Mark Ralkowski – författare

In a promotional video for the eighth season of HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David appears as Godzilla, walking through the streets of New York City, terrorizing everyone who sees him. People scream and run for their lives. Larry, meanwhile, has a quizzical look on his face and asks, "What, are you people nuts?" What makes Larry a monster, and why doesn't he know that he's a monster? Curb Your Enthusiasm and Philosophy discusses several answers to these questions. This book revolves around Curb-Larry, the character that the real Larry David plays on HBO's popular television series: his outlook on life, his unusual ways of interacting with people, his inability or unwillingness to conform to the world. Many of the chapters discuss ethical and existential issues, such as whether Larry is a "bad apple." Larry doesn't ask questions about free will, or wonder whether the world outside our minds really exists because he's more like Socrates than Descartes. He tells bitter truths about how we live our lives. There's something heroic about Larry's independence from social conventions, and something tragic about his tendency to hurt people with his frankness.It's hard not to ask, should we curb our enthusiasm?

Charlie Rose has called Louis C.K. "the philosopher-king of comedy," and many have detected philosophical profundity in his material. Twenty-five philosophers examine the wisdom of Louis C.K. from a variety of philosophical perspectives. The chapters draw upon C.K.'s standup comedy, the show Louie, and C.K.'s other writings. One writer looks at the different meanings of C.K.'s statement, "You're gonna be dead way longer than you were alive." One chapter shows the affinity of C.K.'s "sick of living this bullshit life" with Kierkegaard's "sickness unto death." Another pursues Louis's thought that we may by our lack of moral concern "live a really evil life without thinking about it." C.K.'s insistence that "things that are not can't be" points to the philosophical problem of nothingness in relation to being. His religion is "apathetic agnostic," conveyed in his thought experiment that God began work in 1982. Louis's argument that you can have the kind of body you want if you make yourself want a disgusting, shitty body, is the Stoic ethics of Epictetus. And, as C.K. has shown in so many ways, the fact that we're soon going to die has its funny side.