Posts Tagged ‘comedy’
“Somebody gets into trouble, then gets out of it again. People love that story. They never get tired of it.”*…
Kurt Vonnegut took an early interest in what he considered the fundamental “shapes” of stories…
Stories have very simple shapes, ones that computers can understand.
This was the basic idea behind the master’s thesis that Kurt Vonnegut submitted to the anthropology department at the University of Chicago. It was rejected, however, “because it was so simple and looked like too much fun,” Vonnegut said…
“Kurt Vonnegut on the 8 ‘shapes’ of stories“
He never abandoned the idea. Years later, in a 2004 lecture at Case Western University, he shared his theory– a recording of which has washed around the internet ever sense…
Now, a group of academics have used AI to analyze hundreds of published stories, and have confirmed Vonnegut’s contention (sort of: he argued for 8 “shapes”; they found 6), as they explain in the abstract of their paper…
Advances in computing power, natural language processing, and digitization of text now make it possible to study a culture’s evolution through its texts using a ‘big data’ lens. Our ability to communicate relies in part upon a shared emotional experience, with stories often following distinct emotional trajectories and forming patterns that are meaningful to us. Here, by classifying the emotional arcs for a filtered subset of 1,327 stories from Project Gutenberg’s fiction collection, we find a set of six core emotional arcs which form the essential building blocks of complex emotional trajectories. We strengthen our findings by separately applying matrix decomposition, supervised learning, and unsupervised learning. For each of these six core emotional arcs, we examine the closest characteristic stories in publication today and find that particular emotional arcs enjoy greater success, as measured by downloads…
“The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes” (where you can read/download the full paper).
* Kurt Vonnegut
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As we agnize archetypes, we might spare a thought for a master of the entertaining tale, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (or as he’s better known by his stage name, Molière); he died on this date in 1673. A playwright, actor, and poet, he is widely regarded as one of the greatest writers in world history, and possibly the greatest writer in French history. His extant works include comedies, farces, tragicomedies, comédie-ballets, and more. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed at the Comédie-Française more often than those of any other playwright today. His influence is such that the French language is often referred to as the “language of Molière.”
“The snake that cannot shed its skin perishes”*…
From Rebecca Saltzman…
As America’s seventh-ranked patriotic bunting company, we’re proud to fulfill all of your Fourth of July decorating needs this year. Also, due to a factory mix-up, our bunting this year is made of live snakes.
The American people rely on us for red, white, and blue fabric to hang on their porches. However, it has recently come to our attention that many customers have instead received a writhing mass of serpents. Are they at least harmless? No, they’re quite deadly. But we hope you will be reassured to know that the snakes can play “Yankee Doodle” on their rattles, which is a step up from our plastic bunting option.
How could this mistake happen? Our bunting factory operates under lax, or one might say non-existent, quality control standards. We also built our factory on top of a known snake nesting habitat. Our entire factory is infested with snakes.
To determine whether you’ve received bunting or snakes, we have put together the following helpful guidance…
Read on: “We Apologize That Instead of July Fourth Bunting, We Accidentally Shipped You a Box Full of Snakes,” from @beccasaltz in @mcsweeneys.
* Friedrich Nietzsche
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As we parse patriotism, we might recall that on this date in 1862 (88 years after the Declaration of Independence was adopted by the Second Continental Congress on this same date), Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a young Oxford mathematics don, took the daughters of the Dean of Christ Church College– Alice Liddell and her sisters– on a boating picnic on the River Thames in Oxford. To amuse the children he told them the story of a little girl, bored by a riverbank, whose adventure begins when she tumbles down a rabbit hole into a topsy-turvy world called “Wonderland.” The story so captivated the 10-year-old Alice that she begged him to write it down. The result was Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, published in 1865 under the pen name “Lewis Carroll,” with illustrations by John Tenniel.
“Why is God making me suffer so much? Just because I don’t believe in him?”*…
David Shatz on an important important– and surely the funniest– modern philosopher…
Many have heard the story about the British philosopher [Oxford linguisitic philosopher J. L. Austin] who asserted in a lecture that, whereas in many languages a double negative makes a positive, in no language does a double positive make a negative. Instantly, from the back of the room, a voice piped up, “Yeah, yeah.”
While the story is well-known—and true—many do not know that the “yeah, yeah” came from Sidney Morgenbesser (1921-2004), a professor at Columbia University who later became the John Dewey Professor of Philosophy, and whose 10th yahrzeit will be marked this summer. Those who did not experience Morgenbesser could not fully appreciate James Ryerson’s words in his superb portrait in the “The Lives They Lived” issue of The New York Times Magazine: “The episode was classic Morgenbesser: The levity, the lightning quickness, the impatience with formality in both thought and manners, the gift for the knockout punch.” (Ryerson has long been working on a book about Morgenbesser.) Nor could most people know that this comic genius was revered by philosophers and other literati, including people of eminence and fame, as one of the truly spectacular philosophical minds of his time—someone whom, reportedly, no less a figure than Bertrand Russell considered one of the cleverest (that’s British for “smartest”) young men in the United States…
A man who would surely have tickled Wittgenstein’s funny bone: “‘Yeah, Yeah’: Eulogy for Sidney Morgenbesser, Philosopher With a Yiddish Accent,” in @tabletmag.
