‘Respected’ colleague Patrick linked to a pretty good dumb blonde joke.
Some observations about this joke:
1) It is rare to see a new joke created. I seem to recall an Asimov story about this, but I can’t remember its title.
2) The internet is making the joke. No one who links to it makes the joke. The internet makes the joke.
3) Theoretical basis for 2: ‘dumb blonde joke’ has roughly the same meaning (in non-extensional terms) as ‘generic joke’. Although the internet’s greatest asset is its specificity, it is only able to act autonomously in extremely general terms.
4) I really mean it. No person made this joke. No one. Don’t believe me? Then tell me who did. Any one person you provide will be insufficient for joke-hood.
5) Implications of 2: The internet has a pretty lame sense of humor.
6) Patrick’s sense of humor is just that much worse than the internet’s. No one else involved in this joke combines the joke with random other self-involved blogging bullshit.
7) This joke, of course, isn’t new. But the blogohedron conducts information like lightening.
8) From 6: I respectfully request that no one link to this post either. The chain shouldn’t have come this far to begin with.
9) From 7 and 8: consider me grounded.
10) Searching for Asimov’s story, I came across this factoid: he has works in every major category of the Dewey Decimal System except Philosophy. How about that.
OBVIOUSLY each person who puts up a link makes a joke.
One person putting up a link is insufficient for making this particular joke.
Asking how many people it takes to make a joke is deep into ‘a tree falls in the woods’ territory, but allow me to make some simple observations:
Necessary criteria for the joke to work:
a) The individual contributions of each blogger (node) in the path
b) The hyper-linked infrastructure of the blogohedron connecting those contributions
c) The expectations of the users (aka the Blonde) w/r/t (a) and (b)
The internet is:
1) the contributions of individual nodes
2) the infrastructure that supports the hyper-linked interrelations between individual nodes
My contention is that neither (a) nor (b) alone made the joke, but that both are required for this joke to work. And the combination of the two just is identical to the internet.
“6) Patrick’s sense of humor is just that much worse than the internet’s. No one else involved in this joke combines the joke with random other self-involved blogging bullshit.”
Except you…
God, I am getting tired of this crap.
Though I suppose you might say that’s part of your point.
But I at least linked to it as a joke (and I don’t see how it is diluted, but why waste an opportunity to insult me?)
You linked to it only as a masturbatory exercise.
Hey, masturbation is my one marketable skill.
My point was that the joke works better if it is just a bunch of links that basically say the same thing. Your post slows the chain down.
At least I kept the shitting on my site this time, eh?
eripsa, you’re wrong, wrong, wrong, and not just in matters of etiquette.
Take another look at your ‘necessary criteria for the joke to work’ and tell me why I couldn’t claim that every other joke was made by language.
Actually, I’d accept that claim, under the appropriate understanding of ‘language’. If you mean the result of communication between members of a linguistic community, then all jokes are made by language.
If you mean language in the sense of syntactical scheme, well, thats inert and formal, and contributes nothing to the practice.
I’m not saying the people who link this joke aren’t contributing to its making; obviously they are. But they aren’t solely responsible for its content. Just as language itself is responsible for the content of, say, a pun, the internet is responsible to some extent for the content of this dumb blonde joke.
you have to be blonde as fuck to read anything posted on your site dan, especially the comments… so it’s good to keep the shit in check at least… what, how much time has gone by that so many people have got panties in a bunch? and why? because they didn’t think they were “blond” to begin with?
kudos!
liz
For some reason I’m reminded of an argument I had with an objectivist. He said that there was on such thing as a group, that all seemingly social actions were really just individuals acting individually. I said, “what about war?” No groups there, was the reply, just a bunch of individuals individually deciding to kill and die.
So, ok. Language tells jokes. The internet tells jokes. Wars are coincidental alignments of aggression between discrete atomistic thinkers. Gotcha.
Woah woah woah. You seem to be arguing for the individualist position, not me. You want to claim that each individual putting up the link is making the joke. I am claiming that no single individual is sufficient to get this joke off the ground. You need the group, and in this case, the group includes the internet.
‘Language’ tells jokes insofar as language just is the communication between people. Language understood as the medium of communication is lifeless; it doesn’t do much of anything. It is the communicative act itself that makes the joke, and that necessarily requires groups of people.
I think I am being too esoteric to make my simple point. Take a knock-knock joke. You need two people, a teller and a patsy. You, Z, seem to be defending the position that this is ALL you need to tell the joke; that it happens to occur in a language doesn’t mean that language makes the joke.
I am simply arguing that this distinction rests on a scheme-content dualism that I just can’t buy into. The joke doesn’t just occur in language; language- the communcative act itself, which occurs between people but not ‘in’ anything- is responsible for the joke.
In this blonde joke, however, there is a third player: the blogosphere. And that player adds a dimension to the joke that is necessary for it to make any sense at all, just as the patsy is necessary for the knock-knock joke. You seem to want to write the blogosphere off as yet another ‘medium’, and that it is still the individuals autonomously deciding to post the link that makes the joke.
I am simply arguing that the scope of the relevant group is wider than you are allowing.
Pfffffttt.
The ‘group includes the internet’ you say?
I’m pretty sure what you mean by ‘the internet’ but if I’m right about that then each of the other terms is being used in a completely non-standard way.
Is the existence of the internet and of the set of social relations it fosters a necessary condition for the telling of the joke? Probably. There are issues here having to do with our identification criteria for instances of the same joke (could we have used snail mail, or a card catalog to achieve the same joke?), but I’m inclined to define this joke in a way that makes it internet dependent. So let’s make that a yes.
Does the fact that the internet and concommitant social relations constitute a necessary condition therefore imply that the internet is somehow imbued with agency in the telling of the joke, that the internet is ‘included’ in the ‘group’ which made the joke? No. No more than the air we breathe is included in the group which makes other, non-web, jokes.
I think I’m actually using the term ‘internet’ in a nonstandard way, but I’ll leave the discussion here for a while. I’m sure this will come up again.
I’ll just remark that the internet is not passive. It is more like fire than air.
I know that you use the internet in a non-standard way. My more standard use thus included reference to the set of social relations associated with it.
Blech.