How I Met Your Mother and Philosophy (2 page)

  
5.
  
Barney's Magical World of Self-Deception

       
C
ARTER
H
ARDY

II
    
True Story!

  
6.
  
The Bro Code as a Relational Starter

       
F
RANK
G. K
ARIORIS

  
7.
  
Ted's Cockamouse Flies at Dusk

       
M. C
HRIS
S
ARDO

  
8.
  
Smoking Subs and Eating Joints

       
M
IGUEL
Á
NGEL
S
EBASTIÁN AND
M
ANOLO
M
ARTINEZ

  
9.
  
Telling Each Other
Everything

       
J
ORDAN
P
ASCOE

III
   
Wait for It . . .

10.
  
Why You Should Never, Never Love Thy Neighbor

       
R
ADU
U
SZKAI AND
E
MANUEL
S
OCACIU

11.
  
A Tale of Two Feminist Icons

       
T
INA
T
ALSMA

12.
  
The Legen . . . wait-for-it . . . dary Moment

       
M
ARYAM
B
ABUR

13.
  
Is It Irrational to Wait for the Slutty Pumpkin?

       
T
OBIAS
H
AINZ AND
Y
VONNE
W
ÜRZ

IV
   
Hot and Crazy

14.
  
Barney Stinson's Theory of Truth

       
J
OE
S
LATER

15.
  
The Pick-Up Game

       
B
ART VAN
B
EEK

16.
  
Telling Your Life Story.

       
E
LIZE DE
M
UL

17.
  
Awesome Logic for the Possimpible World

       
M
ICHELA
B
ORDIGNON

About the Authors

Index

I

Challenge Accepted

1

Why on Earth Do We Love Barney?

B
ENCE
N
ANAY

K
ids, Barney Stinson is the devil. At least, that's what Ted says in “Belly Full of Turkey” (Season One). And in “Brunch” (Season Two), he's genuinely surprised that Barney is allowed to enter a church. But even if he's not the devil, he is a truly awful person. Truly.

But then why do we all love him so much? More precisely, why is it so tempting to identify or empathize or emotionally engage with him?

Just how awful is Barney? Unspeakably awful. A few biographical details:

       
•
  
He sold a woman
(“The Bracket”).

       
•
  
He poisoned the drinking water in Lisbon
(“The Goat”).

       
•
  
He has shady dealings with the most oppressive regime on Earth
(“Chain of Screaming”).

But maybe it's just his line of work. We know that Tony Soprano's job isn't exactly charity-work, but we have no problem identifying and emotionally engaging with him. Yet, he is in many ways a choirboy compared to Barney Stinson. Barney can be as awful with his best friends as in his dealings at Goliath National Bank. Again, a few examples:

       
•
  
When facing the dilemma of landing a much needed job for his ‘best friend' (who had just been
left at the altar) or having an office in a dinosaur-shaped building, he chooses the latter
(“Woo Girls”).

       
•
  
He takes revenge, many years later, on the girl who once broke his heart, by sleeping with her and then never calling her back
(“Game Night”).

       
•
  
Gives a fake apology to Robin, whom he just broke up with, merely in order to score another girl
(“Playbook”).

       
•
  
Sells Marshall for $80,000 of credit at the casino
(“The Bro Mitzvah”).

       
•
  
Spends years planning his revenge on Marshall for noticing that he has a bit of marinara sauce on his tie
(“The Exploding Meatball Sub”).

       
•
  
Sets his best friend's coat on fire
(“The Pineapple Incident”).

       
•
  
Pulls a nasty and tactless prank on Robin when he pretends to be Robin's dad on the phone, whose call he knows she is eagerly awaiting
(“Disaster Averted”).

       
•
  
Actively puts Robin down when she meets Ted's parents for the first time
(“Brunch”).

       
•
  
Makes his best friend Ted believe that Mary, the paralegal, is in fact a prostitute, so that he can enjoy how Ted is making a fool of himself
(“Mary the Paralegal”).

       
•
  
Stages a one-man show that has one purpose only: to annoy Lily
(“Stuff”).

       
•
  
Makes a fool of all his friends, who, unknowingly, help him score with a girl
(“Playbook”).

And we have not even gotten into the various tricks he uses in order to get girls to come home with him. His behavior is utterly immoral according to the vast majority of existing accounts in moral philosophy. Lily nicely sums it up: he is “the emotional equivalent of a scavenging sewer rat” (“Best Couple
Ever”). But then why do we like him? Why do we identify with him? Why is he one of the most popular sitcom characters of all time?

