shared context makes jokes possible

by alex

A friend sent me a link to these earrings, and thought that Jenny might enjoy them:

My reply email is guaranteed to be funny for one person on this planet: me.

Nice. I appreciated the pun. Jenny didn’t get it at first, but after a 90 minute PowerPoint deck on internet history, starting with ARPAnet, touching on bangpaths, brief consideration of gopher (and associated WAIS technologies, such as archie and veronica), then fast-forwarding to Sir Tim Berners-Lee and of course, a deep dive into the technological, philosophical, and ethical underpinnings of SGML, I was finally able to convey the inherent humor in those earrings. Of course, she too, was disappointed that HTML was such a cheap hack compared to SGML, but after a quick extemporaneous minilecture on disruptive technologies and the genius behind “perfect is the enemy of good enough”, with liberal examples from the hard drive and microprocessor industries, we were back on track. Afterwords, at the roundtable discussion, we both agreed that the advent of CSS and separating content from presentation was a nice shoutout towards the purity of vision originally put forth by Berners-Lee. Just for completeness’ sake, I concluded the deck with a survey of technology on the horizon, such as Web 2.0, the semantic web, and intertwingularity in general.

I think she really enjoyed it.

But seriously, there is a lot of context that two people need to share before jokes are even possible. Without it, the best you can do is wonder if the other person is about to bash you on the head with a rock and eat your babies.