This is the bigger point to me. Any joke that is successful is because it shows that you know where the audience is coming from. If you can’t empathize with people who aren’t exactly like you, nobody is going to think you are funny.
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My Psych 100 class had the best experiment on campus!
Measuring how cognitive abilities were affected by drinking. Like the buzzer test on WKRP with Johnny Fever, Venus and the State Trooper but with more writing.
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Hey, I run that experiment every Friday night!
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For this study, the researchers recruited 186 adults from a university in North Carolina. The participants’ average age was 19, though they ranged in age from 18 to 53. They were 77% female, and ethnically diverse. …
Eight independent raters scored the responses on a 3-point scale (not funny, somewhat funny, or funny).
I assume that the trial design was robust. Nevertheless, I can’t help wondering if there is an audience-effect here. I assume there is an audience for mean-spirited punching-down ‘humor’ - birds of a feather, and all that - so I suppose that people who score high on RWA find RWA-oriented humour funny. If the independent raters as a group scored low for RWA then they would presumably tend to find RWA humor not-funny?
In other words; beauty is in the eye of the beholder?
Perhaps, but given the on-going failure of conservative comedians to find a mass audience instead of a niche one the beholders in question are relatively small in number when it comes to defining what’s funny.
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“Satire is meant to ridicule power. If you are laughing at people who are hurting, it’s not satire, it’s bullying.” - Terry Pratchett
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The closest Trump ever got to making a self-deprecating joke was at the 2016 Catholic Archdiocese of New York fundraising dinner, which is traditionally a venue for political figures to show a little humility by making fun of themselves in a public forum.
Trump chose to make a joke at his wife’s expense instead. And she was definitely not cool with it.
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No idea, maybe it depended on the experiment. I remember one involving doing algebra, for instance, where some problems were insoluble.
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Yeah, that’s a good point. So, to reframe the title of the post:
Right Wing Authoritarians are funny, but only to a small group of fellow arseholes.
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Given that tons of right wing “humor” is based on making fun of vulnerable groups, they are just bullies and bullying is never funny. I don’t care if other bullies and their toadies find it funny. They can fuck right off.
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Lol, it’s as if he doesn’t understand that throwing his wife under the bus makes trump himself look weak and pathetic.
He can’t handle even minor self depreciation.
What a loser.
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I don’t really have any problem with “forcing” or strongly motivating students who take psychology classes to be part of psychology studies. It is a legitimately valuable experience both for the undergrad participants and the upperclass and graduate students who have to learn how to do experiments.
However the research that comes out of it needs to be recognized as highly biased and carefully interpreted at best because of the sample population. It should be really treated as similar to an undergraduate physics or chemistry lab. You aren’t really discovering anything new, any more than a physics student “discovers” the speed of light. You are trying to learn the procedures so that you can go on to do more meaningful and original research in the future.
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I think one reason right-wing humor is seldom funny is that topical humor involves arguing for changing the status quo. The weak ridicule the powerful. The problem for right-wing humorists is that they’re on the side of the powerful. They must invent straw men who they claim are more powerful than they (e.g. “liberal elites”) so they can claim a bogus position as underdog. Their humor appeals to a narrow group of true believers, but doesn’t gain wide appeal because most people recognize that it’s the powerful ridiculing the weak. Old-fashioned bullying and name-calling are easier to do and easier to understand, so these remain staples of right-wing humor.
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Stewart Lee, by far the smartest and most thoughtful comedian alive today, deconstructed this beautifully in 2013.
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It’s not so much that students shouldn’t have to write papers, but the setup of “Participate in research, or write a paper” is… well it’s setup so that one of the two is obviously much more work and trouble for a student. And if they don’t do either, it hurts their grade, obviously. In my opinion, as a result, the students aren’t actually giving informed consent to participate under the studies, by IRB guidelines, they’re being pressured into it under threat of a more difficult assignment.
It’s not the biggest consent issue out there, but I still don’t like it.
With the coronavirus situation, my lab has moved to posting online studies on https://www.prolific.co/
There’s a lot more than psych studies there too, but if you want to do some new ones, you can get paid for it there. Which is generally how I think studies should be conducted on the undergraduate population as well. Still has WEIRD issues, but it’s better for consent (provided the pay isn’t so large as to prey on poor people) and better motivation also gets better results. You do not want to see what undergraduate memory study results are like when they cram in all their credits just before finals. Obviously universities don’t have a lot of funds for that, for various reasons, but that’s another issue…
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What you’re talking about seems to be more like an in-lab demo, which isn’t what I mean here. Rather these studies are real research studies conducted by faculty or graduate students under the guidance of faculty (the latter being how the majority of academic publications in the field are done). The idea isn’t to teach students the procedures. In my university at least, that’s done as a 4th year capstone class, the results of which are rarely published. Even then, however, students are generally encouraged to do unique projects, rather than replicate old findings.
The issue of the findings being WEIRD (White, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) is a very real issue though.
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Here’s a question: Are comedians funnier under an authoritarian regime?
Asking for a friend.
(See, Yakov???)
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Another good source for opportunities to participate in psychology research is this constantly updated list of studies:
The internet has really opened up the possibility for researchers cast their net wider than “whatever undergraduates happen to be nearby”, so any boingers who want to broaden the pool of research subjects should give it a look.
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W E I R D
Oohhh Atlantic, you sly devils you…
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