No Soap, Radio
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
A lot of practical jokes (certain kinds of hazing, gotcha interview techniques, elaborate gaslighting, simple harassment) are to comedy what conceptual art is to craftsmanship, where the perpetrator is using art and humour as cover for what is really just propaganda, morbid fixations, and aggression. They're an impostors trope. Comedic genius is in the apprehension and expression of paradoxes, it's a kind of magic trick that creates a flash of insight from the setting up and collapsing expectations with reality, and necessarily, a comedians intelligence is inversely proportional to the stupidity he affects in the setup.
The very best comedy is an expression of magnanimity, where the comedian manages to elevate and forgive the butt of his joke while still taking them down. The audience is involuntarily given the sense of a shared absurd human experience, and not just pandered to. A great example of that difference is how Stephen Colbert ultimately became what John Stewart stepped back from to avoid becoming, which is unfunny.
"No soap, radio," isn't really an anti-joke or surreal, it's more like a kind of perfidy where someone is just being a PoS under the safety of a protected pretext (art, joke, injury, etc). Physical humour can be brilliant (Mr. Bean, Emo Phillips, etc) but that's not practical joking either. Anyway, maybe I've overthought it but I think it's courage and magnanimity (literally, the greatness of soul) that separates the comedians from the clowns.
This statement alone shows a real lack of understanding of comedy.
Also what's the lack of understanding.
If this is a joke in the vein of the original idea, that's great!
Both of them were comedians who performed on Comedy Central parodying television news and opinion broadcasters. Stewart's show was more straightforward where he presented the news while joking about the stories and the people featured therein, whereas Colbert's program was intended as an over-the-top parody of the shows of conservative talking heads like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly. Whereas Stewart somewhat maintained his ability to poke fun at both sides regardless of what his personal politics may be, Colbert turned out to be an ardent leftist who parlayed his parody show into a pretty unimaginative leftist late-night comedy show that is often more about activism and indignation than comedy.
I have no idea what bobkazamakis meant by his remark, though. Perhaps he believes that comedy is funnier when it includes an element of political activism.
By the way did you ever play the game Cyberdogs back in the old days? My brother and I had a blast with it. An enjoyable classic.
They say the difference between a good prank and just being an asshole is if the victim can laugh about it afterwards.
To me, Wikipedia describing this as a "practical joke" and "surreal comedy" in the first sentence, then later going on to describe it as a "psychological experiment [designed to show the] pressure to conform" (which I would describe it as) makes me quite upset.
I don't see how anyone can derive pleasure from making fun of the victim's social ineptitude, desire to fit in, or desire to socialize.
I don't see how the victim could say after the fact "yes, that was a fun prank, I did enjoy this surprise".
This is the sort of "prank" that I would be happy to see delegated to the Social Psychology department at college.
Maybe the victim would find it funny if they were shown the Wikipedia article after the fact and had the psychological experiment explained to them, similar to https://xkcd.com/1053/
Short of that though, this just seems cruel
I can't quite nail what the emotional difference is (to me) - maybe it is that laughing (at no-soap-radio) is a an action showing much more vulnerability compared to facing the "wrong" way in an elevator.
Just curious — why the disclosure?
Background: As a German living in Switzerland, I have a very thin line to walk.
The Swiss already think of Germans as exceedingly direct - whereas a Swiss person might say "Well I'm sure this idea could be good in some circumstances", a German popping in to say "I think this is generally a bad idea" is often looked at as if they had just threatened the speaker's mother with a loaded weapon.
I have a name that is not obviously un-Swiss. I have thus started to point out my nationality as a disclaimer for "Please read this as written. Do not imagine a Swiss person saying this; that would give you the completely wrong impression".
It's a bit saddening that this barrier exists; but rather than be constantly misunderstood, I have had to embrace highlighting my nationality-by-birth even though I have lived in Switzerland as an expat for over 10 years.
You may have lived in Switzerland for 10 years, but by your own account, it seems like you've chosen not to adopt Swiss culture (at least this particular aspect). Culture emerges to facilitate communication with shared expectations; how can you be surprised that people will have difficulty communicating with you if you choose to disregard their communication norms, which you seeem very aware of? To me that feels like some person A complaining that he's lived in Germany for 10 years and is saddened that the average person has trouble understanding person A when he speaks Chinese.
I've simply found that this aspect of Swiss culture stands in real opposition to the engineering mindset I rely on in my work as a Software Engineer.
If my (fictional) non-tech-savvy CEO comes up to the engineering department and says "I just came back from %conference% and we need to put everything we have onto the blockchain!", then I will gladly be the one to speak my honest opinion on that rather than publicly agreeing with the CEO, but then ignoring him and continuing with the existing architecture.
Think of it like this: A convention in the USA is to tip service workers, because they are often legally exploitable (by being e.g. paid below minimum wage). So lots of people outside the S would say that "you always need to tip employees, regardless of if they do a good job" is a terrible part of US culture.
I still tip - but I also preferably simply spend my money at establishments that pay their employees living wages and make the concept of tipping extinct completely.
Wow, this sounds pretty British or maybe American to my Eastern European/Hungarian ears. I thought the Swiss would be rather similar to the Germans in this regard.
I personally find that when people say "Germans have no humor", this is coming mostly from an American perspective, describing "Germans don't laugh at the idle chit-chat I'm trying to make with them", which I would subscribe to as mostly fact. (There's definitely cultural barriers regarding this within Germany too)
There are all kinds of internet theories about the joke, but this makes me realize it wasn’t ever about the joke itself, it was about Hawke voluntarily going along with the nonsense coming out of the other character’s mouth. Which is the exact behavior the criminal character wanted to elicit and evaluate.
As a socially inept kid, I just found the whole thing perplexing.
There is, however, a class of comedy where you can make anything "funny" if you push hard enough on some specific edge of the "joke", where eventually people laugh at/from some combination discomfort and absurdity.
You can say that again.
New members to the track team were pranked in this way, and I was quite confused haha