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[EXTREMELY LOUD INCORRECT BUZZER] hit home partly because you can't make "beef stroganoff" into a sex joke, that's overtly what's funny, it's funny to imagine someone quietly trying to workshop "beef stroganoff", turning it around every way in their language processing center while like four contestants pulled from the gameshow audience just ruthlessly eviscerate each attempt, that's funny
but to so many of us it hits on a completely different level, because it's the dry feeling of cameraderie you get from a joke about how everyone in the room with you is having the same tough time doing their job.
comedians hang out behind the curtains at comedy clubs, they tell each other jokes, and they know most of the stuff they're saying is "nothing" - a lot of us probably heard that term on Seinfeld first, "nothing."
meaning, yeah, you've figured out a tenuous connection between two ideas, but it's not making your fellow comedian laugh, 'cause it's nothing. and sometimes you know something is nothing, but you gotta try it anyway, because you've been up all night in your hotel room turning "beef stroganoff" around in your head
you thought of it at the grocery store and some neuron fired off, touched off a few others, made you think "that's a weird word. that's gotta be funny. there's gotta be a joke in there" and you haven't been able to let it go for six waking hours. you were even thinking about it on the cab ride over, but the best thing you have is "she strogan on my beef til i'm off." and at this point, if that was something, you wouldn't know, because you probably passed it over eight times before deciding it was the best bit you could get out of this one, and you're numb.
imagine: you tell your buddy this, and he just shakes his head. and then another guy with a big bow tie on makes an extremely loud incorrect buzzer noise, and you all give the slightest chuckle, but everyone knows exactly what boat you're in.
bits, workshopping, nothing - we're all a bunch of fuckin' comedians now. did anyone who wasn't a professional comic put this much effort into jokes before ten years ago? and even if they did, would they self-apply these terms? how did we all end up acting like we're backstage together at some hellhole called Kneeslapper Central, complete with the wistful feeling that we all wish we'd gone into some other career, one with fewer screaming babies in the audience?
I started writing and then scrapped a really tedious response to this that basically boils down to Everyone Should Read Society of the Spectacle, Please, My Son, He Sick