Barney is not the first bad character in the history of the genre. In
Friends
, Joey Tribbiani did some nasty stuff: he burned the prosthetic leg of a girl in the middle of the forest and then drove away. But he loved his friends and would never knowingly screw them. All four characters in
Seinfeld
did awful things throughout the series, as memorably evidenced by the finale. But Barney takes this to a completely different level of awfulness.

We have a paradox then: how can we identify with and relate to a fictional character, Barney, who is such a terrible person that if we met him in real life, we would probably slap him or leave the room. This paradox needs to be kept apart from the famous ‘paradox of fiction', the most succinct exposition of which comes not from Hume but from Chandler Bing:

        
C
HANDLER
:
Bambi is a cartoon.

        
J
OEY
:
You didn't cry when Bambi's mother died?

        
C
HANDLER
:
Yes, it was very sad when the guy stopped drawing the deer. (
Friends
, Season Six, Episode 14)

The paradox of fiction is this: why do we feel strong emotions towards fictional events and characters we know do not exist? The paradox I want to look at here—we could call it the Barney Paradox—is different. It accepts that we feel strong emotions towards fictional characters. But then the question arises which fictional character we feel strong emotions towards. Who is our identification or empathy or emotional engagement directed at? And here comes the paradox: it seems that often we identify or empathize with the least worthy of the fictional characters.

The show's creators seem to be vividly aware of this paradox—notice the many references to how Barney himself always identifies with the bad guys in any given movie—the “wrong” Karate Kid, Darth Vader, the Terminator—and not with Ralph Macchio, Luke Skywalker, Harry Potter. There are good examples in “The Stinsons,” Season Four) and “The Bro Mitzvah”).

Philosophers worry about paradoxes, because a paradox shows that there must be something wrong with our assumptions.
So let's try to think of some possible ways we can make the Barney Paradox go away.

1. Barney's Not So Bad

Maybe I was just picking out the worst of Barney. And maybe he's more like Joey, who in some respects is not the boyfriend you may want to take home to meet your parents, but in some other respects has a heart of gold.

There are some incidents that point in this direction. In “The Scorpion and the Toad,” Season Two), Barney is allegedly helping Marshall get over Lily and get back in the game. But each time Marshall actually has a chance of scoring with a girl, Barney steps in and takes the girl home himself. The title of the episode refers to the Aesop tale about the scorpion who asks the toad to carry him across the river. The toad asks: why would I do that—you'll sting me and then we'll both die. But, the scorpion responds, if I sting you, we'll both die—so why would I sting you? So the toad agrees, but halfway through the scorpion does sting the toad and they both die—that's just the scorpion's nature. It should be clear who the scorpion is supposed to stand for here.

So far, this is a pretty damning statement about Barney, but that's not the full story. This happened at the beginning of Season Two. But towards the end of this season, we learn that Barney visited Lily in San Francisco and told her to come back to Marshall because he, Barney, can't go on stealing girls from him to keep up the hopes of the two of them getting back together alive (“Bachelor Party”). While this gives a nice twist to the scorpion-and-toad story, it's not clear whether this means that Barney stole all those girls from Marshall for purely selfless reasons. At least at that point we're led to believe that Barney is, at least sometimes, a compassionate and caring friend. But then again, this comes right after an episode where Barney steals Ted's moving truck with all his belonging (“Moving Day”).

The most plausible version of this way of trying to explain away the paradox of identification with Barney is that Barney's not really bad: he's just immature. He's a little like a naughty child—we shouldn't expect him to behave responsibly or in any way that's not completely selfish. His general attitude towards life is that of a preschooler towards his toys. The show plays
with this idea intermittently—especially in the last couple of seasons in a bid to make Barney proper fiancé material for Robin. This cuts the other way too: the writers also make Robin more similar to Barney—for example in “Something Old” (Season Eight), where Robin and Barney are in complete agreement that they should break up a couple just because they're somewhat annoying.

The decision to ditch Ted and his job prospects for working in a dinosaur-shaped office building could be interpreted as a manifestation of this child-like attitude (see also “Little Boys,” in Season Three, which puts the Barney–little boy analogy in context).

Without denying that this is part of the way Barney is portrayed, it would be difficult to frame selling a woman or the ‘Scuba Diver' trick, which deliberately and with cold calculation plays with and exploits Robin's feelings, as immature and therefore forgivable and in some way adorable childish gags.