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Comment by chihuahua | Hacker News Reader

This is probably the first time I've encountered something where "It's so bad that it's good" makes sense to me. I could not stop laughing. The exterior shot with the Seinfeld-inspired music. The laugh track at inappropriate times. They talk about going to a sushi restaurant, and when they've finally agreed to go, they sit down and don't go anywhere. This is like the alien scientists who want to bring back humans after they've gone extinct, and end up cloning chimps. Bravo!

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The crappiness is unexplainably funny. Jerry speaking the cues in the comedy bits and saying "pause for applause", Elaine clipping through Jerry, George talking to the fridge. I lost it when it cut to an indoor shot with nobody in it for 2 minutes and then cut away.

Wow, I thought also the super spammy lol chat is AI generated as well, but it seems people find this really funny? I mean most of the ""jokes"" do not even have a bad punch line. That's the only thing I can lol at now, why wtf?

The chat collectively playing in to the nonsense is all part of the experience.

MST3K, Rocky Horror, The Room, etc.

It IS the experience. Without the chat I would have checked out of the nonsense in a minute but the audience reacting to the endless non sequiturs truly made this an art.

NEW RESTAURANT

Yep, it's the TV equivalent of Blaseball, or Dwarf Fortress(DF). Given a sufficiently complex generator of event strips, framing[1] becomes a social activity. Blaseball saw the production of wikis[2], songs[3], and announcer recap[4] framings.

Likewise, DF wouldn't be the same without Boatmurdered[5] or any of the other story tellings that followed suit.

Conspiracy theorists follow the same pattern but applied to news and current events - a participatory group activity that discards the majority frame and synthesizes new frames under a different genre. Participants reuse people[6] and locations[7] but rewrite the script to become both playwrights and audience members to a substantially transformed alternate experience of reality.

Watchmeforever, is exactly this group mythmaking experience that pairs a random event strip with improvisational community framing that takes the meaningless output of AI-generated content and transforms it into a meaningful group experience.

EDIT: Also The Sims franchise to a large extent. Longtime players have a certain tendency to embellish in-game events beyond the game's pre-packaged framing in a way that produces deeper meaning than the novice/out-of-the-box-frame engages in. Certainly CK1/2/3 and countless others as well.

1. In the Erving Goffman sense

2. https://www.blaseball.wiki/w/Main_Page

3. https://thegarages.bandcamp.com/track/my-name-is-mike

4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diAHuUV2Meg

5. https://lparchive.org/Dwarf-Fortress-Boatmurdered/

6,7. People qua actors, and locations qua sets.

Blaseball is so great. Baseball already serializes well to text based (like listening to a play by play on the radio) and then they started mixing things in like 4th base, unruns, crow attacks, etc that I loved. I almost want to make my own blaseball style sim (maybe based on WWE wrestling?) but don't really have the time.

I think it’s funny in the same way it’d be funny to watch your kids try to act out their own scene from Seinfeld. It’s not the punchlines that we enjoy, it’s the uncanny proximity to the real thing. Sometimes humor comes from expecting something you’re used to and being served something just ridiculous instead.

The seemingly random laugh track really adds to the whole experience.

The crappiness coupled with the chat makes for a surprisingly hilarious watch.

The microwave so loud it's practically been elevated to a cast member cracks me up

The microwave is massively funny

I definitely enjoy them talking to empty rooms, and posed at awkward angles.

There was a skit just now where they talked about going to a comedy show. Of course the scene cut and they didn't actually go. Except three skits later they talked about "the comedy show we just went to".

The singularity is now.

After that Elaine, Kramer, George all talking about a comedy club experience. When they delivered their lines, they each sat on the couch in the exact same spot, models clipping into one another. Then the camera switched to front view of this new comedy chimera and just lingered without a line said.

Everyone was warning about the singularity but none of us considered the horrors of the comedy chimera.

You've been watching the comedy show this whole time

We were so focused on the singularity that we forgot about the coming seingularity.

Simfeld: A Show about Nothing in a Game about Nothing:

The Sims 4 looks like the perfect home for Seinfeld and friends

https://www.pcgamer.com/the-sims-4-looks-like-the-perfect-ho...

Jerry Seinfeld's Apartment [No CC] // Speed Build - The Sims 4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gu2k_e_4mA

The Sims 4 snuck in a little Seinfeld reference

https://www.reddit.com/r/seinfeld/comments/2r7u5i/the_sims_4...

Perhaps, but it really seems like a show about nothing.

The original Seinfeld or this? I really feel this comment could go both ways, tbh.

Now losing all sarcasm-detection, but perhaps not everyone realizes that that ("a show about nothing") is one of the most common/core descriptions about the original Seinfeld. "That was the joke", *swoooosh* and so on, I guess.

See [1] for instance, but it's also mentioned much earlier in the introduction section.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seinfeld#Themes

The original show was about how a comedian finds their jokes. Jerry said as much in a Reddit AMA.

Reference: https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1ujvrg/jerry_seinfeld...

ALL of them (TV shows). Except for Star Trek of course. (Doesn't make them less enjoyable, though.)

This is a reference to Seinfeld. When Jerry and George pitch their show to NBC, they pitch it is a "show about nothing". Which is almost like an recursion, because the show they pitch in Seinfeld is Seinfeld. So, Seinfeld is a show about nothing.

Seinfeld was about how comedians get their material, not nothing. Hence the opening, ending, and interspersed shots of Jerry doing standup related to the events in the show. Though, they somewhat dropped that in later seasons.

Yes of course it's not literally about nothing :-)

> "It's so bad that it's good"

must be that I am not native English speaker and I've never watched Seinfeld, except for some popular clip over the decades, but this is honestly so bad that is really bad. It's Sierra adventures bad jokes bad.

You have to be a Seinfeld fan to find it funny.

I’m a huge Seinfeld fan and I find this incredibly dull

I have never seen Seinfeld and I think it's hilarious. (Also a non-native English speaker.)

Isn't Seinfeld supposed to be a show about nothing?

I mean, obviously it's not. And it's a lot more than that.

But it seems like a good place for AI to start. It's also one of the most popular TV shows of all time...

The unflinching deadpan delivery of the AI just kills me. Reminds me of say Steven Wright, Mitch Hedburg, Norm Macdonald, Harold Ramis. Absolutely slays me.

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