A good video on the subject:
4,411 karma · joined January 16, 2014
https://startuplab.io
Feel free to email me to ray@startuplab.io
Come visit my projects:
- https://nulis.io - tree text editor for writers
- https://helix.startuplab.io - habit tracker
- https://fictionhub.io - fiction publishing platform
- https://www.artstation.com/rayalez - digital art I'm creating
Do you think this font would be a good choice for a text editor?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDqjIdI4bF4
(by the author of Animation vs Animator)
I second Animator's Survival Kit by Richard Williams, it's great. And Keith Lango's video course for 3D animation. These two are absolute best for learning intermediate/advanced animation.
Also, of course, Animation Mentor and 11secondclub competition.
I think all jokes are surprising, but not all surprising things are jokes ("you have lung cancer" is surprising but not very hilarious). Surprise seems more like a side effect of comedy, instead of an explanation. The trick is to figure out what, aside from surprise, creates comedy. What kind of properties apply to all the funny things, and only to funny things.
There's a "benign violation" theory - they say that things are funny when they're surprising but harmless, but that's also not true. Plot twists, scientific inventions, new insightful ideas - there are plenty of surprising harmless things that aren't funny.
A longer post on this:
https://medium.com/@rayalez/comedy-theory-fd142076657e
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I can analyze about 80% of the jokes this way and find two different patterns with clear connection between them, remaining 20% are what I call "purely absurd" jokes, they don't have two connected patterns, they're just ideas that make as little sense as possible. I don't know how to explain both types with some common underlying mechanism.
Just as an example, here's a "dot-connect" comedy sketch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AT6jS_X4NaY
(Pattern 1 is clouds, common recognizer is "cloud that looks like a mushroom", pattern 2 is nuclear explosion).
And here's a "pure absurd" comedy sketch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQfvSLxTsEs
(no two distinct but connected patterns that I can discern, just an absurd idea that makes as little sense as possible)
- Puns are the simplest example of dot-connect jokes ("this word sounds like this other word"). Pranks too (the same situation means one thing to the person who's doing the prank, and another to the person who's being pranked).
- Metaphors are associations that aren't absurd enough to be funny, if a metaphor is absurd/weird enough it becomes a joke.
- Exaggeration/reversal jokes are closer to "pure absurd" jokes, you're taking a normal idea and making it make less sense by exaggerating a part of the pattern, or replacing it with it's opposite.
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Animals seem to laugh when playing, another way to put it - "fake fighting". Play makes sense evolutionarily because kids are practicing fighting, and laughter seems like a signal that "I'm not actually trying to hurt you". I couldn't figure out how to reconcile it with the idea of absurdity, they seem vaguely similar, but I can't expain how comedy works from evolutionary standpoint.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laughter_in_animals
To understand humor from evolutionary perspective, it would be interesting to analyze the jokes babies and kids find funny. Why do babies laugh at peekaboo?
Here's a fascinating video about the first jokes Hank Green's kid has came up with:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q9AEu27NAg
Interestingly, two of them are "pure absurd" jokes (blue baby, police bus), and three of them are "dot-connect" jokes(mam-da, papa pants, coconut baby).
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Laughter and humor are not the same thing. Tickling isn't funny, "social signaling" laughter isn't funny (like when girl giggles when she's attracted to a guy).
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It would make sense if brains evolved to reward novelty. When you learn something insightful about the world, you get a pleasant dopamine hit. If comedy is "supernormal stimuli", it could come from people learning to hack this mechanism, making the sensation more intense.
The way people add more sugar/fat to the food to make taste more intense, or learned to masturbate to fake sex, maybe people found a way to trick their minds into feeling they've learned something super insightful? But what does that have to do with laughter?
Some sort of error-correction process? When you learn a new idea, your brain corrects your old wrong world model, "erasing" mistaken beliefs. Another way to describe absurd is an "obvious error". Maybe there's something to it...
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It's easier to make jokes on taboo subjects because there's an absurd gap between the seriousness of a taboo subject and a lighthearted goofiness of a joke.
