Also it happens to be adjacent to one of my very, very favorite genres: pretending to be stupid to get other people to reveal that how stupid they think I'm actually capable of being.
I sort of hate this genre from anyone who's actually capable of being offended by how it turns out, because it catches people who are genuinely being kind about the fact that unexpected people have weird blind spots, and it also catches people who themselves think that whatever you're being stupid about is genuinely hard.
If you're armor-plated about the results you get, it's okay, but if not you're setting yourself up to be pissed off at people who don't deserve it.
I feel like 1 is a legit beef. But not what Horsey Surprise is doing.
I'm not going to waste time on that unless Barry says it's good.
Oh, I don't watch videos at work -- my computer doesn't have working speakers. I was just reacting to Heebie.
Like, he's not trying to show up commenters as stupid. He's himself being gleefully stupid for laughs. It's more like an ongoing parody of Yahoo Answers and the internet in general than an "I will reveal how dumb others are." Anyhow don't rip on Horsey Surprise because I love him.*
*mostly -- often he'll take the joke one comment too far, when it would have been better to just drop the awesome and leave.
I sort of hate this genre from anyone who's actually capable of being offended by how it turns out, because it catches people who are genuinely being kind about the fact that unexpected people have weird blind spots, and it also catches people who themselves think that whatever you're being stupid about is genuinely hard.
I've done it here, a bunch, and never had it go this way?
For it to work, you have to propose something genuinely seriously stupid. Pretending to be confused about algebra isn't funny. There's a sweet spot where you get someone to explain to you that you need to type on the keys, not next to the keys, or whatever.
Oh, yeah, that sounds less prone to bad outcomes. I've gotten burned by people doing it the way I described in 1: they play dumb at a not completely absurd level; I'm really not going to call anyone out as implausibly stupid unless they share at least 50% of my DNA, so I take it deadpan and explain whatever it is; they get offended.
Which, I should be more attuned to exactly how dim I can expect random acquaintances to be, so as to know when I can safely say "You're kidding me, there's no way you could be such a moron as to genuinely mean what you just said." But I'm mostly not.
But what you're talking about doing, where it's completely, absolutely absurd, isn't going to run into the same problems.
And, you know, being armor-plated about it. If the whole thing's absurd enough, you're not going to be offended if it works.
I'm of two minds when he uses the back-and-forth to land a more conventional joke at the end, like this or this. On the one hand, it's better when the humor is ambiguous; on the other hand, the results are still funny.
It regularly works really well on my dad. I've had him explain to me that one faucet controls the hot water and one faucet controls the cold water, in our bathroom sink.
Hah, your family is the opposite of mine. In mine, being a family member means a firm assumption that you're smart enough to keep up with anything, and merciless ribbing if you miss a step. Patience and helpfulness is for outsiders. You sound like your dad is kind and patient even with people he's related to. That's got to be weird.
He's basically a pretty patient person, but mostly he's super arrogant about his intelligence. That's the bit that I find fun to exploit.
Huh. But that's not him being arrogant about his own intelligence. You don't need to be particularly bright to know that the faucets control hot and cold water. If it's anything other than reflexive patience, it's contempt for your intelligence.
That is, the conversation you describe isn't one where he's showing off as being unusually smart, it's one where he's not calling you out for being unusually dumb.
It comes from the assumption that he is always smarter than everyone else in the room. He doesn't know how much dumber other people are, but they're definitely dumber.
Maybe it does fit your original diagnosis after all, but I like doing it to people who seem arrogant. And I guess I am armor-plated about it - it doesn't bother me at all. It doesn't seem like a reflection of my actual intelligence in any way, nor does it seem like they'd think I'm dumber than everyone else. That's how dumb they think everyone is.
You don't need to be particularly bright to know that the faucets control hot and cold water.
Thanks. I've been in hotels where it took me a good five minutes to figure out how to get the shower running.
It once took me a good week to figure out how to properly use the shower when housesitting for a professor. I figured out on the first day how to make water come out, but the way you adjusted anything was completely mysterious. (There was one knob and it turns out you rotated it in order to control the temperature of the water, and pulled it out to control the volume. But nothing at all was marked and it was touchy and unpredictable in the way that they can often be, so it wasn't obvious at all.)
Heebie, do you ever end up learning things (other than how dumb you another person thinks you're capable of being) by accident with this kind of trolling? I feel like there are a lot of questions it's easy to avoid asking when I'm concerned about other people thinking I'm dumb.
Ken M's material reminds me of bits like this ( "Why does water expand when it freezes?") from Heller's Good as Gold.
I confess I have a soft spot for this kind of trolling dumbery -- which I think of as teasing -- but there's a world of difference between doing it with an unknown audience, as apparently Ken M. does, and doing it among known (or 'known', online, as with unfogged) people. In the latter case, especially with a comparatively thin-skinned audience, you run the risk of offending people if you reveal that you were .. teasing.
It puts a person in a tough spot: is it really satisfying to do that sort of thing if you can't eventually reveal that you were teasing? That's a question about you, the teaser, or troll. Certainly for myself, in an environment like this one, the answer has been no. It's too bad, though!
Heh, I'm reminded of a bookselling friend of mine who used to troll bookselling lists -- when the occasion arose -- to eventually pretty unfortunate effect.
One time: A bookseller asked for translation help regarding a German title which bore on its title page the phrase "Dritter Band." My friend replied that though he hadn't had a chance to run the phrase through a translation website, he had heard of the musical group called Dritter, and "Band" was probably one of those words that migrates across languages, much as the word "okay" is now used in myriad non-English languages. He went on about their bass player being relatively well-known in Germany ....
Things did not go well, as the original poster tentatively bought it, thanked him for his help, and declared that she'd look into the relationship between this band and the title in hand. Uh-oh.
I've gotta say that 24 doesn't make used bookselling sound like the absolute wildest profession. Where are the orgies, cocaine, and fistfighting I thought you guys went in for?
Those happen at antiquarian book fairs.
There's a big difference between selling used books and selling properly antiquarian books.
Either way, when the snotty asshole who joked about "Dritter Band" runs into everyone else, they either hand him a glass of merlot and make out with him, or deride his mylar-jacketed offerings and punch him in the snoot. In between muttering about who's invited to the after-party.
