All Episodes
Previous Next
June 16, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
45:15
Episode 63 - Scott Explains How Jokes Work Because Half the Country is Confused
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hey sleepyheads, it's time to wake up and get your beverage.
It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
For the early birds, I'm going to take my first simultaneous sip.
the rest of you go get your coffee mugs quick bum bum bum so yesterday was an interesting day for me Some of you may have noticed over on Twitter, the level of hatred for me in particular yesterday.
There was a lot of hatred on the internet yesterday, but for me in particular, oh my god.
It's probably the most hate I've actually received since the election itself.
And the thing that sparked it was I saw a tweet by Soledad O'Brien in which he was talking about the president and referred back to his McCain comment in which the president had famously said he prefers people who didn't get caught.
Now, Soldad noted in her tweet that he literally said he prefers people who don't get caught.
And the implication is that the president is a horrible person who said a horrible thing.
And in her quote, she said, he literally said, you know, that he prefers people who don't get caught.
I retweeted it with my own comment, which was, and it was literally a joke.
Now, I didn't think that would cause much problem.
But boy, was I wrong about that.
Turns out, That it unleashed this bottled-up hatred that I think has been marinating and stewing since the election itself, just looking for any escape to come out and spread its bile over people.
So I ended up in this extended debate yesterday, which I found fascinating and entertaining to me, in which I would try to explain to people what a joke was.
And it turns out I was getting a lot of pushback on even whether I could recognize a joke.
And so, for my own entertainment, I said something that I knew would just set a hair on fire because it's the sort of thing you're not supposed to say.
So because I wasn't supposed to say it, I thought, I'm not supposed to say this.
I'm totally going to say this.
Let's just see what happens. So what I did was, most of the people who were coming after me were the party of hate.
The people on the left, I've dubbed the party of hate, because all we really see out of them is not solutions and helpfulness, but rather just pure hate.
And that hate was directed at me yesterday.
So, what I said, to whip it up a little higher, since most of the people in the party that hate, one of their big attacks against their people that they don't like on the right, is that the right is anti-science in a variety of ways.
Now, I don't think that's true.
If you compare the two groups, they just have different things that they agree on the science.
You know, this group loves this kind of science, this group loves the other.
They're both pro-science.
But the left likes to say the other side is science deniers.
And so I thought I would give them something to chew on so that they could debunk their own side while they were insulting me, because I thought that would be funny.
So I said, paraphrasing, I said something like this.
I said that I'm a professional humorist with three decades of practice and that I've literally written a formula for humor.
And so if you're saying that what President Trump said is not a joke, It's your opinion against a, you know, a professional humorist who does this literally every day.
Now, I thought that would be kind of funny because, you know, any normal person would say, well, okay, well, you got a point there.
You are the expert.
There's no doubt about that.
But, you know, I didn't recognize this as a joke, but, you know, I bow to your expertise.
Because that's sort of what a stable, level-headed person might have done, even if they still disagreed.
Even if they still disagreed, a normal person would say, okay, that is a good point.
You are a professional humor writer for 30 years.
You're probably pretty good at recognizing what is a joke.
But did they do that?
No, they did not. Most of them came back to me with some comment like this.
Shut the F up, you a-hole.
You are a disgusting garbage human.
You are the worst person in the world.
It was a level of hate that you rarely see.
It was just lots of it, which was entertaining.
But I thought that I would do a little tutorial.
I'm going to go to the whiteboard here and teach people.
How to recognize a joke.
Now you'll also learn a little bit about how to write a joke, but you won't become a joke writer from this lesson, but it'll get you about halfway there.
So let's go to the whiteboard and we're going to talk about President Trump's what I call a joke and other people just say is plain mean and could not be a joke.
And it was his comment, for those of you who don't know, Senator McCain, when he was in the service, was shot down over Vietnam.
He was captured. He was tortured.
He was badly injured.
And by all credible accounts, he is a legitimate war hero.
Somebody's saying the word songbird.
I believe there's a fake news that says that he was talking and broke under pressure.
