327: your daily Adams
I have to make this quick, because Charlie wants me in bed for A Very Toby Thanksgiving at 2 but there's also smelly gerbils at the moment :p Needless to say, this was shocking [and insightful] to read.There's always a moment when you start to fall out of love, whether it's with a person or an idea or a cause...: a tiny thing, a wrong word, a false note, which means that things can never be quite the same again. For me it was hearing a stand-up comedian make the following observation: "These scientists, eh? They're so stupid! You know those black-box flight recorders they put on aeroplanes? And you know how they're meant to be indestructible? It's always the things that doesn't get smashed? So why don't they make the planes out of the same stuff?"
The audience roared with laughter at how stupid scientists were, couldn't think their way out of a paper bag, but I sat feeling uncomfortable. Was I just being pedantic to feel that the joke didn't really work because flight recorders are made out of titanium and that if you made planes out of titanium instead of aluminium, they'd be far too heavy to get off the ground in the first place? I began to pick away at the joke. Supposing Eric Morecambe had said it? Would it be funny then? Well, not quite, because that would have relied on the audience seeing that Eric was being dumb--in other words, they would have had to know as a matter of common knowledge about the relative weights of titanium and aluminium. There was no way of deconstructing the joke...that didn't rely on the teller and the audience complacently conspiring together to jeer at someone who knew more than they did. It sent a chill down my spine, and still does. I felt betrayed by comedy in the same way that gangsta rap now makes me feel betrayed by rock music. I also began to wonder how many of the jokes I was making were just, well, ignorant.
-- "Turncoat", The Salmon of Doubt
Tangentally, I have put the finishing touches on the ending for Back to Square One, meaning that--should I unexpectedly spontaneously DIE today--someone can find my existing document and possibly tinker with it to try to guess where I was going with the near-to-end bit and very likely get it entirely wrong yet still have the correct finale. It's a vague improvement over Mozart's Unfinished Symphony, I guess :'
The audience roared with laughter at how stupid scientists were, couldn't think their way out of a paper bag, but I sat feeling uncomfortable. Was I just being pedantic to feel that the joke didn't really work because flight recorders are made out of titanium and that if you made planes out of titanium instead of aluminium, they'd be far too heavy to get off the ground in the first place? I began to pick away at the joke. Supposing Eric Morecambe had said it? Would it be funny then? Well, not quite, because that would have relied on the audience seeing that Eric was being dumb--in other words, they would have had to know as a matter of common knowledge about the relative weights of titanium and aluminium. There was no way of deconstructing the joke...that didn't rely on the teller and the audience complacently conspiring together to jeer at someone who knew more than they did. It sent a chill down my spine, and still does. I felt betrayed by comedy in the same way that gangsta rap now makes me feel betrayed by rock music. I also began to wonder how many of the jokes I was making were just, well, ignorant.
-- "Turncoat", The Salmon of Doubt
Tangentally, I have put the finishing touches on the ending for Back to Square One, meaning that--should I unexpectedly spontaneously DIE today--someone can find my existing document and possibly tinker with it to try to guess where I was going with the near-to-end bit and very likely get it entirely wrong yet still have the correct finale. It's a vague improvement over Mozart's Unfinished Symphony, I guess :'