- "On Intelligence" and "I am a Strange Loop" - how mind works.
- "Rework", "Zero to One", "Start Small, Stay Small" - insightful startup advice.
- "Atomic Habits" - by far the best book on developing habits. Thought it was just another one of those self-help books, but turned out to be very insightful and well written.
- "The Obstacle Is the Way" - amazing introduction into stoic philosophy, by Ryan Holiday (author of Trust me I'm lying). He summarized everything I wanted to learn about the subject, and explained it extremely well. Absolute best book to read in hectic/stressful situations, audio version is great too.
- Fun autobiographies: Ghost in the Wires (Kevin Mitnick), iWoz (Steve Wozniak), Catch me if you can (Frank Abagnale), Just for Fun (Linus Torvalds), Elon Musk, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
- How companies work: Creativity Inc (Pixar), In the Plex (Google)
- On writing: Art of fiction/nonfiction by Ayn Rand, Story (and Dialogue) by Robert McKee, Save the Cat, Step by Step to Standup Comedy.
- Grokking Deep Learning - by far the simplest and clearest introduction into deep learning, starts from scratch and takes you through the whole thing, without any of the scary/overwhelming math.
- Refactoring UI (design tips), Programmer’s Introduction to Mathematics, Master Algorithm - still reading these books, but they look REALLY good.
- Other: The Selfish Gene, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Serious Creativity, Hackers & Painters, Hacking Growth, Angel (on angel investing, by Jason Calacanis).
Also collections of essays by Paul Graham [1] and Scott Alexander [2]:
[1] https://www.dropbox.com/s/2no0sqybnxurpcd/Paul%20Graham%20-%...
[2] https://www.dropbox.com/s/i43lqpdyd4qa255/The%20Library%20of...
On topic - dumb decision, nothing new, not very surprising, waiting for PWAs to get to a point where arbitrary Apple/Google rules don't matter anymore.
And I'm talking about Divinity 1, people say Divinity 2 is even better, though I haven't tried it because there's no linux version yet.
It blows my mind how much love and thought they've put into it, I can't recommend it enough, I haven't loved a game so much since I was a kid, do yourself a favor and check it out!
A few things I've made with it:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/GY8D3
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/2VleJ
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/ryqk2
Follow the developer for a lot of awesome and inspiring examples:
Also I've made a little collection of my favorite artworks:
I think you might find it useful (it's still in active development, I'm currently working on completing v1).
I really hope your project takes off, there's never enough writing tools and communities!
I've also recommended http://letterpad.app/ to use it and they've switched to it now.
I'm a huge fan, it's insanely powerful and customizable, you can build anything you want with it.
The only problem is lack of documentation and tutorials, it's really hard to figure out how to use it beyond the very basics (for me at least). They do have a great community in the slack channel, they've helped me a lot, but better docs would make a huge difference.
They all are kinda true, for the same reason you can find the proof of UFO in the Bible, or determine that there are "two kinds of people", or discover 4 personality types. Anything can be shoehorned into any kind of pattern if your definition is vague enough and you're willing to stretch the meaning of things hard enough.
Different writers are familiar with different structures and use ones they prefer, bending and modifying them as they wish. Some writers break the rules on purpose. Some writers get high out of their minds and write stream of consciousness novels in a weekend. Any of that can result in a great/famous/successful story. Finding the pattern that fits all of that is only possible if it's so vague that it can fit literally anything, at which point it becomes meaningless.
Plots and story structures can be picked up and used when it's convenient, it's easier to write when you have a paint-by-numbers structure to hang your story upon, but there isn't the one story structure or the six story types, that's silly.
Keep the name, don't let them police all the delightful quirkiness out of the world.
Do you mind sharing your app? I'm really curious.
Also, I'm currently reading "I Am a Strange Loop" by Douglas Hofstadter [2], it's relevant to this topic and super fascinating. I bet you'll enjoy reading it!
[1] https://www.audible.com/pd/On-Intelligence-Audiobook/B002V8L...
