"Mind-bending oxymorons for that neurotic nephew, sensitive sister, or perplexed parent". "An 'iconoclassic' for all ages!" “The people's guide to paradox." “Hegelian humor for Orwellian times!” "For people in recovery from the self-help industry." --- (This is the fun, pocketbook edition. A large-print edition is also available found by clicking Other Sellers & exploring the drop-down menu..) --- All humor is philosophy. But Austrian linguist Ludwig Wittgenstein went further and wrote: "An entire treatise of philosophy could be written that consists entirely of jokes." Author Evan Hodkins similarly said: "The next religion will consist of an expansive catalog of humor." And Mexican poet Cesar Cruz added: "All art should comfort the disturbed, and disturb the comfortable." And now, dear reader, you have stumbled upon a very curious but very relatable collection of all-original humor that blends these ideas together into easy-to-digest, family-friendly, bite-sized nuggets -- known as "The Eisenberg Principles" -- one-sentence laughorisms ! --- "A revolutionary approach to maintaining the status quo." “The book about quieting the mind that everyone is talking about." "Great for mediators, moderators, motivators, meditators, and medicators." --- From the Preface: "It's rare to find a trifecta of thought streams and modalities as unexpectedly intertwined as what we find in this one-of-a-kind collection of original, one-sentence jokes, "laughorisms" known as The Eisenberg Principles . In these one-sentence vignettes, the fields of philosophy and psychology are married into uproariously funny trysts of paradoxical play , each one like a piece of brain-candy which is no less serious in its treatment of the human condition as it is absurd. We are not only afforded a chance to glimpse into the thoughts of this wondrously twisted thinker, we are challenged to follow him into the surprising and impossible rabbit holes of language he unearths on every page." F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote: "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." This catalog of contradictions puts you through Fitzgerald's test, playing with the principles of paradox and polarity and taking you from the comforts of cliché to the chasms of contradiction with just a few strokes of a pen. --- "Many of the jokes Eisenberg unspools have the psychic charge of a Zen koan, the brevity and immediacy of a haiku, and aim to capture the absurdity of an existence that can make the most sense when efforts to comprehend it are fully abandoned." Charles Brennan, Boulder Daily Camera. "Eisenberg does his personal brand of ‘verbal gymnastics’ to stretch the boundaries of logic and throw the semantics of everyday expressions into question." Michael Travers, EJI --- "The desire to spread levity in the world weighs heavily upon me." ~ Gregg Eisenberg, March 2021 ---- Enjoy a few clips of the author performing this material, Museum of Boulder (CO): https://cutt.ly/ArqYzDs Enjoy an in-depth interview with the author about the streams of ideas running through his material: rb.gy/kacfwn --- Curved-Space Comedy: Beating the Conundrums since 2001. "We live vicariously, so you don't have to." www.curvedspacecomedy.com --- for clips, snips, interviews and songs. --- “The best book about nothingness there is.” "A mind-expanding, heart-opening, gut-wrenching read." "Many of the jokes Eisenberg unspools have the psychic charge of a Zen koan, the brevity and immediacy of a haiku, and aim to capture the absurdity of an existence that can make the most sense when efforts to comprehend it are fully abandoned." Charles Brennan, Boulder Daily Camera, March 6, 2019 "Eisenberg uses verbal gymnastics to twist and stretch the boundaries of logic, throwing the semantics of everyday expressions into question - hopefully stirring our collective conversation about meaning and consciousness forward." -Michael Travers, EJI Journal "The pocketbook guide to people." Melissa Page, Boulder CO "Great for mediators, moderators, motivators, meditators, and medicators." "For people in no condition for the human race." Michelangelo wrote: "You keep sculpting, and sculpting, and sculpting, until... there is nothing left to take away." And that is how I feel about this book. This material, this "carefully curated collection of contradictions" started having a logic of its own years ago. My job as a writer was to be dutiful to the muse, to follow where she led, to keep playing with language and word combinations in all their perplexing permutations, and in the end to keep editing out mediocre content until there was "nothing left to take away." --- I wrote this book to uplift my friends, real and imagined, far and near, who ponder the perennial questions about the human condition (which usually have no solid answers), to keep them entertained