I need people to stop blaming the death of movies on “quips”. A quip is just a funny line of dialogue. That’s all. Like I just saw a post talking about quips and the death of movies and brought up Pirates of the Caribbean as an example of a better movie and yes it is but also that movie is FULL OF QUIPS. I just rewatched The Princess Bride. It’s all quips. Every single line. And it’s a masterpiece.

Movies suck when people don’t care about the art they’re making. That includes them not caring about their quips. Which is why a lot of comic relief dialogue ALSO sucks now. But the problem isn’t that funny dialogue exists.

#it’s not the quips it’s the complete and utter fear of showing any kind of sincerity#honestly it’s almost the equivalent of saying ‘no homo’ after a moment of being genuine

The Princess Bride is almost all quips, but it’s all sincerity. Every aspect of the plot is ridiculous and yet no movie dialogue has ever gone as hard as “I want my father back, you son of a bitch”

people recognize the problem contained within Whedon-style quippyness without knowing the term for the actual issue so they say “quips” when they mean “bathos”

another problem with quips that’s a little harder to analyze and explain is the quips are all in the author’s voice, NOT the characters’.

steve rogers, natalia romanoff, james barnes, tony stark, pepper potts, and bruce banner are people from radically different walks of life, and should therefore have extremely different styles of communication, despite all off them nominally speaking the same language (english). they should have different senses of humor, different senses of where the boundary lies between irreverence and insult, different boundaries, different sore spots, different goals as well as different methods of communication.

the fact that all these characters banter the exact same way, i.e how joss whedon thinks is funny, is incredibly shallow and grating.

steve grew up as a challenging little shit, who was also very small and poor, and he did it in 1920′s-30′s brooklyn new york. he regularly got his ass kicked. tony stark is also challenging and provocative, he’s a shit stirrer, but he grew up rich as all fuck. no one was beating the piss out of him in a dirty alley. tony has grown up surrounded by sycophants, rich enough to get away with whatever amount of bad behavior he wants to pull; steve grew up poor and disabled in a society that openly advocated for the death and degradation of the weak and unfit. why the fuck would they enter a conversation the same way? why would they deliver a snappy retort the same way? natasha romanoff is a spy, she’s manipulative, she’s always watching to see how a joke lands, she’s always conscientiously tuning herself this way and that to get results. she doesn’t have the luxury of casual defiance, or unthinking obnoxiousness, or even standing by her principles and pissing off someone she hates. again, why would she be tossing off little asides the same as tony, or even the same as steve?

the princess bride is sincere, and the characters still banter in their own voices. fezzik is cautious and methodical, inigo is weary and incredulous, vizzini is desperate to impress everyone with his own intelligence and in so doing often sounds like a complete twerp, buttercup is so incredibly pissed off she doesn’t have any brain cells to spare for joking around, and westley is here to ruin everyone’s day. and it works! the characters have great banter because they’re striking sparks off each other, not meshing like identical cogs in a machine.

humor is about subverting expectations, about breaking up patterns, about confrontation and absurdity. you can’t get that from a blandly uniform pulp.

I have never heard anyone summarize Westley’s character so perfectly in a single line

idk if this is a trope or whatever but i love it so much when fictional characters massively downplay the severity of their injuries but in more of a comedic way than a tragic one. like some guy gets impaled and they just glance down at the shard of metal sticking out of them and say some dumb bullshit like "oh man. that's gonna need some ice." and then pass out while all their friends yell at them for being an unfunny idiot with terrible priorities.

Explaining the joke does not ruin the joke, that is just what became popular in place of two actual points of humor: belaboring the point ruins the joke, and explaining an unfunny joke wont save it. When explaining the joke it is very easy to accidentally do both of these. So people will say "don't explain the joke, it ruins it" when that is actually a lie. What you don't want to do is tell a joke, get a negative reaction, and then try again but worse by ruining the timing with explanatory bits.

It doesn't help that comedians, especially bad ones, hide behind "don't explain the joke" when people call them unfunny, which perpetuates the "rule".

However, explaining a good joke to someone who didn't get some key part of it will save their enjoyment of the joke. Perhaps even more key, being the only one who doesn't get to participate in the group humor is really isolating. Explaining your jokes when necessary is good, just do it right. They key is knowing how and when to explain a joke. For example, when someone asks you to, or in the tags of your post.

