Wordjot - Metahumor

Wordjot - Metahumor

“What’s the difference between Plato and Playdough? One’s so pliable you can mold it into whatever the hell you want. The other’s blue.”

Humor relies on the subversion of expectations. That’s why the Plato joke is funny. You have a normal situation: Wise Plato and putty Playdough. Then it’s suddenly reversed. But it only works because it taps into another expectation: that Plato is frustratingly vague in a lot of ways and easy to use to support anything. The punchline wouldn’t work as “One’s so pliable you can mold it into whatever the hell you want, the other FISH FISH FISH FISH FISH.” Your subversions are subverted. It’s still stupid.

I’ve recently been fascinated with another form of subversion: the metajoke. These play on your expectations of what a joke is. Some examples:

“How many people of a given stereotype does it take to change a lightbulb? N+1, 1 to change it and N to act in a stereotypical manner.” This points out the general template of the joke. This form is pretty common.

“A man walks into a bar. He’s an alcoholic. It’s destroying his family.” Antihumor, which subverts the expectation that there’s actually a joke.

“A rabbi, a priest, and a lawyer walk into a bar. The bartender asks ‘Is this some kind of joke?’” These directly call attention to the fact you’re hearing a joke.

“What’s the difference between a telephone pole and a motorcycle? 24, because a camel has two humps.” Possibly the most common type I’ve encounter, which derives it’s humor from the fact it makes no sense. Often called ‘Monkey Cheese’. I hate this kind.

Recently I’ve been really interested in another form, the joke dependent on another joke. Here’s one example:

“There are 10 types of people in this world. Those who know binary, and those who don’t. And those who know ternary.”

Not a great example, but still. It takes your expectation that this will be the common, heard-this-a-million-times-before joke on binary, and then plays on that. I’ve found these types really funny. They’re not that funny to most people, but since I’m really into humor theory I absolutely love them. That probably doesn't speak well about my sense of comedy.

Wordjot - Spy Eye

I’ve occasionally wondered what I’d do if I ever lost my eye. I’d probably replace it with a spy cam. I’d wire the trigger to my eyelid, so I could trigger it by blinking. Two blinks would be video. Don’t know how I’ll handle zoom or flash, but I’ll figure something out.
Cameras are supposed to capture the world, right? But you can’t, not entirely as it was.

The camera is an inside-out Schrodinger’s box. The act of aiming it changes the scene. At the very least people clean up their postures and start looking uncomfortable. At worst the nice men in gas masks take it away and hit you with sticks. It’s hard to take a picture of the world as-is instead of world as wants-be.

That’s why I want a Glass Eye glass eye. It’d give me the power to take pictures without people realizing I’m taking pictures.

Or maybe I should just buy a spy pen.

Wordsomething - MC Escher

I'm trying to figure out a new thing to call this. Wordsmithing sounds trite, and Wordblasting stupid. Wordbombing? Word Vomit? Wordering? Advice needed.

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MC Escher

MC Escher is probably my favorite artist. I guess a lot of math majors think that. He made a lot of neat tessellations and impossible constructions. But I’ve always preferred the mindbenders. “Another World”, “House of Stairs”. I’m irrationally fond of his “Tower of Babel”, one of his earlier and less acclaimed pieces before he found fame in optical illusions.

I think the reason I love these pieces is what they do to reality. Most of the art I’ve come across either tries to represent the real world, like realism or cubism, or represent ideas, like Suprematism or modernism. Escher on the other hand feels like he’s destroying reality, presenting something that Can Not Be. It goes beyond normal optical illusions and impossible constructs into a sort of Lovecraftian insanity. My mind can tell there’s something but cannot comprehend the totality of it. To really get “Waterfall”, I feel like I’d have to break spacetime.

Which got me thinking. Escher uses 2D to go beyond 3D. Could you take that one step further? Maybe you could use 3D to go beyond 4D, like build a sculpture that- from the right point- looks exactly like a tesseract. Why haven’t we done this? Maybe Escher was a rare genius. Maybe we’d have to see 4D to know how to smash it. Maybe people have already done this and I’m just ignorant. No matter what, I’m excited to see what people do with it. If people do something with it. Here’s hoping.

Project: Wordblasting

Two days ago I complained about how it's really hard to reach out to people in Facebook. Yesterday I realized I had a bunch of small writing ideas that couldn't carry their own project, but might be fun to share. Today I realized that G was never going to update Momenergy ever again. This gave me an idea.

I'm going to start updating Momenergy again with these bits and scraps of rants. Each one I will also send to three random people on Facebook and see how they react. The rants probably won't be available on general Facebook, but they'll always be accessible here.

Have two completely written out, one on MC Escher and one on metahumor. Going to upload them both over the next two days.