My understanding is that that's just fake news, but it's very popular on the right.
So to the best of my understanding, There's nothing like that that ever happened.
So McCain is a legitimate war hero, worthy of great respect.
So let's agree that base, and then we can talk about this without that getting in the way.
So here are a few things you need to know about humor.
Number one, I've been saying this often lately, about 30% of the public...
Literally, there's no joking here, but actually, literally, technically doesn't have really a sense of humor.
Now I mean that the same way I can't appreciate, let's say, a fine wine.
I don't really have those kinds of taste buds.
I mean it the same way I don't have any musical ability.
I'm a little tone-deaf.
There's nothing wrong with me.
It's just that particular skill I just don't have.
There are some people who have no artistic ability, just whatsoever.
No artistic ability.
There's nothing wrong with them.
Talent is distributed unevenly.
And it's my observation, after a long life of writing humor and watching people react, that about a third of the public, legitimately not meant to be an insult, With complete respect, I say about a third of the public doesn't actually have something that I would call a sense of humor.
And I don't mean that as criticism.
It's just a fact. Now, they don't know it.
Because the weird thing is, if you don't have a sense of humor, you're just seeing other people laughing at stuff.
And you might say, well, I laugh too, but it's when I see somebody fall off a bicycle or the ball hits them in the nuts or something.
But about a third of the people just don't really have a sense of humor.
Here's my two of six rule created long ago.
I've written about this. If you just Google two of six rule on humor and my name, you'll see some details.
But the rule works like this.
In order for something to be recognized as a joke by not the 30%, because they can't recognize a joke, but by the 70% who do know what jokes are, you've got to have at least two of these dimensions or it doesn't qualify.
People just won't recognize it as a joke.
Now let me go through this to give you some insight what they mean.
Mean is anything, well you know what mean is.
It's a joke that's at somebody's expense.
So you're making fun of somebody, you're being a little mean, or there's something bad that happens to somebody.
Something mean happens. Bizarre is any two things that are out of place.
You'll see in comics quite often that animals will be talking and walking on their hind legs.
That's bizarre. And it's one dimension.
If you get that right, as the Farside cartoon often did, you remember the old Farside cartoon.
There was lots of animals that stood upright and talked.
So he had this dimension sort of automatically before he even needed to write the rest of the jokes.
It was a good setup.
Clever is a play on words or something that's been engineered differently or just looked at differently.
You'll recognize clever when you see it.
Naughty is usually bathroom humor, sex jokes.
I'm not generally attracted to that kind of humor, but it needs to be on the list because some people are.
Recognizable. This is the dimension I use the most with Dilbert.
Recognizable means that you look at the joke or the comic and you say, oh yeah, I was in that situation.
So if you can say, oh yeah, I was there.
I recognize that situation.
That's that dimension.
Cute is usually animals and kids.
Adults aren't really cute in the sense that matters for this.
So let's take possibly the greatest comic of all time, Calvin and Hobbes.
Calvin and Hobbes is cute.
Cute little kid.
Cute little stuffed animal, Hobbes.
So before he's even written the joke, he's got this dimension because he's such a good artist.
He uses clever quite often.
The dialogue is clever.
The situations are clever.
He engineers clever little outcomes that you didn't see coming.
It's bizarre because the talking tiger is sometimes a real tiger and sometimes a stuffed tiger, so that's bizarre.
It's not something you see in the real world.
And then often mean things would happen, you know, there's things with the bullies, something bad happens to one of the characters, that sort of thing.
So the reason that you thought Calvin Hobbes, and this would be a widely held opinion, was the best comic strip of all time is because it was designed from the beginning to take advantage of the artist's talents for both art and writing.
And he would start often with four dimensions, and you only need two.
So he was sort of doubly formulated, if you will, before he'd even done much work.
So it's not an accident that Calvin and Hobbes is one of the greatest comics of all time.
It was designed so it could hit a lot of elements all the time.
Dilbert has a similar but less effective design.
So if you come down a level from both Peanuts and Bill Watterson, they both use the same formula.
