Oh boy, ILX! That's where I'm 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

@ GD - once again, refusing to engage with the substance of exceller arguments and instead insisting that they are either arguing in bad faith, or at least surely would be, in some parallel universe. this all feels like "i'm not trolling, YOU'RE the troll" projection to me.

"no other jokes are given this treatment," directly after a thoughtful and interesting post about giving another joke this treatment

Huh? I understand all your arguments. Your interpretation is still wrong.

That person who thought it was a mispronounciation of "school" is WRONG. His/her interpretation is not just as valid as the correct one. You want to totally redefine what a joke is because you interpreted one incorrectly.

There's been over 1000 posts engaging with this inanity plus the joke writer clearing things up so forgive me for not engaging to your ego's liking at this juncture

Burns: Stop everything!I don't remember writing a check for bowling.}
Smithers: Uh, Sir, that's a check for your _boweling_.
Burns: Oh, yes. That's very important.
Smithers: Yes, Sir. Remember that month you didn't do it?
Burns: Yes...that was unpleasant for all concerned. Anyway, back to the checks. Stop everything! I don't remember writing a check for bowling.

did anyone else have the official Simpsons episode guide book from the 90s that included a transcript of the above scene but replaced "Remember that month you didn't do it" with "Remember that monkey didn't do it"

btw I'm one of those people that misinterpreted the joke as funny as "lol he mispronounced school" since I didn't know about the practice of 'shul', but once I learned that, I adjusted my interpretation of why it was funny to understand he actually meant shul.

Your argument is "but what is a joke anyway? Who's to say whose punchline is correct" which is some postmodern bullshit created to assuage your ego

what is joke
baby don't tell me

Huh? I understand all your arguments. Your interpretation is still wrong.

That person who thought it was a mispronounciation of "school" is WRONG. His/her interpretation is not just as valid as the correct one. You want to totally redefine what a joke is because you interpreted one incorrectly.

I myself am a "dreamer" with regard to ol' Ralph's relationship with the Norse people, so maybe I am just trolling, but I am compelled to ask what you mean by "WRONG" here, GD. It is a somewhat uneasy experience but please consider stepping over the cliff of humor being one of the artistic categories where the value and experience of a piece of art is not confined to author intent

Vikings conquer. being a Viking at sleep = conquering sleep.

aka he wants immortality

Ralph is a highlander

no no he wears an apnea machine that resembles viking horns, that's what he meant obv

Wrong=not the intended punchline. Just because people stumbled upon an alternate hamfisted interpretation that both makes sense and is funny to them doesn't mean that all interpretations are equally "right".

"please consider stepping over the cliff"
Why should I? That's not how jokes work. Esp this one. Stop acting like this is fucking dostoeyvsky or Picasso.

http://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/1476/6986/articles/6-Reasons-To-Love-Your-CPAP-Machine_1024x1024.jpg?v=1601315803

And as I've said I think writer's intent here helps to dismiss the excel option, even before actual confirmation from the writer: a joke that 75% of ppl think is incomprehensible is just not going to be pitched at a show like the simpsons, let alone make it thru multiple rewrites. It demonstrates a failure to view things from anything other than your own ie the audience's perspective.

Like, it happened to turn out that 25% of ppl immediately thought being a viking=excelling at something but no writer in their right mind would EXPECT that from an audience. And if he/she did, fellow writers would set it straight.

https://i.imgur.com/6WYDfgG.jpg

thank you Camaraderie at Arms Length, that was what I was going for :)

I mean, that's what Josh Weinstein was going for. Obviously.