the spirit is weak. woe be the spirit. the body is weaker still. Siërra R
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ask me about horses
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somewhere on website league
username will be botflymother
really if you wanna find me just look for botfly mother
gonna keep that name around for a good while

cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

[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?


DecayWTF
@DecayWTF

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


TalenLee
@TalenLee

See also: everyone with a politics opinion is a pundit, everyone who talks about games is a reviewer, baudrillard and the simulacra intensifies


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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

this is basically like 37% of all my waking mental activity (and sometimes a few percent of my dreams). very well put. that point where you're trying to make it work, you can't quite drive it home, but you swear to god you're not letting this one go

I feel like there's a connection between this and how meta a lot of media has gotten in the last few years. The "sooooo that happened" and "that's not a thing" school of joke is speaking to us like we're there in the writer's room and it's getting late and we all want to go home.

this is exactly my take and it irritates the hell out of me. it feels like a pandering attempt to make the audience feel like they're part of the process instead of just consumers, like they're all in on the jokes that the writers made while writing instead of just what they put in the script. this is connected to other phenomena like the now-ubiquitous demand that every story take place in a "universe" for which every detail is defined, documented and rigorously adhered to as Canon. and I'm just over here like "I thought the artist was supposed to make the work and we were supposed to enjoy it." it feels like people want to cut open the goose that laid the golden egg and the goose is telling it's staff to help the audience push the knife in because it increases ratings

it is, but that's not a very funny joke. like yes, I laughed, but if you told that joke to someone whose brain wasn't melted by hanging around with comedians all the time, they would just blink at you and maybe nervously chuckle.

the sense of humor of the Modern Generations, and of "online" (in the special sense that we use it, because there are millions of people online with America's Funniest Home Videos-grade senses of humor) is based very deeply in dry meta-comedy, jokes about jokes. the unfunniness of something is funny to us. about half of dril's repertoire is funny because it sounds like someone trying and failing to be clever.

i assure you, if you said "she strogan on my beef til i'm off" to a coworker, they would stare at you like a dog looking at a particle accelerator. i have tried this before.

maybe I've just never been good at mainstream humor (definitely true) but that doesn't seem like a particularly weird reaction to a joke, because the joke is out of context. like, they're basically in-jokes but social media means the in-group can be thousands or tens of thousands of people, and riffing on the theme accelerates accordingly

my buddy and i call this "working in the joke mines." sometimes it's time to pursue another vein no matter how sure you are there's something in "beef bourguignon" and "burgin' on"
tangential to this is how i'll sometimes come up with a couple really fire bars but nothing else to complete even a verse of coherent hip hop

I have no idea what's going on with the joke all of a sudden, but I think "What do you call a masturbating cow? / Beef Stroganoff" was around for much longer than social media.

in reply to @TalenLee's post:

Oh goodness never read about that one before. I’m now slightly terrified that we’re halfway to that episode of Star Trek where the alien race speaks entirely in references to stories they can no longer tell, except it’s going to be “man door hand hook car gun”

I realize this is not really the main point, but:

I'd argue that at least some folks who Talk About Games occupy a different space from review? Like, folks that do less review (aka, should you buy this or not), and more using the game as a jumping off point for a larger discussion. Jacob Geller comes to mind as an exemplar here.

also tries to make art/text/game that isn't meta where it isn't warranted

Like, I think that if you're going to build metacommentary in a text, you need to have something more to say than "lol, this is meta, right?"

Thinking of it, I definitely consider myself much more of a storyteller or a poet than a comedian, as such, this isn't a space I'm really inside of much.

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