It's often a good idea to relate things to ancient Greece, where most things of note have their origins - with the exception of superstition which came from the Israelites.
Yes I'm talking abuse, dislike, satire and slander as exercised in the comedies of the mainly known Aristophanes - The Knights (on the Peloponnesean war with Sparta, prev), Peace, The Frogs etc.
Before going further, I checked the Stevenson gag on YouTube, and it was actually Mel Smith playing the psychologist . This makes the gag, "cut off their goolies", pretty absurd for such a refined fellow to say. Absurdity was the stock-in-trade of the Athenian comedies. In The Frogs, Dionysus is depicted as a cross-dressing glam-rocker, while in Peace Olympus is reached on a giant dung-beetle.
The basic point of a lot of the comedies was to seriously satirise the social order, done with absurd logic. In The Frogs, Cleon's role in leading the war against Sparta is likened to a slave running his master's house (Aristophanes was fined for slander.)
The freedom and range of delivery and expression of the comedies take things away from a logical order and into a type of lunatic logic. This is almost the opposite of Conway's quote in M5 that logic is 'vulnerable to the unreal'; the grotesque logic of comedy points to the fact that logic itself is not the whole of reality.
In fact, the body has its own logic which incorporates the obscene, the bawdy pun, the liscentious slander. In terms of theatricality, the plays were staged at the festival of Dionysia, which originated in fertility rites and hymns to the gay god of the vine.
Creative lunacy, limber movements of garlanded girls. While one could say Greek tragedies (also staged at the Dionysia) were cerebral, comedies were intentionally the opposite. Clever but physically bawdy and entertaining.
This makes the basic point that comedies had to encompass a wider instinctive area, closer to the animal. Rather than abstract thought, the movements and expressions of the body are brought to the play.
In actual fact, the associative centre for this is the cerebellum - the hindbrain - that attaches to the spine. The reality of this relates to autonomic control of speech, breath, sight, blood. It is a fundamental reality that connects thought to spine and movement.
Basically, abuse and dislike in comedy come out of this area, for example if the crowd are composed of ugly people. So, really, to be abusive is to be enabled to use words as an effectively satirical way to lampoon the powers that be.
Whereas modern economy and politics are a game of numbers (logic, cerebrum), comedy is a game of wordplay and physical abuse that satirises through association with the natural world.
For example, in one play a girl is sold as a disguised piglet to gain food for war victims. Piglet in Greek also means female genitals. So, meaning that is tied-up with the gross and the bestial always has an element of abuse. The ludicrous logic of comedies undercuts the political and economic logic of the Athenian power-mongers (like Cleon or Pericles.)
In short, the way to counter the modern fantasy (of logic) is not to match words but to implicate modern Man with the gross or bestial in nature that is the reality of fecundity; physical expression, psychic strength.
Logic is unreal if one assumes the gross and obscene are legitimate tactics to undercut the sterile game of numbers played by our leaders. Fecundity is a strength and an unstoppable reality in the face of the fantasy of numbers. Myth versus illusion.
