From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Thu Jan 04 2001 - 15:31:29 MST
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
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