Also when the very premise of the joke assumes that people who read it understand something vital and unique about the joke itself or very esoteric knowledge related to the punch line. Goncharev is actually the perfect example of this, you have to know it is fake to even understand a joke is being made. Explaining the joke does not ruin it, it makes the joke possible. (on a side note, insisting the joke not be explained in this and similar cases is not funny, it just makes you an asshole.)

Most important of all, the explanation is not part of the joke and is delivered straight, not as part of the bit. Which is why explaining jokes in the tags works so well, it separates it from the bit.

So stop being assholes and explain jokes when ND people ask you to.

autistic people of a particular flavour will master the art of expressing mundane sentiment in amusing ways because their most successful jokes as children were primarily accidental. and when you realise you have that spark of a weirdo it's just a matter of intentionality and comic linguistic optimisation to make yourself a regular sayer of things in funny ways.

Saying "[X] wasn't invented yet" when the thing

is peak comedy

The Most Tumblr Punchline

I've noted before that my favorite punchline on Tumblr is "hang on, gotta look something up/okay that's funny."

Let me explain why:

As someone who’s had it used on a couple of my posts, it always makes me grin to imagine the moment someone goes “aha!” and starts laughing. It’s like giving a joke-by-proxy back to the joke maker, because now we know you read and engaged with it and get to imagine you enjoying it.

sometimes, when someone does a silly joke, and i respond to it sincerely, it is because i did not get the joke, and sometimes its because i am actually doing a joke myself. i like to call this "the autist's double bluff"

frequently its a superposition. responding to jokes sincerely is inherently funny so you lose nothing in assuming sincerity and if it was a joke you were funnier by putting in more effort. zero loss environment

The fascinating thing about putting human feet on things that aren’t human is that as you get further from the human baseline, it starts out funny, then becomes creepy, then goes back to being funny again. It’s not a continuum.

Like, human feet on a duck: funny.

Human feet on a crab: creepy.

Human feet on a refrigerator: hilarious.

I think roughly the reverse is true for putting nonhuman feet on a person, both in terms of intensity of reaction and the feeling evoked.

Furniture feet on a human: nonsensical to moderately discomforting.

Crab or other invertebrate feet on a human: intriguing aesthetic, artsy even

Duck feet on a human: No.

Let me tell you, my friends, of the story of me and this cursed tumbr post. I am enraged and horrified at the depths to which you have managed to plunge me, oh demons of intellectual curiosity. 

Above you have the Post. Heinous as it is. There it stands. And upon reading the first half of its damnéd text, I thought to myself, “it’s not a linear continuum, it’s a sine wave.” Then I continued to read the thrice-bedeviled second passage, I said, “This is a shifted sine, or perhaps a cosine, methinks.”

At which point I found myself in Excel. With a spreadsheet. I don’t actually remember opening the spreadsheet, but I blame this upon the spell wrought by the discourse above. I dutifully and thoroughly considered the items, and several new ones, to the point of sketching a few of their designs. That calamitous and hellish paper has since been burned over the kitchen sink, as I found I could not look at it without getting sucked back into the mire of this hellish, devil-spawned post.

Here, however, are the final results of my gruesomely insatiable, rigorous analysis.

A table was all well and good but I found myself wondering if it were, indeed, a sine wave, and if so, what sort? And this led, my dear, misguided friends, to a graph. 

It is a sine wave, I said, but not one wave, no, it is the addition of several sine waves, and after a three-hour session with the Goddess Desmos and an appeal to the Paragon of Mathematic Wisdom (commonly referred to as @deadhawke ), the closest we got to the mysterious wave was funniness factor = 2sin(what foot is on) + sin(0.5(what foot is on)).  If anyone is able to find a closer estimate, they are free to read this tome of sacred text:

 http://www.emptyloop.com/technotes/A%20tutorial%20on%20trigonometric%20curve%20fitting.pdf This very text, thanks be to Einstein, Curie, Tesla, and Hawking, was what served to break me from the spell of This Accursed, Most Evil Post, and brought me back to sanity with a cry of “WHY AM I ANALYSING THE ODDNESS OF MISPLACED FEET???” And with that, my friends, I go to bed. 

I applaud your efforts friend, and I have more thoughts on this but it’s 1AM and too late/early to be drawing diagrams, and also I am bad at math.

