Not A Blog™

How many articles can one person have in queue, unfinished? At least eight; that’s how many I have. They range from short, one-paragraph style experiments to “two paragraphs from done” full-blown essays that I just don’t like. You would think, after a whole week off and no new posts, that I would work ahead and be fully prepared with a salvo of essays. You would have thought wrong. Since I have nothing of substance, I present, instead, a rather bizarre event.

It turns out that I’m more like Data than I ever imagined. Well, not exactly, because the Star Trek character is drawn to humanity while I’m…not to say that I’m loath towards humanity. Let’s just say there’s room for improvement. Anyway, I had a very Data moment a few days ago.

Before I tell you what happened, let me say for the record that, according to some, I bore a resemblance to the android character when I was in high school. I think the physical resemblance has passed (I’ve gained too much weight), but I sometimes wondered if it wasn’t just in looks alone, but mannerisms as well. Maybe.

Back to the story: if you’re a Star Trek fan, you probably remember when Data installs his emotion chip in Generations. Then there’s a scene where he and Geordi are doing some Star Trek stuff and Data bursts out laughing and says that he finally “got” some joke Geordi told once up a time—like seven years earlier. Okay, he didn’t get it before, now he does. I get it. (To be fair, the scene was pretty funny.)

Well, that just happened to me. I don’t know who originally came up with this. I thought maybe it was one of the Marx Brothers, but I couldn’t find it attributed to them. Regardless, I’ve heard the joke a million times.

How do you get to Carnegie Hall?
Practice, practice, practice.

For some reason—I have no idea why this should be, frankly, and it scares me—I finally found this funny just recently. I’ve heard the joke before and I “get” it. Okay, someone wants directions to get to the location, but they get directions to get on the stage. But for some reason, I read it and I just lost my freakin’ mind. I was laughing, I absolutely am not kidding, for at least a full minute. Fortunately I was alone when I encountered the joke—it didn’t come up in conversation or anything—and so I was able to continue with my seemingly unprovoked maniacal laughter for far longer than is healthy, I’m sure.

But holy crap, where did that come from? Why have I heard this joke dozens of times, but only just now find it funny? It wasn’t even one of those situations where you’re not allowed to laugh and the act of holding in the laughter makes everything ten times funnier. It was just like, I’m sitting in front of my computer, and this comes up, and I lose it.

So now when I think about it, I’m still laughing, but I’m laughing almost as much at myself for laughing so much, as I’m laughing at the actual joke. This isn’t the first time it’s happened, either. But usually the “read the joke, then laugh” time difference is about five seconds. I’ve developed a pretty good sense of “laugh timing”, I think. Someone tells a joke—but you can’t laugh immediately! No, there’s just the slightest beat of pause you have to present—and then laugh. It’s about 8 frames (being a video editor, I use frames as a more precise sub-second measurement), which equates to just over 0.25 seconds. Having correctly implemented the post-joke laughter with the appropriate delay, the joke teller is satisfied and nobody else thinks you’re strange.

The problem is, when I go to implement the post-joke laughter, I rarely have “got” the joke by that point. I’ll understand it, but I won’t find it funny until about 5 seconds following that. So the initial laughter is a reflex action designed to belay suspicion as to my true nature, and while it sounds fake to me, I think I can usually pass it off as genuine. (This is a generalization, natch. Some jokes I get immediately—particularly after I get into joke mode. Still, it takes a couple amusing anecdotes to get my “laugh at jokes” center of my brain primed and up to speed.)

Of course, now I have yet another problem which is: depending on the funniness of the joke, everyone’s done laughing after about 3.3 seconds (100 frames) so I can’t laugh at that point! This means I spend a great deal of time being privately amused and trying not to show it, because it has violated the allowable post-joke laughter temporal window.

Lastly, I end up laughing at jokes for far longer than average. Once the joke is in my head, I’ll just keep giggling about it for minutes. I’ll imagine different deliveries, accenting one word versus the other, and I’ll practice delivering one or both sides (you never know when you need to deliver a good joke—I practice), and every time it’s funny. And then by the time I tune back into the conversation, it has moved on to baseball, anyway, and I’m hopelessly lost and trying not to laugh.

This emotion chip is overrated.

-Ted