At 10:52 AM 4/01/01 +0100, Anders wrote:
>They also used it as a weapon during the Great War, according to a
>mock documentary in the skit: british soldiers who did not speak
>German learned one line each, and then read it aloud.
Who did the German translation in the first place?
Yes, I *know* I'm being absurdly pedantic about a nice running gag. The
self-undermining self-recursion is half the fun. But I have this theory,
see. I reckon the laugh-till-you-die joke must have been devised in the
first place by an Asperger person, or maybe a Martian, or perhaps even an
AI program [run on a Babbage Engine, I guess]. It would have to be written
down initially by some critter that could *predict* the dire effect on a
standard human brain-body, while escaping those toxic consequences. Asimov
once wrote a sinister story, `Jokester', in which Multivac, the first great
computer, showed by exhaustive analysis that jokes were not of human
origin. Perusal of this list might confirm that theory...
Damien Broderick
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 09:56:16 MDT