Kids, talking animals.
Snoopy and Hobbs are basically the same character if you think about it.
Snoopy is a regular dog, but then he's also flying on his sop with camel on top of his doghouse.
So Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes both are designed to automatically take advantage easily to the major dimensions.
It's not an accident that they are the most popular comics of all time.
Dilbert takes advantage of the recognizable one most of the time.
I say, yeah, if you worked in a big company, you'd recognize this situation.
Then I'll do something that's usually clever or mean.
Sometimes I'll have a talking dog.
So most of my comics are two-dimensional.
Sometimes I get three.
Once in a while, I'll hit four, and that will be my most popular comic.
Now, if you're someone who does this for a living and you recognize the formula, you can look at a comic that's trending and viral, and you can say, ah, I see why that's viral.
Look at the dimensions.
One, two, three, four.
I don't know if anybody's ever written a six-dimensional joke.
It seems like it's theoretically possible, but I don't know that anybody's ever accomplished it.
If you ever see it, it's going to be a good joke.
Alright, so, looking at the McCain joke, which I call a joke and other people don't, we can just see if it hits the dimensions and then we can do a confirmation by saying, did people laugh?
Now the fact that people laughed at it doesn't make it a joke.
But it might be further confirmation if you've hit the formula.
So President Trump's joke about McCain was that instead of calling him a war hero, Trump said, I prefer people who didn't get caught.
That's pretty mean.
Isn't it? That's really mean.
Because he's a war hero.
You know, somebody who was in the service, serving our country.
And he was literally put up with torture for the honor of his country.
And he's saying, I prefer people who didn't get caught.
That's really, really mean.
It's also one dimension of the humor formula.
It was also clever.
It was clever in the same way that Trump reframed Jeb Bush.
So he took Jeb Bush, who was this calm, collected, very capable executive type with a lot of experience, and he reframed that cleverly into low energy.
And then you could never see it.
That's the only way you could ever see it after that.
So it was the same clever reframe that he attempted.
He attempted to say, in a joking framework, well I prefer people who didn't get caught.
Because it takes all of this awesome goodness which, if we're being honest, the President and every single person observing the situation agrees that a legitimate war hero is sort of a standard that you don't go after.
So it was clever to take this holy, very respected symbol of war hero who literally put up with torture for the honor of the country, for the benefit of the other people who were not going to be released as soon as he did.
McCain actually delayed his own release so he wouldn't be released before the rest of the guys there.
I mean, very honorable stuff.
And when you reframe that and say, I just prefer people who don't get caught, to me, it hits the formula, it's very mean, it's very clever, and it fits it.
Now, what some people say is, oh my god, it's punching down.
That's punching down.
You don't punch down. Because when you think about it, you think of Trump as this billionaire who's the President of the United States.
You know, literally the most important, not important maybe, but maybe most powerful human being in the galaxy.
I don't even think that's a, that's not an exaggeration, right?
President Trump at the moment He might be the most powerful person in the galaxy.
And when you think of McCain, you think of this young service person who's badly wounded in a cage in Vietnam as a capture.
And you think, all right, this powerful, most powerful person in the galaxy punching down at this young service person who's just trying to serve his country.
Ugh! Ugh!
You know, your human instinct is like, no, we don't like punching down.
But that's not what happened.
I just made you revise your memory, and you might not even notice what I just did.
What I just described never happened.
Here's what did happen.
Candidate Trump, not the most important person in the galaxy, Was widely believed to be a ridiculous clown, a racist, a misogynist, a xenophobe, and 50 other insults.
The world expected he had no chance of ever holding any kind of office, had never held any office.
He was literally the most disrespected, lowest of the candidates in terms of sort of how the good people think about him.
At the time of the joke, McCain was a senior senator, maybe the most important senator, which would make him maybe the most important person in the entire U.S. government who wasn't actually the president.
And even the president was a lame dog at that point.
So you could argue that McCain was one of the most powerful people in the world and a war hero.
Most powerful person in the government, or one of them, right, in the top ten at least, and a war hero.
