serves to enhance it by contrast. That's my take on it anyway, it might not be correct, but I wouldn't have thought about the nature of TV comedies/drama's so much if the show was not so completely absurd. My mind was left wracking for meaning and began to deeply analyse these familiar media forms in an effort to find meaning. In this way the absurdism serves the purpose of making the audience think critically about what Too Many Cooks was parodying.
The rest of the Infomercials block does this more explicitly, (and perhaps better than Too Many Cooks). Smart Pipe exposes how a lot of the modern day tech industry is attempting to get you to be fine with incredibly egregious invasions of your privacy and circumnavigation of the legal system with a slick sales pitch, (and doesn't shy away from the implications this has with regards toward children who could not possibly comprehend what's being agreed to, and SHOULD be protected from this kind of prying). Swords, Knives Very Sharp Objects and Cutlery posits that the whole "collectible weapons" market is based around absurd fantasies of violence, and it's rather telling that Dragon Shumway fails to relate effectively with either his wife or producer, willing to sacrifice both without hesitation for his silly ninja fight. The Salad Mixxxer makes a lot of the subtext of "kitchen time savers" infomercials extremely explicit. The point of Too Many Cooks and the rest of the Infomercials block is to bring attention to the fact that those who consume and create these kinds of TV programs and advertisements do not put enough thought into what they are communicating, and by presenting absurd versions of these things we are forced to give them that thought.
I dunno, I liked shows more like the boondocks if anything, but as for Too Many Crooks and that hour, while they might parody or joke about things, I never got the sense that they were trying to be deep or meaningful or make a critique on society. Just that they were for "ha ha cheap laugh" kinda thing.
Ashley Knapp I agree with that.
one of my favorite clubs is called sisyphos (Sisyphus in engl) which I found quite a smart name for a club (especially in a scene like this)Most poeple live from weekend to weekend craving the freedom that awaits them from their ordinary life and getting ready to harvest the goods of free time- Yet the weekend seems just as repetitive as the week itself. meet friends, play games, get drunk, get high or whatever your heart desires. Idk where im going with this, probably end up rambling about philosophical things and in the end saying nothing but its just something that came to my mind and heyy what better place to throw you thoughts at then the youtube comment section :)
I have too much love for this video, especially with how many absurd coincidences i found between it and my day. First, I was listening to Fantastic Planet this morning, which I didn't know was a well known album. This video came on my feed while I was taking a break from writing a script for a series, about the absurd coincidences we find in reality. Oh, and my ferrets came up to me shortly after I saw the weasel at the end of the video. Just another day coincidences seem far too weird to be random
I don't recall Alex from Target but I'm still haunted by Too Many Cooks.
Mike's "Um"-count goes way up when he responds to comments. And I respect that.
Yes! I would watch an Idea People segment! I'm loving the content experimentation that you're doing recently.
Why did I not watch Idea Channel yesterday . . . I was writing a final term paper on "The Myth of Sisyphus" and Camus's absurdism . . . The world is unreasonable, and my interaction with it is absurd.
Idea People? A biography-show by you about people who have had good ideas?
That a thing that I would watch. I would watch that.
To quote everyone's favorite starfeleet captain... "Make It So."
In this world you can never have too many cooks.
I think you mean "when it comes to the future,"
> Implying that your *opinion* of there being no meaning in the world is actually a proven *fact*, even though it cannot be proven
I discovered “Too many cooks” yesterday. It blew my mind and thus I shared it with my friends. What I found interesting was that I was able to predict who was going to watch the video full length, who would give up after two minutes and who wouldn’t even watch because its 11 minutes long (TL DW). After personally hyperbolizing the video to my friends I was able to convince a few more to watch it complete, but there’s one friend who isn’t willing to. Funny thing she gave up on the video right before it was going to become great “oh I got the joke. I don’t need to see everything”. She didn’t experience the best parts of the video because she wasn’t patient enough and wasn’t curious to see what was beyond the 3 minute mark, even if many other people did.
