Because nothing is funnier than someone’s imminent demise, is it?
Seriously though, that is one of the all time classic comedic premises for the sort of list based comedy that is all the rave now. Famous Last Words. I had to do it eventually.
The whole beauty of list comedy of the one-liner sort is that by establishing a simple but very comedicly rich premise, the list entries can be very high density comedy because you can imply so much in a very small number of words.
The premise sets the stage for the power of the list entries. It’s what made Lettermen’s Top Ten Lists so powerful, and what makes certain types of improv games like “use this weird prop” or “riff on this premise” so packed with power and good performance pieces.
Note, though, that this is quite different from the Cracked.com type of list comedy. Their list entries are long-form comedy with many gags and are dense not because of their low word count but because they combine comedy and information in such an intoxicating way.
In fact, now that I think about it, whether it’s Cracked.com, the Daily Show, or even awesome science guys like CDPGrey and Vsauce, the name of the game in the world right now is to find ways to give people a dense information stream that goes down easy.
Food for thought for a content creator like me. I am more of thinker than a knower (though I know plenty, it’s just kind of…. random), so my content would be more about thought than information per se, but still, people need thought too.
Maybe I need to develop a high density form of political and philosophical discussion that lets people get a lot of top notch thinking in a quick and fun form.
Hard not to make that a platform for my own views though. So maybe I will make myself over to become the fastest pundit in the world.
I have some serious pondering to do!
Otherwise, life slides along decently. Still working on shifting myself from “my life sucks” to “my life is fine, but could be even better”. Switching the negative to the positive. Ruthlessly hunting down all my negative thoughts and burn them out like cauterizing a wound, or like burning out an evil vine.
The important part is the burning. Fire is pure. Fire cleanses all. Burn the garbage out of yourself and make room for the real you!
Another part of the program involves seeking out the positive and letting it in to counterbalance the negativity. Positive can push out negative if you let it. But you have to let it in. And you have to be willing to let go of the security of constant negativity.
The nature of dysthymic depression is to hug the baseline and to seek continuity and predictability above all. It is the coping strategy of lying flat on the ground and never rising because if you never rise, you can never fall.
But this is an inherently unnatural and unhealthy way to live. Growth is life, stasis is death. We are born to rise and strive, and when we fall, to just plain get back up and try it again. Like a child learning to walk for the first time, we fall down, have a good cry, then get up and get on with it.
Women understand this way better than men do.
Choosing to keep on crawling instead is a tragically life-destroying decision, although it may well be a choice that is forced upon a person by childhood trauma.
It has been well known for decades that trauma can slow or even stop psychological as well as physical growth. Children who experience a trauma often regress to a previous level of development, as if the trauma causes them to abandon their current state of development as being a bad idea and reverting back to one that they have already fully completed.
And that is easy to diagnose in, say, a four year old who suddenly starts wetting themselves and sucking their thumb, but a lot harder to see when it is a teenager who loses interest in the usual teenage activities and begins living more like a preteen.
I think that describes an awful lot of the nerds I know, and in fact might be the crux of the diagnosis. Our social development got halted some point along the line, probably by bullying but possibly because of other traumas as well, and society didn’t notice because our grades were still good.
And there is no SAT for social development, besides, of course, life itself.
And here is the really fucked up thing : puberty happens whether you are socially developed enough for it anyhow. So the stunted end up with a strangely juvenile sexuality, often conflicted between childlike simplicity and adult intimacy, and I think that leads to a lot of the ugliness that lurks in the psychosexual realm of nerd-dom.
Whether it is grown men wanting to marry anime characters or the horrific levels of barbaric misogyny that results from being both attracted to women and frightened out of your wits by them (think pigtail-pulling taken to a much darker and more intense level) and which has recently surfaced in horrific upsurges of hateful comments directed at various female Internet personalities.
They only attack because they are so scared, ladies. They feel, not without justification, that women can only hurt them by being something they want but get punished for even trying to get it, and so when a woman strays into their all male domain, they freak out and panic, and attack in the most painful, hurtful way in order to drive to drive you away, like you’re a leopard and they are a bunch of monkeys.
The best way to deal with them is to simply not engage. Don’t argue with them, don’t fight with them, don’t even acknoledge them in the slightest. Only deal with people who behave. That is particularly easy on the Internet.
Eventually, the monkeys will calm down and get over their initial fear, and realize you are just another monkey like them, and their desire to interact with you and be acknowledged will overcome their reluctance, and most of them will treat you as an equal.
And the ones who don’t will be shunned and ridiculed by the group.
But only if you do not engage. It’s not easy, and it doesn’t feel right, but it’s what works.