[2] https://www.audible.com/pd/I-Am-a-Strange-Loop-Audiobook/B07...
If you're interested in the subject - check out "Rationality: From AI to Zombies" by Eliezer Yudkowsky and "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies" by Nick Bostrom.
I'm not affiliated with it, just sharing it because I think it's awesome and more people should know about it. You guys will probably appreciate it even if you're not into 3D art. Also it's really inspiring that it's an indie project, and it's so damn good.
Author on twitter: https://twitter.com/ephtracy
(he posts feature updates and shares examples of beautiful artworks made with this app)
- "On Intelligence" and "I am a Strange Loop" - how mind works.
- "Rework", "Zero to One", "Start Small, Stay Small" - insightful startup advice.
- Fun autobiographies: Ghost in the Wires (Kevin Mitnick), iWoz (Steve Wozniak), Catch me if you can (Frank Abagnale), Just for Fun (Linus Torvalds), Elon Musk, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
- How companies work: Creativity Inc (Pixar), In the Plex (Google)
- On writing: Art of fiction/nonfiction by Ayn Rand, Story by Robert McKee, Save the Cat, Step by Step to Standup Comedy.
- Other: The Selfish Gene, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Serious Creativity, Hackers & Painters, Hacking Growth, Angel (on angel investing, by Jason Calacanis).
Also collections of essays by Paul Graham [1] and Scott Alexander [2]:
[1] https://www.dropbox.com/s/2no0sqybnxurpcd/Paul%20Graham%20-%...
[2] https://www.dropbox.com/s/i43lqpdyd4qa255/The%20Library%20of...
The whole movie(and a book) was about using this amazing virtual world as the only escape from the shitty horrible reality. It wasn't just entertainment - people go to school there, people have friends there, for many it's the only source of happiness.
And that's what it was for the protagonist, he understands this better than anyone.
But the moment he becomes a billionaire and gets a hot girlfriend, he goes "reality is awesome guys, you should go out more!" While nothing has changed for most people. Fuck you, Wade!
It's like the dumbest cheapest way to add a "moral" to the movie, completely out of character, he'd never do something like this.
Amazing essays on rationality, psychology, science, all sorts of stuff.
Simple but deep explanations of technology(his Elon Musk series is a must read)
I wrote a post [1] once talking about this in more detail, but it's pretty old and my thoughts have changed a bit since then. I'll try to write an article explains it better once I have the time and energy.
A few thoughts on comedy:
- In "Step by Step to Stand-up Comedy" (great book about doing standup), the author describes the process of writing a standup routine. Basically, first you write a lot of jokes on random topics, and tag them by categories (like "driving", "postal service", "marriage", etc). Once you have a few dozen jokes, you organize the ones that can belong to a similar topic together, and then figure out how to string them together into a coherent routine, where one joke leads to another. So routines are written "bottom-up" from jokes, first you have jokes, then you find a way to put them together in a way that makes sense, but doesn't need much meaning or structure beyond that.
- Movies or sictcoms, on the other hand, are written "top-down". First you have a story structure, which can, but doesn't have to be that funny(laws for comedy and drama are the same), and then you brainstorm jokes using your scenes as topics. If you came up with some good jokes or scenes separately, that don't necessarily fit, you can find a way to "shoehorn" them into the script, nothing wrong with that, but generally it goes structure first, jokes second.
- Jokes are "absurd associations". Our brain thinks in patterns. When you put together two patterns(ideas) that don't belong together, it creates the feeling of absurdity, the less patterns belong together, the less they fit together, the more absurd they will feel. ("A man on a bicycle" is not absurd, "a man on a unicycle" is a little bit absurd, "Hitler riding a unicycle" is very absurd, "Hitler riding a unicycle while wearing a white dress and juggling fish" is absurd as fuck). Comedy is the art of finding connections between patterns. You "connect the dots" between two ideas, find an overlap(an association) between two patterns that are far apart, and you put them together. The more absurd(less compatible) the two ideas are, and the stronger the connection(the more it makes sense), the funnier the joke will be.