You'll need to wait a few days before you get the post Staganography (thar's a low ball composite of Stag and Steganography, the first having to do with nudies, the latter with hiding text in pictures).
No, you did not miss the announcement of a Staganography post, this is the first time we mention it.
Today, however, we write about the much more urgent topic of the role of numbers, or figures, in comedy and satire. We claim expertise in this area, while at the same time frustrating any inquiry into the reason for claiming expert status.
But we give you our reasoning for frustrating the inquiry.
One: we believe our readers are intelligent. If we do a good job, they will agree. If we fail, we have only ourselves to blame.
Two: if we have to wield a thesis or a prior publication in order to gain credibility, we regard it as a failure.
Here are the premises for the post:
Numbers are used in comedy, fine. Comedy is not an exact science, so you are not bound by the wonderful rules of mathematics.
So, what can go wrong?
Everything, thanks to Mr. Murphy. Where Mr. Murphy just so happens to represent the ultimate Irishman of comedic devices.
It may be hard to see why the use of numbers can be dangerous in an area that uses hyperbole and overstatement all the time. If a number is big, it can be great comedy to make it huge.
Or understate it, make it small or tiny.
The secret lies in context (or butt of the joke) and scope.
Example 1:
I am so lucky to have such a huge number of friends, so here is a shout out to to all two of them, Angie and John.
The speaker is the context, the scope the popularity measured in the number of friends. Self deprecating, good fun, nobody gets hurt.
Example 2:
I was in Dublin, Ireland, at the St. Paddy's Day Parade. It featured an overflight by the Irish Air Force [pause], all four of their planes.
Now, try the same with Moscow.
I was in Moscow, Russia at the Independence Day Parade. It featured an
overflight by the Russian Air Force [pause], all four of their planes.
The context: a country's air force. The Irish scope: Ireland is small, a small military is expected, the joke is generally perceived as good natured fun.
The Russian scope: expected to be big, scary, powerful, the number 4 has a lot mire punch.
Example 3:
I was in Dublin, Ireland, and visited the big National Library in Dublin Castle. I sat down, unpacked my thermos and started reading. I did not stop until I had finished reading every single book, all four of them.
The context: a library. The scope: the whole cultural heritage of a country over many centuries. This one will hurt, tempered a little by the obviously hyperbolic number of four books, which nobody will mistake as the correct number.
If you cannot resist comparing the Dublin library to the Library of Congress, ditch absolute numbers.
Example 4:
A German Muslim files a complaint against German comedian Dieter Nuhr, alleging "hate speech" with regard to statements about Islam. Largely unfamiliar with the comedian other than for some snippets we did not find original or funny, we did a Youtube marathon.
All the usual stuff we have seen a decade ago in U.S. comedy is there, including the 72 virgins, beards, suicide bombers, etc.
It's pretty tired, nothing remotely rivaling the Daily Show, Colbert, or Jeff Dunham's Achmed the terrorist puppet.
But then we got to numbers. In this video in German, starting at minute 10:35, he states that the whole Arab world publishes 350 books a year and that the number of patents combined is under 20 per year.
A cursory look at patent numbers, here, and book numbers here shows his numbers to be wrong. The problem is that Mr. Nuhr presents them as facts.
Had he used relative figures, invoking "comedic privilege", it would be okay. Something along the lines of "the West publishes hundreds of times more books per year than the Arab world" would have been okay.
Had he used our example figure 4 from the Dublin joke, we would have found it unfair but within license.
Using the numbers he did with the tone and type of delivery he used in the video, is just bad.
The Germans have a narrower view of "freedom of speech" than the U.S., but we hope the German authorities will throw out the hate speech claim.
We at the K-Landnews do feel vindicated in our earlier estimation of the overall quality of his work: it feeds the man but is not top notch satire.
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