Oh boy, ILX! That's where I'm a viking!..?

Doctor Casino otm

the appeals to authorial authority on this thread have always been so strange to me. like, i thought the author was dead. also: has anyone here ever actually logicked someone out of thinking a joke was funny, and into thinking it was funny in some different way that they prefer?

I was able to convince my son that when I dropped my phone in the toilet it was funny as a satire on technological addiction rather than being funny because the phone was poopy

1) a big point y'all seem unable to consider is viewing it from a writer's/joke creator's POV
2) nobody is doing that. We're simply saying your interpretation is incorrect, that it wasn't how the joke was intended.

Appreciate the 'excels at sleep' folks who are still keeping up the fight.

I'm a reluctant literalist, which ultimately feels like the smaller and more mundane worldview. :(

the idea that the interpretation is "incorrect" because it wasn't what the writer who pitched it had in mind is precisely what i'm challenging!

Not sure whether this entire thread would be better adapted as a university course, a 10-part podcast series or written out by hand in a leather-bound book and sealed in a chamber for a thousand years to be studied by future civilizations.

Nobody who watches the NFL would associate the word "Viking" with 'excelling at something'

IT'S FUNNY BECAUSE THIS IS HOW RALPH IMAGINES HIMSELF!

https://i.imgur.com/UpInW8L.jpg

Sleep, that's where I'm ba toilet

"Oh boy, sleep! That's where I'm Tom Brady!"

"the idea that the interpretation is "incorrect" because it wasn't what the writer who pitched it had in mind is precisely what i'm challenging!"

Some people really cannot handle being wrong about something. This is why postmodernism came about huh. Someone didn't understand a Marx Bros joke and then before we knew it, objective truth ceased to exist.

"Sleep, that's where I'm the G-O-D."

flaw in that argument was, and is, that us "viking at sleep" folks didn't work hard to hear it that way - it's the first and funniest way the joke landed for us.

― I Am Fribbulus (Xax) (Doctor Casino), Monday, September 27, 2021

If explaining a joke always makes it much funnier, then arguing about which interpretation of a joke is more lolworthy is clearly the pinnacle of excellence!

― Aimless, Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Not trying to logic anyone into believing or finding anything funny

Telling someone theyre clearly wrong about a trifle should be ok on a message board

Telling them twenty times should be ok if they come back nineteen times, its all ok

Nobody denying anyone's right to be wrong nor to express themselves in communication of that wrongness

Just vvv important that we don't allow that to slip into some sort of acceptance that they are not wrong because they are wrong

Im not being serious there its not at all important

But also theres no reason not to do it

My question is, what did vikings say when they wanted to express that they excelled at something?

Pillaging! That's where I'm a Visigoth!

vandal was right there

To the xtreme I rock the mic like a Viking

Let’s go with the interpretation that doesn’t require creating a completely new and pointless connotation for a word, because if we assume the standard connotation, as one would expect the audience to do as a matter of course, the joke fits perfectly with the character’s stream-of-consciousness absurdity, and makes for a good laugh at face value.

The "excels at sleep" people are basically the racist trump-voting relatives of not understanding comedy, they know what they're saying is wrong and that's what they enjoy about it

Fresh photos with the bomb lighting
New man rule sleep like a Viking

I've always been on Team Dream here, but have to say that Ralph Wiggum coming up with a bizarre malapropism is vmic.

xp also is Ralph known for using obscure language or hidden meanings? I feel like it’s a cornerstone of his character that he’ll just blurt out whatever and you can take what he says literally.

And is Ralph even self-aware enough to know that he’s not good at things when he’s awake?

He dreams that he’s a Viking- which gives us a great visual to imagine! Which is not the case if he means he’s good at things- where is the humor there?

I don't know if it is vmic, but this era of The Simpsons has tons of out-of-character moments. Characters don't stick rigidly to their expected patterns.

This revive is like digging up a corpse and then making out with it

did we get this sorted?

Flagellating a deceased equine, that's where we're Norse raiders

The "excels at sleep" people are basically the racist trump-voting relatives of not understanding comedy, they know what they're saying is wrong and that's what they enjoy about it

― hiroyoshi tins in (Sgt. Biscuits), Monday, September 27, 2021 12:46 PM bookmarkflaglink

would really love to know what i or others said to give you this impression because it's not correct fyi! it's funny tho, as an "exceller," i've always been able to understand and accept that the "dreamers" hear the joke a different way and think it's funny! i ask only that the same courtesy be extended in our direction.

How many years until U.S. mass violence, warring red and blue enclaves, civil war 2

Missed this whole debate but I somehow do remember the joke and I always took it to mean “excels at sleep”; the other interpretation never occurred to me. I could explain why I take it that way but I’m sure all possible points have been covered in the 2000 or so previous posts. Would only say that my interpretation is not necessarily more metaphorical than the other. Dreaming is in itself metaphorical.

