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Old 10-23-2009, 04:56 PM
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Gone Waterboarding
 
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PaulC and his 15 minutes

On the Internet, everybody's a sit-down comic
Commentators and bloggers hone their humor one line at a time
By Monica Hesse
Thursday, October 22, 2009 10:24 PM

Erin Ryan has more than a thousand followers on the popular femblog Jezebel.com, which would be a lot for anyone on the Internet but is really a lot considering that she's not one of the site's bloggers; she's merely one of the site's anonymous commenters, responding to posts with dry, breezy one-liners that one reads and thinks: "Withering."

Reprinting them here would be utterly pointless -- things taken out of context and preceded with "This is hysterical!" never, ever translate. Suffice it to say, 1,000 random people like Ryan's stuff, and the blogosphere isn't known for its charity.

"I've definitely gotten better at knowing what works," says Ryan, whose day job is in finance. In the beginning she was all over the place. "Now my sense of humor is sharper and to the point." She agonizes over sentence construction and word choice; she hears from old friends who say, "I didn't remember you as so witty!"

The Internet is making us lots of things -- attention suckers, drama queens, Nosey Parkers, stupid.

Is it also making us witty?

It is, after all, the capital of the the one-liner, the brief dose of snark that reflects our tsetse fly attention span. There is the Tweet. The message board comment. The Facebook status update, which newcomers to the site wield with embarrassing banality. Gillian is folding laundry and watching Jim mow the lawn!

Oh, Gillian.

But the newbie will improve, because the Internet one-liner comes with instant grading systems, from the Retweet to the elegant "Liking" of the status update. Eventually, through endless feedback, Gillian is going to understand that no one "likes" her lawn mower.

"Humor is the pre-identified currency online," says David Karp, founder of the microblogging site Tumblr.com, or, as Wired's Scott Brown calls it in his essay on comedy and the Internet, the "Lingua Franca" of the wired world. Failed attempts at it are met with vicious mockery and so entire pockets of the Internet turn into humor boot camps. Make us laugh, or leave.

This order is explicit on Gawker Media, the eight-site conglomerate that includes Jezebel. Commenters on all Gawker sites must "audition" before they're allowed to post anything, and approval can be revoked at the whim of the editors for being "excessively self-promotional, obnoxious, or even worse, boring," according to the site's FAQs. "There will be no warning, and no appeal."

Richard Lawson says, "You have to train with the best." While working in ad sales, he rose from the ranks of Gawker commenter to moderator to editor, and is now a columnist for TV.com. "On a couple of occasions of strange nostalgia I've tried to find the original comments I wrote for Gawker," Lawson says. "God, they're not funny at all."

Maybe Lawson needed nothing more than a little practice to become a fountain of splendid one-liners. But what about the rest of us non-gifted schlubs, the ones who are only "funny" in the sense that we stockpile catchphrases from "30 Rock" and fling them out at random (Live every week like it's Shark Week!).

Are we getting funnier, too?

Maybe. "We absorb humor like osmosis -- by just being immersed, like the Berlitz system for language," says Victor Raskin, founding editor of the academic journal Humor. We trust the wisdom of the crowds. "If I say something I intend to be funny but don't immediately get LOLs and ROFLs, I will assume that it's not funny." We either slink away or step up our game.

"It's the vanity of it all," Karp says. "If I can immediately watch my 'like' count and the view count ratchet up . . . I'll be checking my iPhone every five minutes for the rest of the evening to see how I'm doing."

For a case study of the perfection of the one-liner, just look at FMyLife.com, a Web site in which contributors send accounts of the daily events that make their lives, in general, suck.

FMyLife's Alan Holding receives 7,000 submissions every day, out of which he and a team of moderators select 20. Each is written in the same strict format, which looks like this: "Today, [insert event that demonstrates misfortune]. FML."

In the year since the site's formation, Holding has seen a gradual homogenization of the submissions.

"There are loads of common verbal tics," he says. " 'Turns out,' 'The kicker,' anything to do with Twilight." Wannabe contributors have memorized all the good setups for the pathetic rimshots that define the FML punch line.

Holding doesn't believe that submissions to FML have gotten funnier over the course of the site's year-long existence-- just more technically proficient.

But Holding -- we say this with the utmost respect -- is wrong.

Here's an FMyLife post from the site's first month in operation:

Today, at the cinema, I sat next to a guy who couldn't stand a minute without laughing or making comments about the film. FML

Here's one from last month:

Today, a professor [asked] if I could tutor one of her communications majors in a required Calculus course. Apparently the volunteer tutor the school provides "is a complete dumbass." I'm the school's volunteer tutor. FML.

After the cinema one, there is a recent response from a reader: "Wow, these old FMLs were terrible."

Could be that it's just the technical prowess that Holding was talking about. But what would be wrong with that? Comedians are "incredibly skillful technicians," Raskin says. "And every technique is developed with the full knowledge of other people's techniques."

And every one-liner online builds on the one before it, and when we find the format that gives us the smirks, we become like attention-starved lab rats, rapping on levers, waiting for that elusive ba-dum-bum.

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Old 10-23-2009, 04:59 PM
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MTI MTI is offline
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Damn, my narcolepsy . . . i keep falling asleep every ten words of that . . .


Last edited by MTI; 10-23-2009 at 05:49 PM.
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