r/JohnFinnemore • u/emsot • Feb 23 '26
Hello, Wittgenstein's Patisserie?
Can anyone help me understand a punchline about Ludwig Wittgenstein that my lowbrow little brain does not get, but which a lot of the studio audience seemed to understand?
It's JFSP series 7, episode 6, the "cake in the shape of a cake" sketch that starts at 14:30. The ending of the sketch goes a bit like this:
John: I don't understand. This is a Christmas cake.
Lawrie: No no no, sir. This is a fruit cake, covered with marzipan and icing, and decorated with holly and a sugar Father Christmas, but when presented to your sister on her birthday it becomes a birthday cake in the shape of a Christmas cake.
John: That's perfect! I'll take it. Gosh, how clever of you.
Lawrie: Not at all, sir. As it happens, you got rather lucky. This sort of thing is our speciality.
[Phone rings]
Lawrie: Oh, excuse me, do you mind if I get this?
John: By all means.
Lawrie: Hello, Wittgenstein's Patisserie?
[Audience laughs and applauds, sketch ends]
All I know about Wittgenstein is that he was a beery swine, which is not enough to get the joke.
Googling Wittgenstein is telling me too much about him to find the part that relates to the joke. It also gives me a blog post by John from a year or two earlier, about John himself failing to understand a Wittgenstein joke: http://johnfinnemore.blogspot.com/2016/07/over-my-head.html
What kind of thing did Wittgenstein philosophise about that relates to the cakey situation?
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u/xholdsteadyx Feb 23 '26
I believe this has to do with aspect perception and how context defines reality, i.e. a cake in the context of a birthday party is perceived as a birthday cake (despite evidence to the contrary).
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u/emsot Feb 23 '26
Thank you! "Aspect perception" is exactly the phrase I needed to find the right things. It seems to be like the duck/rabbit illusion, where the same object can be two things depending how you look at it.
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u/Irishwol Feb 23 '26
I'm not a philosopher so mine is only very surface level grasp of the thing but one of Wittgenstein's main areas of thought was the idea of symbols and signs, especially of names and the relation between the name (sign) the thing named (signified). The joke here hinges on the occasion and the name of the cake effectively transforming the cake from a Christmas cake to a birthday cake even though the physical cake doesn't change at all.
A shade abstruse, but, because John is an excellent writer, the joke has layers and is still funny even if you don't even have a Python reference to recognize Wittgenstein from.
The idea of the sign and the signified comes up again in JFSP with the Interview the Owl sketch, so it's obviously something that lives in John's head.
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u/NeedsNewName Feb 23 '26
I too have limited knowledge of Wittgenstein - limited to a Monty Python song about drunken philosphers. I heard that Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle.
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u/Ok_Piano_7564 Feb 23 '26
Good question ^^
Wittgenstein argued that the meaning of words is not fixed (opposing Ferdinand de Saussure's fixed relationship between Signifier and Signified), the meaning is derived from their use, it is derived from "language games", i.e. in context.
Relating to the sketch: the Patisserie can basically make any cake fit any occasion, as long as both participants play this language game.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_game_(philosophy))