"i've always been able to understand and accept that the "dreamers" hear the joke a different way and think it's funny! i ask only that the same courtesy be extended in our direction."

Nobody isn't accepting that y'all hear the joke a different way and think it's funny that way. But when presented with the simpler, more logical interpretation that was verified by the writer to be the joke's intention, we merely expect y'all to go "oh ok my bad, I get it now, that makes more sense. Even though I still think my interpretation is funnier"

I mean this is verging on "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge" obduracy.

a) the post I was quoting and responding to very explicitly does NOT accept that! "excellers" are routinely pigeonholed as being insincere trolls!

b) does this "the author has spoken, stfu" standard apply to any other areas of culture? like for example song lyrics? novels? just trying to get a sense of which messageboard i'm on here.

c) just as an aside, nobody ever acknowledges that right after that one writer said he'd conceived the joke as a "dreamer," another person who was in that writers' room came forward to say they'd heard it as an "exceller." so who knows, maybe it wouldn't have even made it on the show if not for "excelling" being a valid and viable reading/response!

The "excels at sleep" people are basically the racist trump-voting relatives of not understanding comedy, they know what they're saying is wrong and that's what they enjoy about it
― hiroyoshi tins in (Sgt. Biscuits), Monday, September 27, 2021 12:46 PM bookmarkflaglink

not only that but many people are saying these Trump-voting Excellers want to deport the Dreamers!

also,

d) the idea that "dreaming" is "simpler" and "more logical" is an opinion!

It's not a very well-phrased joke if ~30% of a large group of relatively smart people misinterpreted it in the same way

sleep like a viking to oWn teH liBs

No it's not an opinion it's fact. No joke in the history of comedy is constructed where the audience is supposed to assume someone is coining a phrase but the joke isn't even about the phrase-coining.

If Hendrix said he sung "scuse me while I kiss the guy" yet you STILL insist "scuse me while I kiss this guy" is equally valid, you have a problem with admitting you were mistaken

It was below 25%. But that's irrelevant. I understand misinterpreting initially. But continuing to insist on the misinterpretation is ridiculous

Having to invent a backstory of "that's where I'm a Viking"=that's something I excel at, and then that leads you to realize Ralph thinks he excels at sleeping is just objectively more convoluted than he dreams he's a Viking.

There's the intention of the joke writer and then there's the actual text of the joke, two different things

Right. One clears up the ambiguity of the other.

Oh good then, glad I found out many years later what that joke was supposed to mean

does this "the author has spoken, stfu" standard apply to any other areas of culture? like for example song lyrics? novels?

songs lyrics (and poetry and some novels) are often obscure and open to multiple interpretations. Jokes otoh are usually more pointed--i.e. they lead to a punchline. The Death of the Author idea is less about anyone getting to come up with their own Breaking Bad ending than a recognition that the authorial imagination is guided by social forces he/she may not be conscious of.

That's the spirit, J!

at this point i'm just repeating arguments made ad nauseum in this thread a decade ago, but: the "dream" theory *also* involves huge leaps beyond recognizable everyday experience and usage, insofar as irl nobody dreams about anything (at least not anything pleasant) consistently enough to have an expectation that every time they go to sleep they will have that same dream. even if they did, "that's where i'm an X" would remain a bizarre linguistic invention - I have never once heard anyone describe a dream by saying "sleep is where i was back at my old high school, only it was in Spain and all the walls were purple..." whereas "that's where I (blank)" is an established construction for sentences about abilities, like "that's where I shine," or, say, "that's where I really excel."

if "dreamers" are going to make claims to the intellectual high ground i would expect them to engage with these weaknesses in their position, or corroborating cases like the Pete & Pete use of "my little viking" from around the same time (posted upthread and systematically ignored). instead they just insist that "excellers" are somehow "objectively" wrong. a travesty of blinkered rigidity! they describe this dilemma as if the way language and humor land in the brain is something definable at the level of symbolic logic or something, where we could count the number of "steps" involved and conclude which meaning is right by which one takes fewer steps. and that's not how stuff works!

also anyway occam's razor is only a rule of thumb - sometimes the more complex explanation IS the better one!

Yet it applies here

songs and novels, as much as jokes, might lead to an intended interpretation. not sure what makes them categorically different. this thread feels like someone on a Beatles message board said Lucy in the Sky always makes them think sort of sadly about the hopes vs experiences of hippie women in the "summer of love," and someone else came in to declare "sorry to inform you that it was inspired by a drawing John's kid did at school, CASE CLOSED"