Okay, so, operations on Jakku: what was supposed to happ – dammit, GD796, if you can’t keep your hand out of your crotch piece for five seconds, I will cut it off. As I said, what was supposed to happen?
RL29: Um…sergeant, we were supposed to land on Jakku and find some dude with a map.
SG51: Okay, yeah, in frikkin’ Bantha-speak, I guess that’s what was supposed to happen.
AK22: Sergeant! At 0045 we received orders for 1st Platoon, 2nd Company, 4th Battalion, 225th Legion to conduct an air assault onto Jakku in order to interdict a high value target for interrogation by Kylo Ren.
SG51: No one likes a show-off, AK22. But yeah, that’s exactly what was supposed to happen. What did happen? Anyone?
Over on Medium, a fellow referring to himself as “Lucky Shirt” (twitter handle, I’m assuming), just penned (it just sounds better than “typed”) an amusing rant about his poorly made burrito.
It’s funny in that over-the-top-rage way that the Internet loves to love; most of the joke is in how ridiculous it is to summon this much dudgeon over a burrito, while acknowledging that we all get hacked off from time to time at lousy customer service. The rest of the joke is in how wittily he does all that.
But the part that interests me is the appendix, added later:
Angry about the tone of this post?
It was a joke. The tone of it is most of that joke. I would never actually get this angry about anything. I hope nobody would. And it makes me sad that I even have to explain this.
Ah, but you do, good sir. You do.
Because working yourself into a towering rage over something unimportant: people do that. People take to the internet to issue jeremiads over how poorly mixed their smoothies were. It is an assumption to think otherwise.
And the worst of all assumptions is that everyone shares yours.
Irony – and indeed, all humor – is based on shared assumptions of what is rational and what is absurd. None of them are global. All of them are contextual. This is why we say “you had to be there.” This is why gags that tickled your parents’ collective ribs seem utterly tired and lame to you. And it is why the Beastie Boys spent the rest of their career denying that they were anything like the guys in “Fight for Your Right to Party”, to no avail.
This doesn’t mean that people who don’t “get it” are stupid, mind. It just means they aren’t in on the gag. Either because they haven’t been introduced to it, or they are confused by the assumptions inherent therein. So, the more over-the-top your irony, the more obvious it is to you that no one could take this seriously, the more it needs a disclaimer warning against exactly that.
Because IRONY DOES NOT TRANSLATE TO MASS MEDIA. Irony is a wink. Mass media is a bullhorn.
He’s a politician, which means that his first language is lies. If you can’t make that funny, you need to give it up.
This is not LOL funny, but it’s not bad, even if it is ideologically charged. I know our professionals can do better. So I am forced to conclude that they don’t want to.
Went downstairs and turned on the TV and was amused to see I’d left off watching “They Live,” which is The Matrix except with a wrestler.
Heh. But that’s on OTC pain pills. Wait for Mr. Vicodin to come to town:
Vicodin #2 seems to have had the desired effect. Unfortunately, it has effed me up to the point where typing and typing as fast as possible seems the only way to maintain grasp on reality. If you can imagine feeling like you’d just eaten a pound of opium, then topped it off with a brick of raw meth, well, there you go: simultaneously distant and soothed and REALLY REALLY HERE, RIGHT HERE, VERY MUCH HERE.
And then of course, he starts hearing things:
Well, last night I heard a whining sound, culminating in a tortured shriek. I’d hear it, then silence, then a few minutes later, same thing. What. the hell? Finally went up the block to investigate, whereupon I heard the sound behind me, and realized:
IT’S COMING FROM MY HOUSE.
I have very little experience with drugs, save for having discovered the folly of mixing muscle relaxant with beer, and for a few lovely minutes spent hanging out with Valium right before I got my eyes fixed. Valium is awesome: you’re fully aware and can have a perfectly lucid conversation without the effort to “maintain,” but everything issmoooooooothed out . . . Then again, I was singing “Mother’s Little Helper,” to myself and giggling before they led me down the hall to to the Lasik room, so I could be rhapsodizing.
