You crush Miette like the grape?

brick up mother in basement for ONE THOUSAND YEARS

The Cask of Miettellado

Y'all are just absolutely committed to creating humor I cannot explain to my spouse, aren't you?

Surrealist humor sure is taking on a new flavor huh

I have finally identified my only two braincells.

In 3d video games at least, objects that clip like this bump around and make so much noise because they are gaining speed as they rapidly cut between being pushed and pulled by the surface's collision box. These objects can possess immense speed even if they look relatively stationary.

Touching the chair may well result in releasing this enormous amount of confined speed into your body, which is a fun way to meet the dev team.

#well now i gotta forever use meet the dev team as a euphamism for dying

My fellow Tumblr denizens may be confused by this image, but trust and believe that the chiveposting that has been happening is in a chef/back-of-house subreddit and everyone has been so so loving and supportive (for line cooks) of this fellow who started it all by wanting to improve their knife skills. He is taking it all in good humor, the edits with the airplanes crashing into "towers" (wrong size long chives) have been consistently funny, and the mod comments of "we WILL continue chiveposting despite the haters of repetitive content bc We Like It" have been a delight. He was a few hours later than he normally posts today and the subreddit was in an uproar bc they feared something had happened to him, but thankfully he uodated with the above image and the shitposting hit the algorithm so hard it was briefly one of the top posts.

Please understand, we love the chive man. His sisyphusian attempts, which are never perfect, gives him an excuse to practice every day and his efforts are rewarded with updoots (high praise on a critical af platform)

Some day he might get bored and not post. Until then, chive on.

one time a person on this app asked me how I characterize Jason. The answer is: he’s me when it’s two am and all I’ve eaten in the past 10 hrs is a cup of iced coffee and a cough drop but I have to muster the brainpower in order to write some fanfic because it’s my only projected free time for the next week

aka scarily eloquent but at the same time absolutely delusional and probably needs to be taken to the hospital

an interesting part of migrating to tumblr and learning its culture is figuring out by clues how bloggers announce that they don't give a fuck about whatever issue of the week is happening and don't want to get wrapped up in the discourse. If that's indeed what this means idk

that's very close, it mostly signals that the awareness of the discourse has reached critical mass on people's dashboards and folks are parodying the most common popular posts. Kind of like a clown routine making fun of other clowns when they're not looking, except everyone can see it and hits reblog anyways. There's a whole category of post that makes fun of the discourse of pet ownership that's like "lumberjack is an invasive species in hardware stores." Self aware humor is the vibe. Don't worry it's easy, just use form without the original context like

"learning about tumblr culture like" *spins roulette wheel* "running outside and touching grass all the time"

"actually that's not quite true because" *spins roulette wheel* "most tumblr users don't know what outside is nevermind how to touch things"

it's also a subtle jab at the original conversation being really dumb. It's not about not commenting or participating, it's PVP. You've just entered an attack zone, anyone can jump in on this conversation and own you or me or both of us at any time. It's great.

what are y'all talking about can we Please focus on the fact that the sons of Muspel literally just destroyed the Bifröst

And the big reason it's not funny when corporations use this in advertisements is:

Gallows humor ain't fucking funny when it's coming from the guy wearing a black hood with his hand on a lever.

Like fuck you, your CEO makes millions of dollars and your spending more money than I'll ever see in my life to pay other corporations whose CEOs also make millions of dollars to write / produce / display ads fucking gloating about you and your cronies plunging the world into poverty to line the pockets of investors. If I see an ad doing that shit, your company is going straight on the "boycott if at all possible" list.

(and no, "Oh no, we had to lay off 3000 people because the public is too poor to buy our product anymore!" does not count as the poor widdle corpo also suffering from the ruined economy)

OOH OOH, I have an answer to this actually! I know exactly why it is that you as an asexual person are enjoying the sex-related stuff in Running Close to the Wind! Because I will argue that it is NOT all that horny, in fact!

What it is...... is ✨BAWDY✨

Horny books want to turn you on, so sex is treated as a Serious, breathlessly big-deal thing. Bawdy books do not care about turning you on, because the point of bawdiness is to entertain and delight you with some rowdy, boisterous antics.

A bawdy approach is deeply unserious about sex: it's just a funny thing people do which gets them into funny situations. Bawdiness also doesn't really presume that the audience will be participating in any sexiness that is happening. There's a clear division between what the characters are feeling and what the audience is expected to feel -- we're just standing on the outside munching popcorn while a group of weirdos flail through some hijinks for our amusement. This is, naturally, a very welcoming and comfortable space for many ace and aro people, who KNOW that sex is one of the silliest activities a person can partake in.

