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

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"

"not sure what makes them categorically different."

Give me another joke that is open to interpretation in the same way songs and other art can be

So like, in that one Simpsons episode where hank scorpio says goodbye to a shoe,

"YOU'LL HAVE TO SPEAK UP. I'M WEARING A TOWEL"

xpost No, it's more like if Amanda Palmer heard the Boston song "Amanda" and told everyone it was about her and then Tom Scholz said, "Uh, no it's just a name I decided to use," and AP spent the next ten years telling people that her interpretation was EQUALLY VALID

Non-metaphorical:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcwcxBf_fTE

Some people think that "Why did the chicken cross the road?" "To get to the other side" means that the chicken is going to the afterlife.

We all know Homer was laughing at Hank Scorpio because he once saw someone say goodbye to Elizabeth Shue. Or at least that was how the joke initially struck me so it's just as valid an interpretation as any.

if i read the Amanda Palmer analogy correctly, you're saying Palmer in this scenario makes a false factual claim: "Tom Scholz wrote that song about me." that claim can be refuted by the author coming forward with their own story, just as much as someone claiming they were or were not Deep Throat or the guy in "You're So Vain." but his thread was never posited as a mystery hunt to find out what the joke-author intended. it was a poll: how do you hear/interpret this joke? the joke-author coming forward does not conclude all interpretation. culture would be pretty boring if so.

"Hey Dean! You're a stupid 'Head!" was Homer criticizing the Dean for his warmed over hippie politics.

Xpost

In season 19 episode 9 (Eternal Sunshine of the Simpson Mind), Duffman says "I'm just giving it to your wife. She is gonna be sore tomorrow."

The authorial intent of the joke is clearly that Marge has been injured and Duffman is handing her a cold compress.

However, some viewers have interpreted this line as a sexual innuendo! When that was clearly not the intent!

Imagine.

In the original film Wet Hot American Summer, Michael Showalter is professing his love to Marguerite Moreau, and he says "I love it that sometimes for no reason you're late for shul". As a Jew familiar with Yiddish crossover words and watching a film thick with references to Jewish summer camp, I know that "shul" is the Yiddish word for synagogue and may be used to mean prayer services at summer camp. And I enjoy that joke. I once read someone - maybe on ilx - finding Showalter's mispronunciation of the world "school" to be one of the particularly funny parts of that line, and representative of the absurdist and out-of-left-field quality of the comedy in the movie. I am quite confident that person's interpretation is objectively wrong w/r/t authorial intent. But from a humor standpoint, it seems "valid" to me, whatever that means. Particularly given that though that film has a particular cult following among Jewish summer camp alums, surely the word "shul" is unfamiliar to a significant percentage of its audience who then likely either didn't understand that line, or found a way for it to make sense to them. In other words, I think Dr. C is correct that comedy, and particularly absurdist comedy, is more like poetry and song lyrics than one might think

"the joke-author coming forward does not conclude all interpretation. culture would be pretty boring if so."

Yes, it does. All the other interpretations are wrong. Funnier? Possibly. Where your mind first went? Sure. But wrong nonetheless. As has been pointed out, jokes are not art subject to interpretation the way paintings, stories and songs are. No other jokes are given this treatment.

Ralph could just as easily have said “sleep- that’s where I’m a baseball player!” but that wouldn’t have been funny. The joke is that it’s funny to imagine Ralph as a Viking, and it’s also funny that he must have this deeply suppressed dark side if he has this recurring dream.

"Oh boy, sleep! That's where I eat your face and skullfuck your still-twitching corpse!"

eat your face and skullfuck your still-twitching corpse!"

so... you are on team excel?

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About time you arrived in the thread!

How are you excel guys pronouncing "GIF"?

I used to be passionately pro-excel but at this point in my life I just don't think it's a very good joke

The joke would work better in Spanish where you can say "el sueño" to mean either sleep or dream (as nouns)

Oh wait not pro-excel. Anti-excel. I think pro-excel people should be exiled obviously

Y'all pretending that if Weinstein said he intended it to mean excel you wouldn't view it as vindication and the correct interpretation

DJP won this argument years ago

"Oh boy, sleeping! That's where I'm murdery and rapey!"

― Marriage, that's where I'm a Viking! (HI DERE), Wednesday, April 28, 2010 12:58 PM bookmarkflaglink