If it is true, and I think he may have a point, there would be some value in labelling humour or satire as such. It sounds ridiculous, but like it is ridiculous to have a label “not suitable for your pets” on a microwave!
Satire, snark, and sarcasm have to be least effective way you could possibly choose to communicate. You are absolutely begging to be misunderstood and misquoted, either genuinely or maliciously, and then it's nigh on impossible to explain yourself as all your excuses just sound like like it-was-a-prank-bro.
Another huge problem is that satire is often used as cover for telling not-quite-truths. I listen to satirical radio programmes (we have a lot of those in the UK) and sometimes I think they're really bending the truth quite a bit to get the joke and their criticism isn't really fair. That'd be fine if these people weren't simultaneously actual political activists who the next night are saying they're making genuine political arguments, and if people didn't think it's-funny-because-it's-true. I'm pretty sure some of them do satire just to get away with attacking without having to back any of it up, and so they can absolve themselves from responsibility when challenged.
Quite often, I think really I'm just listening to some nasty bullies.
All-in-all, I think satire is a bit toxic for everyone involved.
Not many people have the fortitude to resist their charms or the self-awareness to police themselves indefinitely. I know I don't.
In the US The Daily Show established satirical ha-ha as effective method to deliver news and discuss politics for younger generations.
It started as pure satire but turned into real institution people used to learn about the world. The spinoffs like The Colbert Report and related shows from people who worked in the show is impressive: The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn , Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, The Break with Michelle Wolf and Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj all continue using similar framework.
In the right the effective satire seems to come mainly in the form of internet trolls. It's more hostile, less intellectual. It's for people who see hostility as funny. Despite being very crude, this kind of satire can have huge influence.
I think the satirical shows do a better job of being more subtle and not just being cynical at everything
However, by pointing out absurdity in a way that invokes a positive state of being, welled crafted humor can not only get the point across more efficiently but propagate more effectively if people choose to retell the joke.
Like the comedian in the UK who said she wanted to throw battery acid at politicians. It was (probably 90%) satire. But when challenged if she said she thought you should throw battery acid all she can say is yes with a weak-sounding defence of 'but it was just a prank.'
Scott Adams became world famous writing a cartoon full of snark and satire. These are perfectly valid ways of communicating and in fact they make up a significant chunk of human communication.
Reading comments like yours is somewhat bewildering to me. It seems like you're pushing philistinism as a virtue.
On one hand, I used to follow Scott Adams' blog when he made that assertion and a couple other ones. His point, if I remember correctly, boiled down to "I'm going to present an obviously wrong idea, argue in favor of it, and see where it takes us". In this context, his assertion about people not "getting" humor referred to people taking his hypotheticals for a fact even though he clearly labeled them as "but what if...?". The example that comes to mind is when he argued "What if we assumed that men are rapists by nature, and modeled society around this fact?" and people attacked him for "affirming" that all men are rapists.
On the other hand, he has become one of the stronger Trump supporters I've ever seen (which is not necessarily bad), pointing out how everything he does is a great calculated move to what I consider a delusional extent (which is kind of bad - his POV currently seems to be "by asking Ukraine to investigate his opponent, Trump was doing the country a service"). By reading his blog, I got more and more the feeling that his "what if" questions were not an academic thought exercise, but rather a way to push some toxic beliefs he holds while having the plausible deniability of "it's just a hypotetical".
So my point being: this quote by Scott Adams can go both ways. Maybe he's right and humans are very bad at understanding humor and/or satire, and my two points are in no way related. But I wouldn't rule out the other possibility: that humans are actually very good at spotting what's behind the mask, and that those 30% of people are those who didn't fall for his trick and rightfully called him out for it.
Given all opinions are based around what you would do in a hypothetical circumstance, the limits should be pretty low.
Also, there's a strong difference between satire and hypothetically asserting that rape is innate.
[1] - https://theintercept.com/2016/01/26/ha-ha-hillary-clintons-t...
[2] - https://politics.theonion.com/hillary-clinton-tries-to-woo-v...
[3] - https://politics.theonion.com/why-don-t-people-like-hillary-...
[0] https://jezebel.com/dilbert-creator-deletes-misogynist-rant-...
Let's see some actual research supporting the notion that a third of the population reads and interprets satirical content as straight fact.
> Let's see some actual research
which I find ironic given that you present your personal opinion about that person as if it were a fact. Maybe we should all start cleaning up in front of our own doors first whenever we feel an urge to not criticize (which would be okay) to bad-mouth other people.
In addition, you also do exactly what the comment you replied to ask you not to, seemingly without having given its content any thought whatsoever.
More, Scott Adams didn't say anything here. You merely read a comment from someone making a claim about what he said, in a short sentence. So you don't even have anything from the person you talk about himself. On top of that that claim would not be worth any severe criticism in the given context. Even if it were shown to be wrong, so what? It does not seem to me like anything substantial hinges on it, even if you took it as just a tongue in cheek kind of comment. Anecdotal evidence from reading online forums and discussions seem to indicate that the described phenomenon indeed exists, how many people are involved and if it's always the same ones or not don't seem to me to be of great importance since no quantitative predictions are involved.
Indeed. Who cares whether anything is true or not when discussing policy on websites with billions of users? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
"X seems pretty bogus."
"Who cares if X is true? Anyway, Y Y Y"
When the statement is as outlandish as "30% of people don't understand humor", the burden of proof lies squarely with the person making the claim.
Even if Scott Adams wrote something legitimately offensive, that article, like everything on Jezebel, has an obvious agenda and uses language that rip-snorts while tip toeing around the points Scott was making. If anything, it's made me more sympathetic to him because the obviously bigoted author can't stand the fact that a "white male" said something contrary to the women-are-wonderful stereotype.
In the case of Scott Adams, it's especially not fair to say that he's wrong without actually providing a reason why because, as a person who has been writing humorous comic strips for decades, he's in a position to provide his intuition as to how many people don't understand humor. Whether his belief is actually correct is a matter for discussion. It might be one thing if Joe Dirt off the street was shouting that 30% of people don't understand humor, but it's not unreasonable for someone who writes humor for a living to provide his judgment on how people respond to humor. Scott Adams doesn't write the funniest stuff in the world, but at least give the guy some credit for his experience instead of just pointing out that he doesn't have proof.