As for it being the first piece of media you've seen that treats sex this way -- Oooh, I bet it isn't, though! Because I absolutely did NOT invent this vibe! Shakespearean comedies often rely heavily on bawdy humor (for example: the title "Much Ado About Nothing" is itself a bawdy double entendre: "nothing = no thing", where "thing" is a euphemism for dick. So the title means "Loads of Drama About Pussy"). Many of the jokes in Terry Pratchett could be classed under the umbrella of bawdy comedy, as could a good chunk of old-school slapstick. All the funny scenes in Moulin Rouge are built on foundations of bawdy comedy, inspired by or taken directly from scenes in opera, where bawdy humor has always been one of the core loadbearing pillars -- same with the Commedia dell'Arte. Ever been to a drag show? At least a few bawdy jokes in there, I guarantee it. Oh, and I Love Lucy! Check it out:

Familiar vibe? :D yes, it's our good old friend ✨BAWDY COMEDY✨ It's got some winks at sex (Lucy saying "let's stand two feet apart, we don't want to get the school rated", the tango's reputation as a sexy dance, the physical intimacy which results in the punchline, the positioning of the eggs that she and Ethel are hiding on their persons) but it's not remotely trying to be sexy. It's too busy giggling with you at this absolute gremlin of a woman.

I will allow that bawdy comedy seems to have decreased in popularity in recent decades -- possibly an unfortunate unintended casualty in the sexual liberation movement? Greater freedom of sexual expression -> greater freedom to depict sex sexily, instead of having to stay firmly in the territory of saucily winking and chuckling about it under a layer of plausible deniability??? Or possibly Reagan's fumbling of the AIDS epidemic -> Sex can't be funny anymore, sex is scary and deadly????? Or the rise of Evangelical Christianity condemning anything even faintly related to sex???? Maybe a bit of all of that? I'm just spitballing here, I don't have anything but guesses. I'm sure somebody has done a PhD about it somewhere in the world. I hope they are on tumblr and see this post so they can explain where and when and why bawdiness fell out of fashion to the point that people have forgotten the word entirely and (this isn't just you, op!) only have the vocabulary to frame it as, "well it's horny but not sexy?? it's like weird gremlin horny??? What IS this?"

Genuinely, I think we as a society need to rediscover bawdiness and embrace that vibe again. I think we need to lean into it. I think it would fix us. 90% of the fandom antis/purity culture people on this accursed webbed site are like that because they've never been taught that it's okay to relax and laugh about sex.

I mean, sex IS pretty scary for a lot of people! But one of the most powerful things that comedy can do is to take a scary topic and defang it. Bawdy comedy shows you that sex is something really normal and scrungly and weird and funny and not all that big of a deal, instead of something to tie ourselves up in anxious knots about. Everybody say, "Thank you, bawdy comedy!"

Another datapoint in my working theory that my bar for fictional sex enjoying tends to be “ would this bore the hell out of an ace person?” because sex is just another thing that characters can do, and no more or less interesting than so many other activities. I get that some people find it very motivating in spurring their desire to write or draw but this rarely translates to my eagerness as the audience to show up, and neither of those tastes are “right,” they just are.

E.g. I loved OGLAF, but I’m definitely not the only one who neither came (…contractually-obligated hee) nor stayed for the porn. It’s like if someone wrote a fantasy sport situation/ sketch comic but the sport is sex. The art is great and it’s bonkers-silly, and also there’s a ton of sex in it, but you can tell the creators got distracted from the porn with general-purpose levity, and it’s so much better for that.

OGLAF!!!!!! How could I forget Oglaf on my list of things!!! Yeah I agree with all of this, Oglaf starts out kind of in the middle of the spectrum between bawdy and horny (like i think some of those titties are supposed to be at least a bit titillating). But that blend of horny/bawdy is not a stable isotope of comedy -- it can be balanced, but it's tricky to sustain over a long period of time, because it always wants to tip over and resolve down into one component or the other.

I'm still thinking about this actually, especially why so much bawdy comedy (or what should be bawdy comedy) just does not work. Like, take sitcoms. LOTS of sex-related Humorous Situations, which would theoretically qualify as on the bawdy comedy spectrum, but they fall a bit flat and often leave us cold, or feeling bored/annoyed/tired. Why? 🤔

well, now you're getting another whole essay, because I think it comes down a couple different pitfalls:

