I like this one. It makes me smile.
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CD player playing "Harmful If Swallowed" (2003, Dane Cook)
But Dane Cook isn't funny.
504 reacts to poor or corny attempts at humor.
I actually like his material at times, but his humor is like a litmus test for dumb. If your new girlfriend stays silent at Carlin's punchlines but cracks up at Dane Cook, you're in trouble.
Me neither, and it's really beginning to eat at me.
Sound barrier broken, subject killed.
Alas, poor tabby.
I have an annoying - but smart, and science obsessed - younger brother who kept me annoyed one night with variations on goodnight (culminating in that bedbug phrase) until I managed to get him to leave so I could sleep. For some reason, it has lived on in my memory as one of the most annoying things he's ever said to me. Apparently, since that sentence has been echoed on the SCP's TVTropes page, I've inadvertently succeeding in immortalizing it.
So, the article number came up in chat, and I was rereading the article, and thought of that test. I have never understood it, so I started typing the phrase into Google, thinking maybe it would auto-complete a rhyming phrase or something, and explain it all.
"good luck on a healthy dermis" came up as one of the results. I clicked on it, but there was no explanation- only the scp page.
What this means, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is that enough people have found and joined in the wtf of this particular entry to embed it in Google's internet memory. I don't think I'll ever get the punchline, or that anyone will, but it's clearly done well as a joke without that benefit.
Anyways, just figured I'd share that.
I was never sure that I understood it, but always took it to be a (incredibly lame, and stretching the boundaries of punning as currently understood by science) play on dormire, which is latin for "to sleep". I thought it was supposed to playing with "have a healthy sleep/skin" double meaning … except that even allowing that incredible amount of latitude it still doesn't really make sense.
Of course I could just be over-thinking a nonsensical utterance. I do that sometimes.
My brother was too young to know "dormire" by heart. He was simply playing with the common "bedbugs" idiom, extending it literally in an attempt to be humorous through that very fact.
This SCP reacts to poor or corny attempts at humor. An attempt at humor that falls short of any sort of humor so completely and confusingly would certainly qualify for high-speed tomato drubbings. A failed joke that deserves fruit thrown at mortal speeds.
Should someone test to see if these will react to jokes in different languages? See if they can understand?
One of the tests (the Monty Python one) has a joke in German. The tomato exploded.
What I think would be a good test is if two seperate SCP-504s were exposed to an identical joke, one in English and the other in (insert language here). If they react identically, this might be good in proving that it doesn't matter what language. Personally, I'd like to try it with one joke in English and the same joke in Japanese, but all my humor ability is in English. So maybe someone else could try it?
Also, I'm curious as to the final result of where the tomato ended up for the Sarah Palin test. Did it splat against the TV, go back to where it started, or just explode in confusion? (The sum of the recorded velocities suggests it exploded in front of the TV, in my opinion.)
Well, the manga Toriko is pretty good for puns, so is Hikaru Amane ("David") from Prince of Tennis. The issue with that is that some of the puns aren't doable in English.
Wait, hold on. That joke isn't even a real joke. A bunch of the words are made up. There's no reason for the tomatoes to be affected by it, especially not fatally.
Wait, what. The Funniest Joke In The World is fatal because it's extremely funny, not because it's bad. The idea, apparently, is that the tomato explodes after hearing it, because it's fatal to hear, which I take issue with.
Could it be that the tomato - gasp - had a sense of humor??
Who would'a thought.
Sarah Palin never actually said that line. She stated in an interview with ABC that you could see Russia from an island in Alaska, which is technically true. The sentiment is still stupid, that living next to a foreign country gives you some sort of deeper insight into foreign relations, but let's try not to perpetuate misinformation.
Yeah, I replaced it with the SNL skit tat DID use the line, but finding an actual interview for this would be ideal.
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page revision: 1, last edited: 02 Apr 2021 15:16
