Boing Boing: Watch “Hardware Wars” in HD. “The description of this YouTube claims this HD transfer of the legendary Star Wars parody, Hardware Wars, was done under the supervision of director Ernie Fosselius! Hardware Wars was a film that every kid at my Elementary school heard about back in the late 1970s, but only one of us had seen.”
Defector: Elon Musk Is Grimly Determined To Let You Know He Is Funny. “Not to take the comedic semiotics of Elon Musk too-too seriously, but the most interesting facet of his dogged, ever-flopping quest to be thought of as a comedy genius as well as a success entrepreneur guy is the ways in which he is consistently five or more years behind the online comedy meta-game. For someone with a stupefying amount of resources and a bizarrely overcooked opinion of the importance of his dying app, he understands precious little about the modern forms of comedy.”
BusinessWire: National Comedy Center to Preserve Don Rickles Archive (PRESS RELEASE). “The National Comedy Center, the United States’ official cultural institution dedicated to the art form of comedy, announced today that it will be preserving an archival collection from Don Rickles’ estate, showcasing the late comedy legend’s six-decade career. The collection spans from the 1950s to 2000s, chronicling a storied life in comedy through rare photographs, correspondence, creative papers, and wardrobe—all of which will be preserved at the National Comedy Center.”
New York Times: If Every Brand Is Funny Online, Is Anything Funny?. “For a decade, marketers have found success on social media by roasting customers, and even flirting with them. But with Gen Z, and platforms like TikTok on the rise, the jokes may be wearing thin.”
Cracked: Proto-Monty Python Sketch Show Discovered After Being Lost for 50 Years. “What once appeared to be an ex-sketch comedy show, a sketch show that was no more, was resting in peace, had ceased to be, and was bereft of life may have been simply stunned after all. Most of The Complete and Utter History of the British Isles, a sketch comedy television show created in 1969 by almost-Pythoners Michael Palin and Terry Jones, was once thought to be lost forever. As it turns out, The Complete and Utter History of the British Isles was simply misplaced.”
Chortle: Velvet Onion vanishes. “Alternative comedy website The Velvet Onion has disappeared from the internet. The site covered the scene from 2010 to 2018 – but now even the cost of maintaining its archive as a permanent presence has proved too much for founder Didymus Holmes.”
The Daily Beast: How Barstool Built an Empire by Swiping Sports Highlights. “Four years ago, Barstool Sports was raked over the coals for taking a comedian’s video. The sprawling and bro-tastic media company already had a reputation for stealing jokes, but that act of theft inadvertently revealed another way the site was profiting from content it didn’t own: an anonymous, seemingly random Twitter account which was in fact run by Barstool.”
Ars Technica: Researchers discover that ChatGPT prefers repeating 25 jokes over and over. “On Wednesday, two German researchers, Sophie Jentzsch and Kristian Kersting, released a paper that examines the ability of OpenAI’s ChatGPT-3.5 to understand and generate humor. In particular, they discovered that ChatGPT’s knowledge of jokes is fairly limited: During a test run, 90 percent of 1,008 generations were the same 25 jokes, leading them to conclude that the responses were likely learned and memorized during the AI model’s training rather than being newly generated.”
Mashable: Memes are a love language, Hinge says . “In the modern era, much more than physical touch and gifts can count as love languages. New data from dating app Hinge shows that memes are emerging as a way to show your affection. Daters’ number one preferred way to flirt before and after a first date is sending memes, according to a Hinge survey of 2,000 users.”
Motherboard: I Asked ChatGPT To Control My Life, and It Immediately Fell Apart. “After 35 years of living in relative control of my decisions, I had decided to see what would happen if I asked AI to control my life instead. Years of suboptimal performance, both personally and professionally, and numerous failed attempts at self-improvement had convinced me there had to be a better way, and I wondered if the collective knowledge hidden inside OpenAI’s hit tech product could help me.” I have rarely laughed so hard at an article.
IFL Science: This Is The World’s Oldest Bar Joke, But Literally Nobody Knows Why It’s Funny. “Say, have you heard the one about the Abderite who saw a eunuch talking to a woman and asked whether she was his wife? Upon hearing that eunuchs couldn’t take wives, the Abderite replied: ‘so, is she your daughter?’ Didn’t tickle your funny bone? It probably sounded better in the original Latin – along with context clues like who, exactly, the Abderite people were and why they seem to have been the ancient Roman equivalent of the ‘dumb blonde’ archetype.”
Boing Boing: 2Dumb2Destroy is a new AI ChatBot trained on the dumbest dudebros imaginable. “Trained on countless hours of Pauly Shore movies, all seven Police Academies, Ralph Wiggum quotes and that one bodybuiling forum where a bunch of gym bros decided a week had eight days in it, etc. This is one A.I. you don’t have to worry about ever overthrowing humanity, or stealing your job.”
Mashable: What if ChatGPT was a cat?. “ChatGPT, the online artificial chatbot taking the world by storm, is being used for a lot, including messaging Tinder matches and writing essays. It was only a matter of time before replicas and chatbot spin-offs trickled our way. One such AI asks: what if ChatGPT was a cat?”
This is Colossal: Hapless Hangups and Silly Spoofs Abound in the 2022 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards. “In this year’s juried contest, 5,000 entries from 85 countries amounted to fierce competition, showcasing ‘seriously funny’ images in an effort to highlight the diversity of the world’s wildlife and raise awareness of the need for conservation. In partnership with the Whitley Fund for Nature, the contest contributes 10% of revenue toward conservation efforts in countries across the Global South.”
Los Angeles Times: TikTok’s addictive anti-aesthetic has already conquered culture. “IIf Franz Kafka were to reconceive “The Metamorphosis” for our era, he might decide to ditch the novella in favor of a series of surreal TikToks — Gregor Samsa as eyes and mouth green-screened onto a picture of a roach jacked from the web. Kafka is long gone. But thankfully, we have Kendria Bland, a Mississippi comedian who does a semiregular bit on TikTok about the travails of a pack of domestic roaches who like to party behind the refrigerator and sneak Popeyes when the humans aren’t around. “
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