• It's OVERLY burdened by a pervasive, background sexual anxiety. Example: The Big Bang Theory. Most of the leads SAY they want sex, but the concept of Sex itself is clearly just as terrifying as the women that the male leads allegedly yearn for. The show can't decide if it wants us to laugh, or if it wants us to sympathize, or pity them, so it ends up wrestling itself into this place where you can almost see the miserable self-hatred leaking out of its pores. Of the main characters, I think the one who manages to stick closest to bawdy comedy is Amy, whose actress does her goddamn best with the material she's given, but it still often comes off weird and uncomfortable. Bawdy comedy CANNOT be genuinely terrified of sex on the narrative level. A character can be, yes, but the narrative voice and narrative scaffolding absolutely cannot be, otherwise you're dead in the water. (Note: Bawdy comedy can also reflect the social anxieties of sex (such as using tropes of infidelity, more on this below), but the point is that it's being playful with them.)
• It hates women. Now, don't get me wrong, there is plenty of bawdy comedy out there which is sexist to some degree, and a lot of the classic (and sometimes genuinely ancient) tropes rely on it. But I want to draw a faint and delicate line between "sexism" and "actively hating women" -- a Venn diagram which looks like a fried egg, where "hating women" is the yolk. Using TBBT as an example again, it uses a flavor of humor that persistently implies that women are terrifying alien creatures, objects of fear and horror (or, even worse, contempt) rather than active participants in boisterous desire. In TBBT, are Outsiders, they are Other, they are The Enemy. Compare that to one of the classic tropes of bawdy comedy, the senex amans: the stock character of an amorous Old Man getting hilariously cuckolded by his Hot Younger Wife and her Handsome Lover. While this trope still has elements of sexism, the Hot Younger Wife and the Handsome Lover are the protagonists, and it is HER cleverness and quick thinking which keeps the bawdy antics going when her elderly husband comes home early and almost catches them in a tryst. The trope is sexist because it's derived from a sexist society (the understood background being that this woman was not free to exercise full agency in who she married, as many women weren't), but the trope doesn't set her up to be hated the way that TBBT hates women. To achieve bawdy comedy, your women characters may be in the role of the gremlins or playing the 'straight-man', but as soon as you bring a real loathing into it, you're veering into a danger zone where it's not bawdy comedy anymore, it's mean comedy.
• It is otherwise degrading. I watched the first scene of Adulting and instantly DNFed -- it could have been bawdy, I think it WANTED to be bawdy, but it actually landed in "sordid". There's no joke here, there's just a disgusting thing, framed as being disgusting, and then the disgust spreads to someone who we're allegedly supposed to laugh at as the main character. Nope. Missed the mark. The characters in bawdy comedy might be a little endearingly self-deprecating, and they might be whacked by the Joke Trout of slapstick a couple times in the course of the Boisterous Antics, but in true bawdy comedy, this is not framed as a humiliation, and the comedy is not punishing them. In the above clip from I Love Lucy, we're not laughing at her being degraded -- that is, unnecessarily and disproportionately targeted by the narrative for no reason than because it might be funny; we're laughing because Lucy made some gremlin decisions (oh, you thought it was a good idea shove eggs down your shirt and try to be sneaky about it?) and she's experiencing some very proportional consequences of gremlinry (now you've got a shirt full of smashed eggs), and yet she's still trying to play it chill and casual. As another example: the Hot Young Wife's Handsome Lover might get wrestled into a bad disguise - - a ratty old dress with a mop on his head for hair -- followed by the Elderly Husband catching sight of him, peering at him in confusion, and remarking to his Hot Young Wife that her new lady's maid is awfully ugly. But the source of the comedy doesn't come from the protagonist being mocked and insulted, it's comes from our delight that such a bad and obvious disguise actually worked.
• Not Committing to the Bit: it can't decide whether to frame potentially-bawdy antics as funny or serious. Remember the first season of Glee when -- god i've forgotten everyone's names -- the teacher's wife was, like, faking being pregnant? That could have been funny (and in order to do so would have had to embrace the true spirit of bawdiness), but then it really left the neighborhood of comedy entirely because it needs us to be on board with thinking it's creepy, actually. Same thing happens with My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. The main character is "crazy", but the show erodes our willingness to root for her because it needs to remind us that what she's doing is Bad instead of fully embracing and celebrating her Unhingedness. Compare that to, say, Jenna Moroni from 30 Rock, who is FULLY allowed to be an insane fucking gremlin and is never narratively condemned for it.
• Poor comedic construction. Sometimes this looks like not sticking the landing or getting too sincere at the wrong moment. Too many examples to name. Any time that the sitcom lovers finally kiss and the studio audience goes "awwww" instead of "YAYYYY WOO HOO" you know that we are on really rocky ground in the pursuit of bawdy comedy. Other times, this might mean bad pacing. It's still bawdy comedy, but it got the rhythm wrong, so we're yawning. Jokes are hard!! Comedy is a fine-tuned machine.

Obviously all of these are subjective to some degree, but I think these are the core elements to watch out for when you're writing bawdiness or assessing it as a reader, and the first two points especially (overly burdened by sexual anxiety and Hating Women) are a huge part in why so much modern would-be-bawdy humor falls on its face.