3 ms·

There's a lot of rules on comedy this breaks. It could be much better with half of it removed

rightbyte 5y ago
I kinda miss these amateur non-meme not very funny joke essays on programming. Think Murphy's law kind of joke lists. Has the genre died to memes or does Google search just not present them anymore?
- kristopolous 5y ago
  probably the latter. It's the same low effort style. Here's the most succinct crash course in comedy I know of https://misterandyriley.com/2016/10/31/how-to-talk-comedy-writer-updated/ https://misterandyriley.com/2016/10/31/how-to-talk-comedy-wr... In this article the biggest sin is this one: "Bananas on Bananas – similar to Jazz Trumpetry. Trying to top a punchline with another punchline right after it, and another, and another. Sometimes this might be great – but when it’s not, and the result is just tiring to watch/read/listen to, then you’ve got Bananas on Bananas. [via James Bachman and Simon Blackwell]" and its relative: "Hat On A Hat – this is in very common use in the USA, and has a similar yet subtly different meaning to ‘Two Sock.’ A Hat On A Hat is an occasion where two funny things are happening at the same moment in the script, or immediately adjacent moments, and those two comic ideas are each distracting from the other. The solution is normally simple: remove one of them." People like to think that comedy is a matter of opinion. That's totally false - it's the originator of audience testing and a/b testing. Starting in vaudeville performers would carefully study slight modifications to their routine and the audience reaction to them. Every comedian with a repeatable act learns what works and what doesn't. They cut/add/tweak/rearrange. You can clearly see this in early versus later work of your favorite standup. The maturation of everyone's routine follow the same general comedy rules of what stays and goes. It's a describable teachable learnable repeatable skill. It's the reason that lots of successful comedians come out of the groundlings and ucb. It's not a matter of opinion, there's decades of quantified research on this stuff. The OP article if it just followed basic comedy rules and structure would become immensely better.
  - codingdave 5y ago
    Blog posts != standup. There may be structure to comedy, but that does not mean that there are dogmatic rules that apply to all mediums and all audiences. Expecting anyone to study and follow the techniques that have been developed for a successful standup routine, and then use them when writing up a blog post is somewhat absurd.
    - kristopolous 5y ago
      It's not just for standup. It's also true for sitcoms, same rules. Live performances are the ones where measurable data exists. People do room reads for written content to test it. It's not all arbitrary
  - dcminter 5y ago
    You know how if you have to explain the joke it's not funny? If you have to explain why it's not funny ... "It's not a matter of opinion" really? Says the joke crime commission? Oh wait, there isn't one, because humour is always a matter of opinion.
    - kristopolous 5y ago
      And so is taste in food, fashion, photography, interior design, music, writing. Some things are generally agreed on though. Food shouldn't be poisonous, interior design shouldn't block doorways, music shouldn't damage hearing, comedy shouldn't make people run to the car to get their gun. There's rules for everything.
nemetroid 5y ago
If the perceived problem is stacking too many gags on each other, how would that help? The joke density would be unchanged.
- kristopolous 5y ago
  Because weaker jokes follow better ones. Comedy is not cumulative, it's a function of minimums The weakest joke is the weight that brings things down. Remove it Narrow the theme, focus on the flow How many times have you read something and there was a bad joke sandwiched between good ones and you remember that? It's better without it. The comedy performs better in all metrics. Think Rodney Dangerfield's rapid tight style. He was a master of this. The theme bounds the humor but the jokes are tight executions He didn't always do that. Took him years to "discover it". Here's a 15 year difference 1968 - https://youtu.be/PiNDirvqSUY https://youtu.be/PiNDirvqSUY 1983 - https://youtu.be/cQLv7CG10B4 https://youtu.be/cQLv7CG10B4 His style changes follows the rules I linked to in the other reply. Listen to the laugh density and duration of the two. It's really dramatically different. Another comparison, same process, Emo Phillips 1983 - https://youtu.be/lRp_r-EHmfs https://youtu.be/lRp_r-EHmfs 2010 - https://youtu.be/xywEDvBTzM0 https://youtu.be/xywEDvBTzM0 Joan Rivers had a large library of her performances that she studied all the time trying to improve the technique in the same way.
  - nemetroid 5y ago
    I don't really get what your main criticism is. In your other comment, you said the biggest sin committed was that of stacking punchlines on punchlines (which is a problem of flow, not joke quality), but now you're saying that some of the jokes are too bad and should have been cut? More importantly, though, the standards of live comedy can't be directly applied to something that's intended for reading. Live comedy concerns itself a lot with timing your delivery to the (vocal) audience response. I agree that the linked material would need rework before it could be used as a stand-up routine, but that's not the goal. For what it's worth, I think the blog post is funny. Most of the jokes are funny. Some jokes are less funny, but aren't dwelled on, and by the end of the page I've forgotten the bad ones.
EdwardDiego 5y ago
He's a software developer, not a professional comedian.
Doctor_Fegg 5y ago
I found it funny. Am I just wrong somehow? Am I wrong to like Vaughan Williams' music even though there are parallel fifths all over the place?
- kristopolous 5y ago
  No. Not at all. You can enjoy a story where chekhov's gun doesn't fire. I didn't mean for this thing to be a big discussion

