I think it’s a silly joke rather than a witty one. For what it’s worth, I thought it was pretty funny.
I believe that silliness is actually more difficult to make work—it’s more delicately dependent on people’s associations—though that may simply mean that I’m better at witty.
This reminds me of “WWJD? JWRTFM!” [1] which I tried to interpret as a complex theological reference to the relationship between Jesus and the Christian bible, but which apparently is just a routine tech support joke.
[1] What Would Jesus Do? Jesus Would Read the F—ing Manual! [2]
[2] There was a recent request to keep overt profanity off LW. I have no idea whether cursing or veiled cursing is more annoying on the average.
I believe that silliness is actually more difficult to make work—it’s more delicately dependent on people’s associations—though that may simply mean that I’m better at witty.
Another reason that silliness is more difficult to do well is that it’s a large search space compared to the target you’re trying to hit — there are vastly more ways to be silly than ways to be simultaneously silly and actually funny, so most people attempting it end up just doing the former and thinking that it passes for humour. Example: almost all (alleged) comedy music.
(That applies even more so with absurdist humour. In that case, the search space is even larger — anything that doesn’t make sense, pretty much — and, indeed, a lot of people first attempting absurd humour end up just being absurd but not humourous. I think this has something to do with positive bias — a person finds they enjoy some variety of absurd humour, and they decide they want to make their own, so they try to reverse-engineer the rule; they hypothesize that the rule is “it makes no sense” (or, within a particular genre, something more specific but still insufficient), and they observe that it fits the positive examples they know of, but fail to search for things that fit the hypothesized rule but which they don’t find funny.)
FWI, regarding profanity—if you are talking about my comment about profanity, Alicorn et al. convinced me that my concerns did not have sufficient basis.
I think it’s a silly joke rather than a witty one. For what it’s worth, I thought it was pretty funny.
I believe that silliness is actually more difficult to make work—it’s more delicately dependent on people’s associations—though that may simply mean that I’m better at witty.
This reminds me of “WWJD? JWRTFM!” [1] which I tried to interpret as a complex theological reference to the relationship between Jesus and the Christian bible, but which apparently is just a routine tech support joke.
[1] What Would Jesus Do? Jesus Would Read the F—ing Manual! [2]
[2] There was a recent request to keep overt profanity off LW. I have no idea whether cursing or veiled cursing is more annoying on the average.
Another reason that silliness is more difficult to do well is that it’s a large search space compared to the target you’re trying to hit — there are vastly more ways to be silly than ways to be simultaneously silly and actually funny, so most people attempting it end up just doing the former and thinking that it passes for humour. Example: almost all (alleged) comedy music.
(That applies even more so with absurdist humour. In that case, the search space is even larger — anything that doesn’t make sense, pretty much — and, indeed, a lot of people first attempting absurd humour end up just being absurd but not humourous. I think this has something to do with positive bias — a person finds they enjoy some variety of absurd humour, and they decide they want to make their own, so they try to reverse-engineer the rule; they hypothesize that the rule is “it makes no sense” (or, within a particular genre, something more specific but still insufficient), and they observe that it fits the positive examples they know of, but fail to search for things that fit the hypothesized rule but which they don’t find funny.)
FWI, regarding profanity—if you are talking about my comment about profanity, Alicorn et al. convinced me that my concerns did not have sufficient basis.