McCain's up here. Candidate Trump was way the hell down here.
Trump was absolutely punching up.
He wasn't President Trump punching down at an imaginary 25-year-old years ago who was in a cage in Vietnam.
That would be punching down in the worst possible way.
But because your mind is conflating the present and the past, you have this image of Trump punching down and it's gross.
But it also didn't happen.
It's a complete imaginary situation.
Now here's another concept you need to know about humor.
The funnier something is, the more you can get away with.
This is just always true.
If something is hilarious and also really, really mean, You're still just going to laugh and say, okay, that was really mean.
But it was certainly hilarious.
So the hilarious part just sort of washes out the mean part and you go, I'll live with it.
I'll live with the mean part because it was pretty funny.
But if you're not funny enough and yet you say something that's sort of mean and dangerous, such as trying to reframe a legitimate war hero as someone who got caught, That's a dangerous thing to say, but it's only two of these dimensions.
It's mean and it's clever.
To do something that dangerous and that mean, mean sounding.
Anyway, I don't think it was mean, but it was mean sounding.
It struck all of us as mean, so that's the same point.
You're going to need to hit three, maybe four dimensions before you've got a little cover.
Trump's mistake was what I call a joke mistake.
A joke mistake.
He didn't have enough dimensions in his formulation, so he was not on the funny danger line.
He was below it. He was dangerous without being funny enough.
And he had 30% of the population who couldn't even tell he was trying to be funny.
So there was a lot of mistake there.
So just to be clear, from the first time I heard him say it, I labeled it as a mistake.
So most of my criticism yesterday was in the form of, my God, how can you say this was a good thing?
Which is exactly what I don't say.
It was a terrible thing.
It didn't work out.
It didn't work out for Trump.
It didn't work out for McCain.
It didn't work out for the people who didn't recognize it.
It didn't work out for me.
It didn't work out for people in the service.
It didn't work out for anybody.
So you can't say it was anything but a mistake if it literally didn't work for anybody.
You know, at the very least, if it had worked out for Trump himself, but maybe it was bad for other people, you could say, well, I don't agree with it or it was mean or it was evil.
But at least he did what he was trying to do.
None of that happened. Nothing about this worked.
It just became this big problem, right?
But, let's put it in context.
It wasn't a problem...
Like murder. It was sort of a problem, like a joke that didn't land.
Now, what are the things that people liked about President Trump?
If you were to say, in the briefest possible way, tell us what voters liked about him in the first place.
You could talk about all of his policies and you could talk for hours, but what's the heart of it?
What's the simplest explanation of why people were drawn to the president?
I'll give you my opinion.
It's because he didn't respect boundaries.
He didn't respect boundaries.
And we thought, lots of people thought, not everybody, but lots of people thought that's just sort of what we needed right now.
We needed somebody who had the right intentions to make the country a better place, as long as we trusted that his interests and our interests were the same, and why wouldn't he want the country to be greater?
That accrues to his benefit as well.
So in my case, I trusted, well, his self-interest And the country's interests are going to be the same because there's so much watching of him.
Even if he wanted to do something bad or watching too closely, it couldn't happen.
So as long as his intentions are good, we have a better feeling about him.
All right.
Now, you may remember Kathy Griffin did something that she might have thought was a joke.
She posed for a picture in which she held a representation of President Trump's bloody severed head.
It caused many people to criticize Kathy Griffin.
Do you remember what I said?
I said, it's just a joke.
It didn't work.
Didn't work for Kathy.
Some people liked it and they laughed.
But it fell flat.
I, publicly and immediately, defended Kathy Griffin.
Because I said, yeah, I get why everybody is offended.
But this isn't like murder.
This is a joke that didn't work.
And how do I know it's a joke?
It was mean.
It was bizarre.
It was clever.
It had all the dimensions.
Kathy is a professional humorist.
There's no other explanation of what she had in mind.
But people said, quite reasonably, this isn't funny enough.
You're below the funny line, right?
Even though it had the elements, it just struck us wrong because it's so gross and it's...