This basically sums up her life. She’s able to do much more but she usually gives up soon after she starts something. She believes that it’s too much work to reach the top so she doesn’t even try. You could spend hours trying to convince her that it will be worth it but she’s like “No I’m good. I actually like it here. You go for it.”
“Too many cooks”, just like many things in life, takes some time to really give its pay off. But when it delivers, man it’s amazing! It makes the wait feel worth it and when you go back and re-watch it you enjoy it even more because you’re able to see the things you missed initially for not having the full understanding of what was happening.
I don’t know if this has anything to do with the meaning of life but at least it has some parallels to life.
Or maybe I’m just reading too much in this….
Yeah, I guess I am.
One of the most wonderful things about high-quality video is that no matter when it happens, when the buffering starts the people on camera all have derpy expressions..
There it goes... absurdism, hell/other people's perceptions and addressing hyperbole in that order in one comment
I will be awaiting my medal
Geez, I just got that song out of my head yesterday! Thanks, Idea Channel. :p
I lol'd at the "Too Many Mikes" caption that Ian was editing.
I discovered TMC about two weeks ago and since then, I've showed it to my roommate, my suitemate, and another friend, all of whom had very different reactions to it. The first laughed it off as a weird Internet thing (which, by all cases, it is), the second got annoyed by it and eventually told me to turn it off (which I definitely did not do), and the third was absolutely mesmerized by the absolute absurdity and found it an amazing creation (which, by all cases, it is). It's now become a joke between the four of us and we have all been singing it nonstop, which means my job was complete. It begs the question, though, how you first responded to watching TMC, Mike? I'd love to hear the story
Do you get enjoyment out of making my brain hurt? It's still tender from "Is the Internet Cats?"
the ending was fantastic. you guys are the best.
The "Ideas People" is something I'd love to watch
Too Many Cooks will never get old. It is timeless.
I heard another theory that the killer represents the audience thats why his name is always blurred because he's teleporting through dimensions killing all these shitty tv shows and there horrible tropes at first he's calm and doesn't mind them but then goes insane after seeing the same crap over and over again, his arch nemesis is alf because he's the dumbest trope of all a character just made to sell toys.
JUST WANTED TO SAY THAT WHEN YOU SAID "WRAP THINGS UP"
YOU USED A PICTURE OF MY FAVORITE (UNDERRATED, NOT WIDELY KNOWN) DISNEY FILM, THE THREE CABALLEROS
CRYING RN THANK YOU
Seriously amazing and thought provoking video. I'm going to start watching Too Many Cooks. I'm so glad that you and this channel exist and that you're talking about absurdism. Thank you.
As an especially esoteric theatre nerd, this highlighted for me the connection between Too Many Cooks and Augie Praley's Thanksgiving with the Chekhovs. That play is going for the Chekhov more directly than the Sartre, but I'd argue that it at least predicted -- perhaps preempted -- Too Many Cooks, for us mighty few who are aware of it.
Actually I'd say you have a very good point there. But one little correction is in order:
We do not push our boulder, run after the rolling boulder and do it all over...(popular) culture (the internet, mainstream media, ...) rolls up the boulder, but when it slips, people will shout after it for a bit (in the case of the internet, mostly profanities of course) and, stroke of genius, roll up a DIFFERENT boulder, since the first boulder became boring. Ad infinitum, ad absurdum.
Ad nauseum too!
Annabelle Barr
In the sense I meant my comment that would mean that culture isn't doing its job, because the very fact of boulder rolling gets boring. I don't agree: The internet is a well-oiled fun machine, likewise other culture industries. They wouldn't work as well as they do, if the ad nauseam was a good way of describing it. Hate for the way culture itself works is reserved for those who are able to distinctly analyse it, a minority. And technically you could argue that this in itself would be an instance of boulder-rolling or at least of screaming after a boulder rolling down.
I was just trying to increase the Latin to English ratio in your comment. But I would say that the constant stream of pop culture today can be disorienting, if not sickening.
Can verify: Too Many Cooks defies any simple explanation.
