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May. 30th, 2007 05:30 pmA few hours before the official start of Wiscon, I had lunch with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
oursin, wordweaverlynn, boxofdelights, and a few pleasant strangers. Conversation turned to meta-humor. The LOLcat genre of jokes, for instance, need an audience to be quite familiar with several kinds of background joke, in addition to the nominal subject of the joke. Otherwise the joke isn't just not funny, it has layers and layers of incomprehensibility (with nothing at all to support it. See also old Bullwinkle cartoons, which could be mildly entertaining to kids who didn't get the jokes, but funnier to adults who did.) Now that I've seen some of the LOLcats, I still feel very awkward about them. Some of them seem so self-reflective I don't understand them, or maybe it's just a matter of starting with something I don't get and layering on meta layers I don't get, on top of that, with the expectation that the reflectivity will be funny all by itself. It begins to work for me when it starts with something I recognize and puts the LOLcat structure on top of it. The miller's and prioresse's ones made me smile. http://houseoffame.blogspot.com/2007/05/i-can-hath-cheezburger.html
( meta-humor for beginners )
( graduate level meta-humor ) I think there's something funny and profound there, and I'm curious about how far it resonates. Is the video funny for you?
oursin, wordweaverlynn, boxofdelights, and a few pleasant strangers. Conversation turned to meta-humor. The LOLcat genre of jokes, for instance, need an audience to be quite familiar with several kinds of background joke, in addition to the nominal subject of the joke. Otherwise the joke isn't just not funny, it has layers and layers of incomprehensibility (with nothing at all to support it. See also old Bullwinkle cartoons, which could be mildly entertaining to kids who didn't get the jokes, but funnier to adults who did.) Now that I've seen some of the LOLcats, I still feel very awkward about them. Some of them seem so self-reflective I don't understand them, or maybe it's just a matter of starting with something I don't get and layering on meta layers I don't get, on top of that, with the expectation that the reflectivity will be funny all by itself. It begins to work for me when it starts with something I recognize and puts the LOLcat structure on top of it. The miller's and prioresse's ones made me smile. http://houseoffame.blogspot.com/2007/05/i-can-hath-cheezburger.html ( meta-humor for beginners )
( graduate level meta-humor ) I think there's something funny and profound there, and I'm curious about how far it resonates. Is the video funny for you?
