#social-dynamics

[mclegibilist]

On the Need for Targeted Comedy

A few years ago, I realized that the job that most matched the character of my soul was being a stand-up comedian. I don’t mean that my calling is to be a stand-up comedian, I mean the kind of archetype that stand-up comedians tend to occupy through honing their art is my resting state. This doesn’t mean I’m a good stand-up comedian either, and I doubt I would be. Rather, it means that, from what I can tell hearing people describe their art, seeing them practice and perform it, and looking at it’s evolution over time is that the kinds of emotional spaces I occupy and the kinds of problems I solve to navigate them are similar.

This has been a great boon to me, because I’ve learned a lot about how to deal with my life from listening to stand-up comedians talk about their journeys, more than I’ve learned from other people talking about such things, on average.

But it also makes me realize something: I would give it a solid-go, if I could be a stand-up comedian for specific people, if I could choose my crowd. This happens, to some extent through the choice of venue, through self-selection, etc. but the reality is that comedians still have to deal with incredible variance, which forces some adherence to lowest-common denominators.

In some sense, that’s what kills 90% of the comedy that could be, the realizations you’ve found a great way of expressing but just wouldn’t play widely enough. I think that’s where the real funny is at, and even better, I think that the ability to unlock a method at creating and distributing comedy will change the way we communicate. Right now, “virality” is what platforms aim for, forcing people to live under big tents, because that’s content creators are incentivized to please large volumes of people. But I believe an unfilled niche is already inching into showing itself: targeted comedy.

The funniest funny isn’t the kind that creates a group in order to make in group jokes, it’s the kind where in group jokes reveal a group that was already there.

Comedy is the path towards revealing emergent coordination, because the people who get it will know they have something to share with each other.

[mclegibilist]

If I Fail

I feel, that if I fail at my life goals it will 100% be because, in general, I was playing so many games to get into a space where I could say what I actually thought about the things I wanted to study and be taken seriously. Most of my peers aren’t unsupportive per se, but generally I don’t tell them what I really think about 99% of even study-relevant subjects, because I know I’ll be putting myself in a position where (a) they’ll rebut with some classic defenses that everybody accepts as common wisdom in my field and (b) they’ll still go off and use the ideas and (c) I’ll fall into the role of “punching-bag idea guy” that they like to talk to but can always throw under the bus because I’ve put myself in an indefensible position for the social status games of academia.

[mclegibilist]

Understanding What a Dunk Looks Like

A note on notation single quotes ('') are for quoting the presented text, single quotes ("") are for everything else that would normally go in quotes.

The first stanza of "Jenny and the Ess-Dog" goes like this

Jennifer dates a man in a 60s cover band

He's the Ess-dog, or Sean if you wish

She's 18, he's 31;

She's a rich girl, he's the son;

Of a Coca-Cola middle man

listen on youtube

listen on spotify

This is what we call a "dunk". Some might say this is obvious. My desire, in analyzing communiciation, is to give reasons for the obvious that we feel transfer robustly between examples, reasons that are predictive in uncertain situations.

Here's my question, how do I know this is a dunk? Rather than a full analysis, which could be a PhD thesis, let me list a few points of evidence:

#1 '60s cover band' — the 60s were a great time for music, but 'cover band's are considered derivative and therefore not good signals to any of the desirable qualities being in a band might display. The fact that they cover music in the 60s indicates they are nothing but an homage to greatness. It also contextualizes how "stuck in the past" a 31 year old is, as we find on the third line.

#2 'Ess-dog' — Is bygone slang and, again, this man being 31 makes this feel "try-hard". People, knowing that being youthful is a cultural virtue, dislike those who plainly attempt and fail to keep their youthful air more than those who don't even try. They are the posers, the people who need to be specifically singled out to show where the real signal for a category is.

#3 'Sean if you wish' — 'if you wish' isn't something you usually use to end a statement, unless you intend to show your resentment for those who choose that path. Beginning a statement that way can be slightly different: "If you wish to sing, then sing!" This gives the impression of "imposing self-image on others", i.e. explicit manipulation of other people's behavior in a way that doesn't "fit" what the other person thinks you can ask of them, everyone hates that. Maybe "Ess-dog" would have flown these days, since people can choose their names and pronouns in many circles, but having to use "the" feels like grandeur.

#4 'She's 18 he's 31' — it probably goes without saying given current age-gap discourse that large age gaps (usually measured in their proximity or excess over a decade) are looked down upon in the current Western world. In this case, this is profiled as "youth seeking" on the part of the Ess-dog.

#5 'She's a rich girl' — we don't even need the second half of this sentence to say: saying someone is dating someone rich almost always implies money-seeking, even if it's just to "match class". And in the Modern™ world where class is fake, except for rich people fucking over everybody else, this is considered, what's known as "really lame and gross".

#6 'he's the son/Of a Coca-Cola middle man' — there's a lot here. being defined by your dad is bad these days: you're "supposed" to be someone individual, you're supposed to "make yourself" despite your privilege, if you've got it. But the privilege here is sad and pitiful, i.e. Ess-dog's dad is only a 'middle man' which means he's not on top, so he's not powerful enough to be impressive, and he's not on the bottom so he's not a sympathetic character. He's someone who ruins other people's lives while having his life ruined. And what about his mom? Why can't she do something cool. Anyway, Pater Ess-Dog works at 'Coca-Cola' which everyone hates, for a plethora of reasons. It causes obesity. It's too big, so obviously it's corrupt in the anti-capitalist mindset. And most importantly, it represents the idea of "soulless brand interested in making as much profit as possible." I definitely believe that one, though I guess I think that's actually true of every identity, just with different ideas of "profit".

Of course there's much more, and this is only the first stanza, but we'll leave this here as an initial push into the kind of analysis I'd like to see, the kind of cultural archiving I think we need.

[mclegibilist]

Machiavellian Naïvete

Since coining practical terms and terms of praise is passé at this point, let me coin an insult:

Machievallian Naïvete (n) — a property of many modern brands of authenticity that insists that eschews complex strategic behavior, by sublimating any tactics developed into an intuitive want or lifestyle choice. This launders strategy into what is (truly) an authentic persona, but one that is burdened by the need to constantly make itself "correct" under the notion of authenticity it has bound itself to.

It's an insult, because (apparently) no one wants to be called Machievallian, which I think is a result of a lot culture telling us that planning against people behind their backs is bad, even if you're in competition with them. But actually, I would argue that this term can be applied to most moments of true authenticity—not because those moments are less authentic than we believe, but because the contextual factors that allowed us to be authentic in that moment are almost always generated by our sensitivity to what is allowed.

It is pure Machiavellian Naïvete to spew your edgelord opinions with a friend you've developed an intimate bond with full of irreverant chatter, and it is one level further into this Naïvete to train yourself that saying the ones about religion is "bad taste" because of your differing opinions there.

After all, where did you get this notion of "bad taste"? Is it that it hurts people? I don't quite believe that, we tend to guard certain opinions that hurt people as "defendible"? The classic defensibility criteria are moral principles, but where did these principles come from? It doesn't matter who made them, I mean why do we accept them?

We accept them because they endorse the group dynamics we've come to feel are desirable, though this notion of desirable is obviously not universal or even especially intersubjectively robust locally.

Doesn't matter, because 99.999% of the time you don't need to understand what principles you're claiming to back will do you need to know which ones will cost the most for some interlocutor to deny, giving you clearance to use the principle as a foundation in your argument.

This is what Machieavellian Naïvete and almost all social strategy are really about: making yourself unaware of any strategies that are difficult to defend to those who might call them out.