Too many cooks! [too many cooks] TOO MANY COOKS! [TOO, MANY COOKS...] Too many cooks! [TOO MANY COOOOOKS!] The saying goes it will spoil the broth, [HONEY I THINK THATS NOT TRUE!] Ahh well TOO MANY COOKS will spoil the broth [To fill our hearts with SOO MUCH, SOOOOO MUCH LOOOOOOVEEEE!]. TOO MANY COOKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Absolute banger that still slaps in 2024.
In a class that I just finished, Theater and Therapy, we spoke a lot about the audience and the performer melding and becoming one entity. Everyone is a performer, and also a part of the audience, and everyone has no objective meaning, but have all of the subjective meaning.
Mike, regarding Too Many Cooks: Have you heard of the theory that the killer in the video is actually the hero, not the villain? That he himself was immune to the zombie-esqe "intronitis" (as noted by his name always been scrambled), and was killing the infected to as to prevent it's spreading, and eating the bodies to dispose of virus with no other suitable means of hazmat. A bit of a stretch, but a neat take none-the-less.
The wide array of media in every form, on every topic is overwhelming. We are not consumers, we are filterers, ignoring most, and only focusing on a few. When we come across something that's neither interesting, nor shocking, funny, or artistic, or any other trait, it's novel. We attach meaning, which is absurd yes, but does come out of a balancing, to counter the excess in extreme.
I'm on the Existentialist side: life has whatever meaning we give it. I like what Viktor Frankl said: It is not man who asks, what is the meaning of life, but life which poses the question to man. Why should the fact that we're the ones to create it mean it doesn't exist? Actually, it can't exist in the without some sentient being to grant it. People love to say that we're insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but I always say, insignificant to whom? We're significant to ourselves, isn't that enough? What more validation do we need?
Just reminded me why this is my favorite Chanel ever.
Too many cooks teaches us that life is meaningless in general. We are all just players in our sit-coms. Everything is pointless. Everything is too many cooks.
So I watched this one last night, slept on it, and realized after I had woken up that I had no idea at all what I was to take from the video. So I watched it again today and rectified that, but it made me wonder (and this has absolutely no bearing on the episode).
I still had an emotional connection to the arguments you made in the video, despite having no earthly clue what was going on. I couldn't connect one idea to another, I remembered some of the jokes, the general idea of the video, but I still couldn't figure out what it was truly *about*. And I realized that I was connecting with your video purely on the music you had playing in the background. I had watched so many of your videos that the music in your videos (mostly the same playlist of instrumentals video to video) had an emotional effect on your arguments, allowing me to effectively auto-pilot this video. I'm still unsure of exactly what I needed to get to it because the second go around, I was distracted by the music.
The pauses, breaks, transitions, and upbeat tune of the music in the background told me where the jokes are, when your arguments and points were moving from one place to another, whether the topic was historical/referential or part of your analysis, and I felt like I knew what the argument was despite no words being truly understood. It may have been because the topic of the video (absurdism) was so close to your previous video on memes (like you mentioned) that I unconsciously tuned it out.
All in all, I need to thank your editor for the excellent placement and arrangement of your BGM, and I should probably watch your next video with subtitles and while muted to get the full brunt of your analysis. Maybe it'll sink in properly next time.
Who drinks Surge? Where do you even get it anymore? I thought it got taken off the shelves in the 90's because some kid gave himself a heart attack when he drank an entire case of it in one sitting.
Idea People sounds like an amazing thing that I would definitely watch!
I just want to say that i love Camus since my adolescence and i love you guys for bringing his ideas to the discussion
Hmm.. "Grin, bear it and roll your boulder." That would make a good tee shirt!
I think therefore I am in spanish is "pienso, luego soy", where "luego" usually means then, but can also be used to indicate causality, so it can also be interpreted as therefore, though that's a less common use of the word. So yes, it can be interpreted either as "I think and then I am" or "I think, therefore I am".
EDIT:
lema.rae.es/drae/?val=luego
^ For those who understand Spanish, here is the link that proves it.
I'm always half-expecting you to say 'Hey, VSAUCE, Michael here!". :")
Idea Channel is so Vsaucey, in a good way!