It reminds us of the real beheadings, and that's now funny.
So because we could think of the real beheadings and they're still fresh in our minds, we couldn't process it as a joke, most of us.
Now the people who hated the president did process it as a joke, and they laughed.
Now, laughter is a confirmation that something was a joke.
Similarly, if you play back the video of President Trump, the very first time he said, yeah, President, or the first time he said McCain got caught, you hear that the, and he prefers people who didn't get caught, you hear the audience laughing.
Now, they're gasping, but they're also laughing.
So it's not the laughter that tells you it's a joke, because people do laugh at things that are just awful or surprising.
But the laughter can confirm after you've seen that it hits the notes.
It's like, oh, I hit the notes and people laughed and the person doing it is known for telling jokes.
That's a joke, even if it's not funny.
So I defended Kathy the same way I defend President Trump.
A bad joke is a bad joke.
Now the people who say it's not a joke, They're not exactly saying he wasn't trying to joke.
They're saying that his main message was the evil part.
His main message was that McCain was not really a war hero.
Now, I would suggest that in context, what we saw was President Trump in a competition to become president in which the entire, I would say the main fabric of the competition was demeaning the critics and the people you're running against.
It was the main thing people were doing.
During the same time, candidate Clinton was calling the president a racist and saying everything he did was dark and he was a sexist and all these.
Now if you think all those things are true, Then you don't even notice that anything bad happened.
If you think that they're not true, you say to yourself, my God, how could anybody say such terrible things in public?
And it's just horrible.
Imagine calling another person in public a racist.
That's some serious shit, right?
Hillary did that every day.
Now you say, well, some people are going to say, well, that's okay, because he really is one.
But, you know, that's a pretty high standard to call somebody a racist.
I personally don't think he is in any meaningful way that isn't universally true of all people.
But if you look at President Trump's reframing of Hillary Clinton as crooked Hillary, It was deeply demeaning.
It was meant to diminish her.
But it was also a little bit funny in the context of his nicknames.
That one worked. So the reason that Crooked Hillary worked, Ly and Ted worked, and Low Energy Jeb worked, Is that they were funny enough and they weren't really dangerous because people say, okay, he's just making fun of another candidate.
It's lighthearted and everything.
So he stayed on the line with those other ones.
And that's what made it work.
So, Michelle Wolf.
She did her comedy routine at the White House Correspondence Dinner.
Her critic said, my God, that wasn't funny.
You were just being mean to, especially to Sanders.
But The people on the left said, no, that was just funny.
She's just doing jokes.
She was hired to do jokes.
And the people on the right said, my God, that's not funny.
These are not jokes. She's just being mean.
What did I do? I defended her.
They're just jokes.
Were they mean? Yes.
Was Michelle Wolf off the line?
Yes. She was not funny enough.
For how mean she was.
Just like Kathy Griffin with that one situation.
And just like the McCain reframe.
So it was okay when President said, Jeb Bush is low energy.
But think about it.
Jeb Bush had been a public servant For many years, a respected politician, someone who easily could have been the President of the United States, and we probably would have been happy about it if we didn't know any contrast.
So was it fair to call Jeb low energy and label him forever?
Not really, but it was funny enough.
And it wasn't that bad, so he got away with it.
Now, when the president goes after a war hero, he's doing what people liked about him, at least his supporters liked.
There was a line he wasn't supposed to cross.
You don't make fun of Senator McCain's war record.
That is a line you do not cross.
Here's President Trump.
Hey, was there a line back there?
Didn't notice. It's kind of what people liked about him.
That one case, I label it as a mistake.
But consider how many things he said in public, how many jokes he's done in public, etc.
You know, he's got a pretty good record for humor.
Now, amazingly, I argued with people online yesterday, quite a bit, a number of people, who said that President Trump has never been funny or never attempted humor before, and therefore this wasn't humor either.
And I thought to myself, President Trump has never attempted humor in public?
What world are you on?
What do you call his rallies?
And then somebody would say to me, oh, he's done humor in public.