My favorite thing about this post (I like a lot of things about this post) is that it’s a sideways lesson in data visualization and scientific communication, because if you rearranged the Things axis–Things is not an ordered list, so you could do it however you want–this would not look nearly as satisfying (or like a sine wave at all).

I did try to give the Things an order - from most human to least human. Which is a bit of an arbitrary order, but my thoughts went like this: 

Which just proves I spent too much time on this. 

Aha! A reasonable rubric (and I appreciate the reply!) though I’ll point out that the graph also posits that Human, Duck, Invertebrates, and Furniture are equally spaced along the axis of…um…let’s call it Thing. If I were designing a lesson plan to teach data literacy with this graph, this is the part where I would ask everyone to brainstorm what the units on the Thing axis might be.

I made all kinds of shitty, backwards, obsolete jokes when I used to try to be funny on like 1999 webforums and newgrounds and started doing a gag comic but as I got older and I interacted with more people and was exposed to more conversation, guess what, I stopped finding certain things funny. I didn’t just “comply with  political correctness” and keep them to myself out of fear. I just ceased to see humor in things that were pointlessly demeaning. They didn’t make me happy, they weren’t necessary, they didn’t attract people into my life who were especially kind or enjoyable to talk to and I eventually realized that I only regarded those things as comedy material to begin with because everyone else was doing it and it generated upvotes.

#banned banned all of you are banned#none of you are without sin

@the-rollo

I love these, though I have used more than half of them, they are still beautiful none the less.

you know a joke that never EVER gets old is when a character says smth like “I will NOT go to [place] and that is FINAL” and then it cuts to them in that place I eat that shit up every single time

Equally good variant: when the character says smth like “what’s the worse that could happen?” and it cuts to a scene where it’s so much worse than what they imagined

a superb version: it cuts to a scene thats also worse than the AUDIENCE imagined and youre just like ‘what. what happened. how’

I know it’s ridiculous, but the “person carrying an absurd and improbable number of weapons must remove them all (to the bewilderment of those around them)” trope is still one of the best tropes of all time.

my favorite jokes

incredibly inappropriate units or lack thereof (twelve sand, forty-five mph of cell phones)

basically anything you could reply to with “well you’re not wrong”

Posts where people pretend to not notice something really messed up in a picture and instead critique everything else

Posts that talk about a generic situation but get oddly specific followed by the next person asking if they’re ok.

i just left my job. i couldn’t work for that man after what he said to me.

what did he say

“you’re fired”

why do text posts these days sound like vaudeville humor

Instead of blogging about this awful scene, I’m going to talk to you about cringe humor!

For some reason, American comedy has decided that the best way to make an audience laugh is to put your characters in a situation where they’re doing something incredibly embarrassing and don’t seem to be aware.  I call it “cringe humor,” because the whole point is you’re supposed to laugh at something that would make you cringe in real life out of secondhand embarrassment.

I can’t laugh at this stuff.  I’m too busy cringing.

See, I spent my teenage years desperately trying to figure out how to socialize.  I had to reverse engineer it; I have Asperger’s syndrome, a type of autism that pretty much means you’re born without the ability to absorb social math the way most people do as a child.  When I was twelve or thirteen, I started psychologically torturing myself to stop making a fool of yourself Will come on.  There’s a lot more to it than that, but…whenever I see someone else acting like that, the deeply ingrained reactions from years of reverse-engineering social contact from first principles kicks in, and all I feel is a mix of sorry for them and angry with them.

I’ve gone a lot of years and a lot of therapy undoing the damage I did to myself, but one of the things I honestly take pride in is that I’m not mean enough to enjoy other people making fools of themselves.  Fortunately or unfortunately, this means that the fastest way to piss me off in a show is to start using cringe humor.

I’m not gonna do much blogging about this scene.  I’m gonna power through it as fast as I can, and hopefully there’s fun stuff on the other side.

okay but literally all of this (except for therapy) is me like god damn. I might have written this exact post before. Maybe many of this exact post.

HELLO ASTRAL TWIN CAN WE BE NO-CRINGING FRIENDS TOGETHER

“(comically absurd conspiracy theory) isn’t real…..because (presents significantly more absurd conspiracy theory that renders the first one impossible)” is a pretty solid and modular joke and i’m writing it down in my good jokes book

lets hear a couple more, cloud boy

the united states isn’t secretly run by a race of evil reptilian humanoids because the united states never even fucking existed in the first place