Sometimes, when all else fails, you just need a laugh.

This having been one of those days (meh, let’s not go there), I pulled up one of my old favorites - Emily Levine’s 2009 TED Talk, “A Theory of Everything.” If you like a little philosophical flavor to your humor, Levine is your woman.

Example: In the first minute, Levine says she doesn’t like to talk about herself because she’s “a recovering narcissist.” She says she used to think that meant you loved yourself but then she learned it had a flip side,”so it’s actually drearier than self-love, it’s unrequited self-love.”

Levine’s purpose in this talk/comedy routine is to explain how she arrived at her particular brand of comedy. She says it was a revelation when she read Lewis Hyde’s book, Trickster Makes the World: Mischief, Myth, and Art, about the “playful and disruptive side of human imagination” as represented by the character of the trickster in mythology. Think of Shakespeare’s Puck, Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat, Matt Groening’s Bart Simpson, or Marvel Comics’ Deadpool - all tricksters.

Watching it again, I realized how valuable the traits she (and Hyde) describes might be for thinking about the “character” I’m exploring in this blog, the Disruptor.

Trickster: the opposite of Objectivism

Levine contrasts her philosophy of comedy with Objectivism (think Ayn Rand), in which the subject asserts himself over the object (emphasis on the him, since even female Objectivists like Rand espouse what they see as the essential masculinity in the act of subject-object subjugation).

Levine’s objection to Objectivism isn’t so much tied up in the violence it does to the object - which any good Objectivist would shrug at since that’s the sina qua non of the theory. Rather, her objection is to the fixed or finished nature of it. Objectivism, as she sees it, fixes things subject, object, and relationship into one pattern, leaving no space for interaction and surprise.

traits of the trickster

Instead, Levine values (and models her comedy on) the trickster because he rejects these fixed forms - all of which I would assign to the modern entrepreneurial character I call The Disruptor:

First, he is “boundary-crossing”: He enters into spaces in which he is the innocent, not the expert - allowing him to spot the connections and contradictions that the initiate overlooks.

Second, he works his mischief through “non-oppositional strategies” - instead of denying other realities and insisting on one view of the world (think pretty much everything on Twitter), he tolerates (even cultivates) the existence of multiple realities at once.

Third, he thrives on the accident or the unexpected, which he uses to trip our standard neurologic circuitry, forcing our thinking into new patterns.

Fourth, he maintains a fine line between prepared and unprepared, never allowing himself to “tip over into beauty,” which is a fine but fixed thing, no longer in generative disequilibrium.

Fifth, the trickster “doesn’t have a home.”

Disruptor as Trickster

In popular culture, especially on the internet, I see a new kind of superhero taking shape. This character, in a peculiarly Gen X/Milennial/Gen Z fashion, changes the world, but always in a shape-shifting, unexpected way. He doesn’t go out and dominate the world like the 20th century titans of industry; instead, he can often be found sitting behind a computer, all alone (or maybe in a cafe in Quito or Prague, since he lives out of a backpack anywhere with an internet connection). He has no MBA, no Ph.D.; he holds no chair, no title. His skills and his knowledge are never fixed; he specializes in occupying the space beyond the known, the virtual reality that others haven’t suspected and even he has barely glimpsed (and, once he sees it clearly, he will by definition become bored with). He lives in multiple dimensions, or realities, at once, even creating new realities right under our noses while we think we’re living in the “real” one.

Especially in the law, we thrive on the fixed, the rational, the subject-object definition. But the fixed never evolves, and the world is constant change. We strive for the Beauty of true Justice, but what might we be missing when we reduce the world down to the rational? And what might we discover if the lawyer is willing to don the cloak of the disruptor-trickster?