Are you referring to his press briefings?
To which I say, yes.
Yes. He says funny things in his press briefings.
That's exactly what I'm saying.
You haven't noticed? How did you not notice?
Alright, so the funniest critic yesterday was, do you know the name Andy Richter?
He was a sidekick for Conan.
I'm not sure if he still is, but he has also an independent career in humor and humor acting.
And I don't know if he does stand up, but he might.
And he came after me too for suggesting that the McCain reframe was intended as a joke.
A professional comedy guy.
And he came after me personally.
It wasn't, you know, I disagree that it was a joke, or I don't like President Trump.
He came after me.
With no specific criticism, just came after me.
And, I don't know, dozens and dozens, maybe over a hundred, actually I think a few hundred people, literally just came for me and just insulted every part of my looks, my personality, my talent.
Hundreds of people came by just to say, oh, I think he's the guy who does Dilbert, or no, I think he's the guy who does Garfield.
Or to tell me that Dilbert has never been funny, not even once, so how would I know what a joke looks like?
And it was once again the party of hate.
There was no arguing with the point.
There was nobody saying, oh, you know, Scott, I don't believe that your formula works or that it's valid.
Nobody said that. Nobody said, yeah, your formula is valid, but I think in this case he only hit one dimension, which wouldn't be enough.
Nobody said that. All they said was that I personally am a horrible, horrible piece of garbage.
That was their argument.
That I'm garbage.
So I thought I would create this little video and then I'll link to it for all the people who don't understand how humor works.
But I would ask those who came after me personally to check to make sure you haven't become the thing you hate.
I've defended your side and we'll keep doing it.
If your side tells a joke and it doesn't land, and even though there was a mean real message at the base of the joke, the real message was, I don't like President Trump.
The real message was, we don't like Sarah Sanders.
We don't like the administration.
The real message here was the president was just reframing a critic the way he reframed low energy jab and lying Ted Cruz.
Joke didn't land.
Jokes didn't land for everybody.
Jokes didn't land for everybody.
But they landed for some people.
They landed for the people usually on their side who weren't too sensitive about these things.
I'm going to defend humor as not the same as murder and not the same as a direct message.
Consider, if you will, that any of these three people had taken their joke format and said just the mean part of the joke, the part that they meant, without the humor.
Imagine Kathy Griffin saying, yeah, in all seriousness, it'd be great if somebody murdered the president.
She wouldn't say that.
If you took the joke away, that would be like, what?
That's the worst thing I've ever heard.
If Michelle Wolf said, I really, if she'd said what she really thinks, I believe, which is, I really hate Sarah Sanders.
I just hate her frickin' guts.
If she'd said that without the joke around it, Imagine how much worse that would be.
And so if you don't see the joke, it just looks like that message that I just said.
Likewise, the McCain reference, if the president had said something like, oh, I totally don't respect captured POWs.
First of all, he doesn't think that.
He was just reframing McCain in particular because McCain was a special critic.
He was punching up.
So, you know, the president didn't really have a serious message unlike the other two.
His message was just trying to put McCain in a lower, you know, take him down run.
But it didn't work.
All right. I'm going to give you my bonus end of the periscope thought for those who have lasted this long.
Do you remember what the uncanny valley is?
I'll remind you. It's a concept in which, let's take robots.
If you saw a robot that was made of metal and he looked like sort of an old-timey robot, you'd say, oh, that's cute.
It's a robot. And if you saw a human being who was just a regular human being and they were attractive, you'd say, oh, that's a cute human.
Assuming it was a cute human, that's a good-looking human.
But the uncanny valley, without all the details, means that if your artificial life, your robot, were improved in its looks to be more of an android until it was almost like a human, But not, your reaction to that new thing would not be the logical thing.
You say to yourself, oh, this robot is like 98% acts just like a human.
That's pretty cool.
Like, that's a cool robot.
You wouldn't say that. You would actually be disgusted by it.
Because it was almost human, but there was something wrong.
