humour (16)

We were talking about how humour necessarily includes a dose of malignancy. But that's not quite it: I think rather that humour's key ingredient is self-deprecation, where the audience identifies with the butt of the joke. After all, humour's purpose is the ability to distance oneself from a tragic situation, an important problem-solving skill.

- Seems you're in way over your head.
- Yes, I guess I'll have to swim!

Once the prototype of the original arcade game Pong was made, it was set up at a local bar for testing. Its makers, the first Atari engineers, watched as bar patrons started playing, then left. Next morning, they learned the machine had stopped working after some time. When they opened the box, they found that the money coins had filled up the bin and caused the machine to hang.

Found in a 2003 Discovery Channel documentary, "The Story of Computer Games", a Leopard Films production.

- I'd like you to listen to something. Do you mind music that can sometimes be off-scale, off-tempo and technically shaky?
- Sure, I can get into rock.