Everything in this section has been measured as having at least 7,5 dHE (deutsche Humoreinheiten, or German Units of Humour, which is the EU industrial standard), so don’t you go telling me it’s not funny. Like, what the heck do you know?
(I don’t really mean this, it’s just a humorous poem, which I wrote ten years ago, and just came across it going through old papers…)
If you were a daphnia,
A hydra or a snail,
You’d be more scared of a clown loach
Than of a killer whale.Small things bother the little ones
Great things bother the great
So don’t come at me with your issues
Trying to upwardly delegate.
I was asked today in a private message how to measure sarcasm.
The idea of sarcasm is that what a person says in plain text is different to what they actually mean, and certain parts of the audience are supposed to understand it, possibly find a humourous twist in the juxtaposition of what you said and what you meant, while the person or people who is the butt of the sarcasm ideally should remain confused by it and publicly shown up as stupid.
There are two ways of measuring sarcasm in a remark, one is the effectiveness of the sarcasm in doing the above job, while the other measurement refers to the pithiness, as sarcasm is particularly appreciated by connoisseurs if it has a “pithy” quality. The thing is, sarcasm is seen as “the lowest form of wit”, while brevity is called “the soul of wit”, and souls like to rise up, so therefore sarcasm which is both pithy and also very sarcastic sarcasm has forces in it moving up and down at the same time creating internal circulating flows like a storm cloud or a galaxy and draws into itself the energy and attention of the audience. A much-appreciated sarcastic comment then needs to have two measurements, a pithiness score and a score for sarcasm effectiveness.
As explained above, effective sarcasm is all about the intended listeners understanding the hidden meaning or it being lost on them, depending on the intention of the remark issuer (RI). Therefore, the formula for sarcasm effectiveness (FSE) is (n/e)+(u/i)*100%, where n = number of those not understanding the comment from those who were not supposed (by the RI) to understand it, e = number of those who were not supposed to understand it, u = number of those who were supposed to understand it and did understand it and i = number of those who were supposed to understand it.
I hope you understood that.
This is separate to the measure of sarcasm pithiness. An ideally pithy sarcastic remark is supposed to have five words in it. The pithiness score is therefore 5 minus the actual variance from 5 words, plus or minus. So a one word sarcastic remark as well as a nine word answer achieves a pithiness score of 1. This only applies to the final sentence if we are referring to multi-sentence pieces of sarcasm.
Hope that answers your question.
Cessna’s trademark. Amazing what you can pack into them…
This one’s been doing the rounds on emails. Hope you like it.
1. Two blondes walk into a building — you’d think at least one of them would have seen it.
2. Phone answering machine message: ‘If you want to buy marijuana, press the hash key.’
3. A guy walks into the psychiatrist wearing only clingfilm for shorts. The shrink says, ‘Well, I can clearly see you’re nuts.’
4. I went to buy some camouflage trousers the other day — but I couldn’t find any.
5. My friend drowned in a bowl of muesli — a strong currant pulled him in.
6. A man recovered in hospital after a serious accident. He shouted, ‘Doctor, doctor, I can’t feel my legs!’ The doctor replied, ‘I know, I’ve cut off your hands’.
7. I went to a Seafood Disco last week, and pulled a muscle.
8. Two Eskimos sitting in a kayak were chilly so they lit a fire in the craft. It sank, proving once and for all that you can’t have your kayak and heat it.
9. Our ice cream man was found lying on the floor of his van covered with hundreds and thousands. Police say that he topped himself.
10 Man goes to the doctor with a strawberry growing out of his head. Doc says, ‘I’ll give you some cream to put on that.’
11. ‘Doc, I can’t stop singing: ‘The Green, Green Grass of Home.’
Doc says, ‘That sounds like the Tom Jones Syndrome. ‘
‘Is it common, doc?’
‘Well, it’s not unusual.’
12. A man takes his Rottweiller to the vet. ‘My dog is cross-eyed, is there anything you can do for him?’
‘Well,’ says the vet, ‘let’s have a look at him.’ and he picks up the dog and examines his eyes, then he checks his teeth. Finally, he says, ‘I’m going to have to put him down.’
‘What? — because he’s cross-eyed?’
‘No, because he’s really, really, heavy’
14. What do you call a fish with no eyes? — a fsh.
15. So I was getting into my car, and this bloke says to me ‘Can you give me a lift?’ I said ‘Sure, you look great, the world’s your oyster, go for it.’
16. Apparently, 1 in 5 people in the world is Chinese. There are 5 people in my family so one of them must be Chinese. It’s either my mum or my Dad — or my older brother Colin — or my younger brother Ho-Cha-Chu — but I think it’s Colin.
17. Two fat blokes in a pub, one says to the other ‘Your round.’ The second one replies, ‘So are you, you fat bastard!’
18. Police arrested two kids yesterday, one was drinking battery acid, and the other was eating fireworks. They charged one and let the other one off.
19. ‘You know, somebody actually complimented me on my driving today. They left a little note on the windscreen. It said, ‘Parking Fine.’ So that was nice.’
20 . A man walked into the doctor’s, he said, ‘I’ve hurt my arm in several places’
The doctor said, ‘Well don’t go there any more’
21. Ireland ‘s worst air disaster occurred early this morning when a small two-seater Cessna plane crashed into a cemetery. Irish search and rescue workers have recovered 2826 bodies so far and expect that number to climb as digging continues into the night.
I was passed the following photo which is doing the rounds in the email channels. From the context I understand that it is supposed to be funny in some way, but for the life of me I cannot tell what it is. Can any of the subbers help?
The Archbishop of Canterbury and The Royal Commission for Political Correctness announced today that the climate in the UK should no longer be referred to as ‘English Weather’. Rather than offend a sizeable portion of the UK population, it will now be referred to as ‘Muslim Weather’ (Partly Sunni, but mostly Shi’ite).
I’ll just add this here in case any of my readers have missed it.
| Playout date: | 24 October 2006 |
| Camera: | WM Capture/Recorder/Converter |
| Post Production: | Windows Movie Maker – slight use |
| Location: | Nowy Swiat, Warsaw |
| Other people featured: | Not known |
| Genre: | Nicked for subtitling |
| Music used: | None |
| Languages used: | Polish |
| Animals featured: | None |
This is probably the first example I can think of of when I have simply taken a film from another source and added subtitles in translation. As a rule I don’t do much third-party stuff on my channel, but there are three cases where I do. The one case was the radio stuff which Stuart Heron captured the video for and I added to my channel with the agreement of play radio. Another case is Soviet films which actually belong to everybody and which have not always been shown in full on YouTube. In these cases I have put them on if I had them. The third case is where I have taken something which is vailable and popular but not yet in English and I’ve taken it in order to produce the English version with a translation given as subtitles. This is an example of this case.
It has become one of my most popular videos, and to a degree I think I foresaw that it would be. I uploaded this from the office while working with another colleague, and that colleague and I were checking back every so often looking at the views which hit a hundred on the first day. I wasn’t used to that back then and I’m still not really used to it although it happened one or two times since. One thing is sure Polish people are heavy users of the Internet especially you Tube and they do like their politics.
"Some" means some were unsatisfied. Some people would still be satisfied with immigration until Berb
Jes, sed x-metodo estas la plej bona metodo. "Abide" ne "Abode".
Terrible response to a terrible article Alan. It was a very unbalanced article. Author is a fool if
La skribita E-traduko de "Abode with me" estas terure malbona, char oni uzas la x -alfabeton anstata
Daily Telegraph stories Answers from Genesis Breaking news in Russian from the BBCThis is for the serious stuff...