And that's what the uncanny valley refers to, is that the closer the artificial life gets to being a real human, until it gets exactly there and is identical to human, that last little part we are actually revolted by.
It's like, ugh! Think of zombies.
A zombie is kind of a human, But not.
If you see an alien in, let's say, a movie where the human body has been taken over by the alien, they'll play them creepy.
It's like... Yes, how are you, honey?
I had a good day.
And you're a little creeped out because you're like, oh, that's like almost a human, but not quite.
Take this concept to politics.
I believe the uncanny valley is explaining the level of hate and revulsion we're seeing between the left and the right.
When the left looked at me yesterday, the types of responses I got We're not normal, political, I don't like your side, you're stupid, you know, how dumb can you be, that kind of stuff, surfacy kind of criticisms.
It was actual revulsion.
People were actually sickened.
By pictures of me, references to me, and especially imagining me.
So you know from your own experience that if you're in love with somebody, they just look better.
You imagine that they're better looking because you love them.
And if you hate somebody, even if they're attractive, and I'm not, but even if you hate somebody, they look extra ugly.
So the people who hate President Trump, to them, he physically looks disgusting.
But to the people who love him, he's like, for a 71-year-old, he's in pretty good shape.
I mean, that guy's got all his hair.
It looks pretty good. So your impression of physical attractiveness is very much influenced by just your feeling about the person.
Now in politics, When you see, tell me this isn't true.
Wait, I'm going to need a prop.
Don't go anywhere. You know where I'm going.
When you see, most of you are on the right, most of my viewers here.
When you see somebody on the left, and you have like a reaction to them, Tell me I'm wrong.
What you're seeing is the uncanny valley.
You're seeing somebody who has the DNA of a human being, the outward appearance of a human being.
They're almost a human being.
But they do this.
That's not funny! How can you make a joke about Senator McCain?
That's not funny! And you say to yourself, Ugh, Dale, you're like almost a human, but what is that?
Like, I don't know what I'm seeing here.
It's like an alien. It's like a monster.
It's like a zombie. I don't know what that is.
To be fair, let's reverse it.
When Dale, who believes he is just a guy with a neat beard, is looking at you, Huh, as I look at these conservatives, these people who are supporters of Mr.
Trump, I notice that they look a lot like regular people, but when they talk, they're saying things that regular people shouldn't say.
So I'm revolted by them.
Disgusting. They're not just human.
They're like human garbage.
Garbage is actually the word I heard the most yesterday about me.
Now, when you call somebody garbage, you're not just saying I don't like their opinion.
You're saying you're revolted by them.
And that's where we are now.
You have the deplorables comment.
We're not just disagreeing anymore.
We're deep in the uncanny valley.
When we look at people on the other side, we're actually physically disgusted because they look like humans, but we don't understand why something that looks like a human is acting and talking the way they are.
Some sort of monster.
Alright, so that's my bonus thought for the day.
I call the anti-Trumpers, and the left in particular, the party of hate, because they're leaving with that revulsion.
The uncanny valley is sort of their world now.
On the right, people can be just as hateful, just as mean, etc.
But the people on the right are in a little bit more celebration mode.
When we watch the silliness on the left, it seems just a little more cute and weird and funny.
The people on the right are almost consistently laughing at the reactions they see on the left.
Not all the time, but lots of times you're like, oh my god.
You all know the famous picture of the, right after the election, there was the woman, she may have had a pussy hat on, who was screaming at the sky.
Very famous picture, like, screaming at the sky.
And the people on the right are just laughing.
It's like, oh my god, that's hilarious.
It became a meme and everything.
So because you're on the winning side in this situation, the people on the right were on the winning side, they can take things a little lighter and they can just look at the people who look like humans but they're acting a little weird and it's just more funny because that's the benefit of winning.
If you're on the losing side, You see the other side is just monsters in the uncanny valley way.
I think that explains a lot of what you see as revulsion on top of hatred, on top of political disagreement.
We're on the third level, the third ring of dislike.
That's all for now. And let's get an ambassador to Singapore, don't you think?
▲
Export Selection