A few other examples of Morgenbesser’s wit:
• Morgenbesser in response to B. F. Skinner: “Are you telling me it’s wrong to anthropomorphize people?”
• In response to Leibniz’s ontological query “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Morgenbesser answered “If there were nothing you’d still be complaining!”
• Interrogated by a student whether he agreed with Chairman Mao’s view that a statement can be both true and false at the same time, Morgenbesser replied “Well, I do and I don’t.”
* Morgenbesser, a few weeks before his death from complications of ALS, to his friend and Columbia philosophy colleague David Albert
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As we laugh and learn, we might recall that on this date in 1979, “Ring My Bell” was atop the pop charts.
Written by Frederick Knight, the composition was originally intended for then eleven-year-old Stacy Lattisaw, as a teenybopper song about kids talking on the telephone. But when Lattisaw signed with a different label, Anita Ward was asked to sing it instead.
“Ring My Bell” went to number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, the Disco Top 80 chart, and the Soul Singles chart. It also reached number one on the UK Singles Chart. And it garnered Ward a nomination for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance at the 1980 Grammy Awards. It was her only hit.
See (and, of course, hear) Ward perform the song here.
“The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence”*…
Ah, but what about humor…
Humor is a central aspect of human communication that has not been solved for artificial agents so far. Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly able to capture implicit and contextual information. Especially, OpenAI’s ChatGPT recently gained immense public attention. The GPT3-based model almost seems to communicate on a human level and can even tell jokes. Humor is an essential component of human communication. But is ChatGPT really funny? We put ChatGPT’s sense of humor to the test. In a series of exploratory experiments around jokes, i.e., generation, explanation, and detection, we seek to understand ChatGPT’s capability to grasp and reproduce human humor. Since the model itself is not accessible, we applied prompt-based experiments. Our empirical evidence indicates that jokes are not hard-coded but mostly also not newly generated by the model. Over 90% of 1008 generated jokes were the same 25 Jokes. The system accurately explains valid jokes but also comes up with fictional explanations for invalid jokes. Joke-typical characteristics can mislead ChatGPT in the classification of jokes. ChatGPT has not solved computational humor yet but it can be a big leap toward “funny” machines…
Or can it? “ChatGPT is fun, but it is not funny! Humor is still challenging Large Language Models,” in @arxiv.
* Jean Baudrillard
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As we titter, we might send birthday giggles to a man who don’t need no stinking LLM, Scott Thompson; he was born on this date in 1959. A comedian and actor, he is best known as a member of The Kids in the Hall and for playing Brian on The Larry Sanders Show.
“I raised you up to fly to the heavens, not to brood over a clutch of eggs!”*…
Susanna Forrest takes a deep dive into a fascinating subculture that lasted for almost a century: the Amazons of Paris…
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the social range of people who could ride for leisure widened, and more and more women rode. This was because horses became more accessible, but for women it was also due to an improvement in the sidesaddle. I will write more about sidesaddles and my – to me – unexpected love for them in another issue of the newsletter. All you need to know here is that in the early 1830s, either in England or in France, a much-disputed innovation made these saddles more secure, which meant in turn that women could attempt greater feats: more daring jumping, more radical “tricks”, and more sophisticated high-school or haute-école dressage.
The term “amazon” was adopted to deal with these new horsewomen. The implication was of fearless, perhaps manly women like the she-warriors who fascinated classical Greece. They were overstepping into a male world, and while they were often admired, there was also something not quite feminine – or perhaps threateningly hearty – about them. The term is used in multiple European languages at this time. In French, it was also part of the term for riding sidesaddle, “monter en amazone” and for a sidesaddle riding habit or “amazone”, often masculine in style from the waist up, with, later in the century, breeches under an apron rather than a flowing skirt. Gradually the term became more feminised and general and seemed to be applied to any horsewoman.
The earliest named women performing on horseback are Philippine Tourniaire and Patty Astley in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At the time, male performers did acrobatics and other stunts on horseback, and the women followed suit…
The Amazons were in the ring from, roughly speaking, the 1830s to the early twentieth century, when both circus and circus horsewomen were falling from fashion. They travelled across Europe and sometimes further afield to dance on and ride their horses, which leaves me with a huge variation of place, time, language, social class, and style of performance spread across many archives. I’ll try to both generalise here and introduce you to the subtleties of their professional and personal lives…
It’s an exciting ride. Stuntwomen, dancers, acrobats, jockeys, charioteers, Olympians, actresses, courtesans, dressage riders – and more: “Who were the Amazons of Paris?” from @Susanna_Forrest.
* Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus
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As we saddle up, we might recall that it was on this date in 1978 that The Carol Burnett Show aired the last of its 279 episodes; Ms. Burnett had decided, after 11 seasons, to move on. The series had won 25 primetime Emmy Awards; it ranks number 17 on TV Guide‘s list of the 60 Greatest Shows of All Time, and figures in most “100 Best series” lists.
Consider, for example, the iconic “Went with the Wind” sketch…
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