What Too many Cooks has going for it that Kony 2012, Alex and twitch plays Pokemon was its replay value. My friends and I in college watched that every night for the week it was on and found something new and great to laugh at. We counted how many times the killer is shown (we say 26), we sang along one time, we slowed the credits down at the end another time. In a way its like your favorite movie, you watch it again and again and each time you learn and see something new to keep it refreshing.
I think Twitch plays Pokemon also has staying power, not because of replay value, but because of the scope and uniqueness of its in-joke-meme-cult. Someone also pointed out that it created a paradigm shift in how we interact with media and how we interact with each other interacting with media
"One must imagine Sisyphus being happy" - Albert Camus
me: maybe i should watch too many cooks before i watch this
*sees that it's over ten minutes long* oh well, mike will summarize it in the video
mike: it defies simple explanation-
me: FINE
I'd love to watch "Idea people" episodes! I've been waiting for someone to do something like that
Here’s an idea: Absurdism is the graffiti of ideas.
In the modern world, Graffiti is often a symptom of malcontentment. When groups of people feel that they have no ownership of the mainstream culture, the culture of the establishment if you will, their malcontentment may manifest in any number of ways; Graffiti is that malcontentment as a public exhibition. The most visibly evidence of a culture is it’s public buildings-it’s houses, it’s offices, it’s freeways, it’s subway cars, it’s billboards, etc-in a sense, every building allowed by the establishment is a monument to the culture, a way of saying “we are here, and our way of life works.” To this Graffiti says the opposite. When one illegally writes on the wall of a building or on a public bench, one is saying, “I have no ownership here. This thing wasn’t built for me, so no ‘our’ way of life isn’t working, not for me and mine.” Graffiti is a kind of indirect and often unintentional critique of the established culture, always popping up when society becomes lopsided-when those in charge cater to myths of success, prosperity, and morality that allow one group to flourish while another famishes.
Now, when I say that Absurdism if the graffiti of ideas, I mean to say that in the same way graffiti reminds the established culture that it has excluded some of it’s own by defacing property, Absurdity shows that the established culture has excluded some of it’s own by defacing memes-not “internet-memes” like “Do you even lift?” or Doge (these are already absurdities and are in essence exactly the kind of “idea graffiti” that I’m describing), but memes as originally coined by Richard Dawkins in his book on evolution, “The Selfish Gene.” Dawkins’ memes are distinct units of culture, similar to genes in biology, hence the name. Dawkins’ memes are basically the million little ideas that are passed back and forth between people keeping them all more or less on the same page, culturally speaking. An old adage, a certain dance, a particular image such as the Mona Lisa or the plume of black smoke issuing from the North Tower of the World Trade Center--each of these is an example of a meme. Should the Absurdist come into contact with any of these and feel that they do not represent him, that is they do not represent his history, his values, and/or his way of life, he may deface them. He may take them out of context and juxtapose them with other such images or sayings to the end of stripping away their meaning. Mona Lisa gets a mustache, the World Trade Center gets the Fresh Prince dancing it down into an avalanche of dust, and the family sitcoms of the 80’s and the early 90’s get Too Many Cooks. Too Many Cooks declares that the mythology of 80’s/90’s family sitcoms is moot; that mythos it’s absurd because it no longer represents us, if it ever did
And here’s another Idea, or rather a question: With the glut of absurdities in contemporary western media, and particularly in American media, are we witnessing a sort of Singularity of Absurdism? And If so, is that maybe a bad thing? Going back to the analogy of Absurdism as a kind of idea graffiti, consider what life would be like if you saw graffiti everywhere - graffiti inside, graffiti outside, graffiti on the every side of every building, on every car, covering every window - if graffiti was everywhere what power would it have? If Absurdities are everywhere, what power would the Absurd retain? Would it still be able to function as a warning against assuming that meaning is inherent to the world around us, or would it still be absurdism at all? Would it in fact be nihilism? Absurdity on top of absurdity until nothing means anything at all - everything is Absurd.