I kinda miss these amateur non-meme not very funny joke essays on programming. Think Murphy's law kind of joke lists. Has the genre died to memes or does Google search just not present them anymore?

kristopolous 5y ago
probably the latter. It's the same low effort style. Here's the most succinct crash course in comedy I know of https://misterandyriley.com/2016/10/31/how-to-talk-comedy-writer-updated/ https://misterandyriley.com/2016/10/31/how-to-talk-comedy-wr... In this article the biggest sin is this one: "Bananas on Bananas – similar to Jazz Trumpetry. Trying to top a punchline with another punchline right after it, and another, and another. Sometimes this might be great – but when it’s not, and the result is just tiring to watch/read/listen to, then you’ve got Bananas on Bananas. [via James Bachman and Simon Blackwell]" and its relative: "Hat On A Hat – this is in very common use in the USA, and has a similar yet subtly different meaning to ‘Two Sock.’ A Hat On A Hat is an occasion where two funny things are happening at the same moment in the script, or immediately adjacent moments, and those two comic ideas are each distracting from the other. The solution is normally simple: remove one of them." People like to think that comedy is a matter of opinion. That's totally false - it's the originator of audience testing and a/b testing. Starting in vaudeville performers would carefully study slight modifications to their routine and the audience reaction to them. Every comedian with a repeatable act learns what works and what doesn't. They cut/add/tweak/rearrange. You can clearly see this in early versus later work of your favorite standup. The maturation of everyone's routine follow the same general comedy rules of what stays and goes. It's a describable teachable learnable repeatable skill. It's the reason that lots of successful comedians come out of the groundlings and ucb. It's not a matter of opinion, there's decades of quantified research on this stuff. The OP article if it just followed basic comedy rules and structure would become immensely better.
- codingdave 5y ago
  Blog posts != standup. There may be structure to comedy, but that does not mean that there are dogmatic rules that apply to all mediums and all audiences. Expecting anyone to study and follow the techniques that have been developed for a successful standup routine, and then use them when writing up a blog post is somewhat absurd.
  - kristopolous 5y ago
    It's not just for standup. It's also true for sitcoms, same rules. Live performances are the ones where measurable data exists. People do room reads for written content to test it. It's not all arbitrary
- dcminter 5y ago
  You know how if you have to explain the joke it's not funny? If you have to explain why it's not funny ... "It's not a matter of opinion" really? Says the joke crime commission? Oh wait, there isn't one, because humour is always a matter of opinion.
  - kristopolous 5y ago
    And so is taste in food, fashion, photography, interior design, music, writing. Some things are generally agreed on though. Food shouldn't be poisonous, interior design shouldn't block doorways, music shouldn't damage hearing, comedy shouldn't make people run to the car to get their gun. There's rules for everything.

nemetroid 5y ago

If the perceived problem is stacking too many gags on each other, how would that help? The joke density would be unchanged.

kristopolous 5y ago
Because weaker jokes follow better ones. Comedy is not cumulative, it's a function of minimums The weakest joke is the weight that brings things down. Remove it Narrow the theme, focus on the flow How many times have you read something and there was a bad joke sandwiched between good ones and you remember that? It's better without it. The comedy performs better in all metrics. Think Rodney Dangerfield's rapid tight style. He was a master of this. The theme bounds the humor but the jokes are tight executions He didn't always do that. Took him years to "discover it". Here's a 15 year difference 1968 - https://youtu.be/PiNDirvqSUY https://youtu.be/PiNDirvqSUY 1983 - https://youtu.be/cQLv7CG10B4 https://youtu.be/cQLv7CG10B4 His style changes follows the rules I linked to in the other reply. Listen to the laugh density and duration of the two. It's really dramatically different. Another comparison, same process, Emo Phillips 1983 - https://youtu.be/lRp_r-EHmfs https://youtu.be/lRp_r-EHmfs 2010 - https://youtu.be/xywEDvBTzM0 https://youtu.be/xywEDvBTzM0 Joan Rivers had a large library of her performances that she studied all the time trying to improve the technique in the same way.
- nemetroid 5y ago
  I don't really get what your main criticism is. In your other comment, you said the biggest sin committed was that of stacking punchlines on punchlines (which is a problem of flow, not joke quality), but now you're saying that some of the jokes are too bad and should have been cut? More importantly, though, the standards of live comedy can't be directly applied to something that's intended for reading. Live comedy concerns itself a lot with timing your delivery to the (vocal) audience response. I agree that the linked material would need rework before it could be used as a stand-up routine, but that's not the goal. For what it's worth, I think the blog post is funny. Most of the jokes are funny. Some jokes are less funny, but aren't dwelled on, and by the end of the page I've forgotten the bad ones.

EdwardDiego 5y ago

He's a software developer, not a professional comedian.

Doctor_Fegg 5y ago

I found it funny. Am I just wrong somehow? Am I wrong to like Vaughan Williams' music even though there are parallel fifths all over the place?

kristopolous 5y ago
No. Not at all. You can enjoy a story where chekhov's gun doesn't fire. I didn't mean for this thing to be a big discussion