there’s no consensus on funny. how could there be?
No, the entire Fluxblog entry was deleted and just replaced with the words OBIE TRICE for a while.
okay, that is funny.
I actually managed to get this classic up on quite a few entries before the 15-year-olds on the Recent Changes patrol woke up:
I reckon you have a sense of humor, Kate, but also an idea that things that fall outside that sense of humor can’t possibly be funny. I hesitate to say it, because I don’t want to wind you up, but that’s how it looks from here.
Apparently, I’ve been caught vandalising by “a member of wikiproject christianity and wikiproject anglicanism. The reason why I joined is because I want wikipedias christian related things to be of the highest quality. I am a member of wikipedia simple english and there esperanza and am a member of the regular wikipedia esperanza.”
Perhaps. There are some things that I really don’t understand *why* they are funny. And it’s just mystifying, really. Even when I try, like Pinefox, to get people to explain what about it they find amusing, it just fails to compute on any humour level.
You’re right—it’s not just that I don’t think it’s funny. It’s that I can’t conceive of the mental viewpoint that would find it funny.
Explaining why things are funny = massive dud.
Not always.
this is also v. funny to me:
I like explaining why some things are funny. It is still probably dud tho.
I mean, if it’s a cultural reference that you are just not familiar with, then having it explained can indeed make something mystifying suddenly seem hilarious.
But it’s more like, to find these things funny would require me to take on a mental viewpoint which is so alien to me that I just can’t get my head around the humour at all.
Also shout out to the moderator note “edited out non-existent ‘cheeky chappies’ category”, which I suspect was in response to P**l Sc***.
...before the 15-year-olds on the Recent Changes patrol woke up
LOL.
Didn’t the individual who (I thought unfairly) deleted the entry for a certain UK band turn out to be a 15yo schoolkid from Brisbane w/a string of complaints as long as yr arm about unfair rapid article deletions on his talk page?
It’s like... the reactions that some people have to those Right Wing Political Cartoons.
You can read the words and look at the situations, but unless you understand the mindview behind it, they simply aren’t “funny”.
(Though I do actually think that funniest things are simply not explicable—that certain air of utter surrealism and unexpectedness.)
x-post
All the funny wiki-jamming stuff is based on confounding reader expectations plus a touch of the surreal (Fluxblog is a hat? But...how?!). Simple but effective.
If you can’t see what’s funny about confounding expectations via surrealism then dog help you.
This thread was starting to turn into a game of “who’s the *real* troll”, but now it’s all like
damn polite britishers
a present from me to ilm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexis_Petridis
Oh dear.
God bless us, every one.
But how is just inserting “...and has been known to want HEN FAP” into various articles confounding reader expectations?
Yes, it’s a continuum with culture jamming at one end and WE WANT HEN FAP at the other, but it’s like the difference between graffiti art and mindless tagging like a dog marking its territory. Which is art, and which is vandalism? Which is humour, and which is just vandalism?
I don’t really understand how mindless vandalism, repeating catchphrases one didn’t even come up with ... how that translates into humour in any universe.
I don’t either. But it happens. (xp)
God, I’m turning into the Pinefox. Lord help me.
If you look in your history books, you’ll discover that the most graffitied phrase back in Paris ’68 was, “Nous voulons le fap de poule!”
See, I think/thought the hen fap thing was pretty lame & unfunny, but even then, I look at this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kid_Creole_and_the_Coconuts
do ctrl + f for “hen fap”, and I must admit, I laffed. It’s the incongruousness of it, hidden in there where most ppl won’t even notice it/
mindless tagging like a dog marking its territory.
It is certainly not mindless to the person tagging. There is a valid reason for them to be doing so (as well for the dog.) I think vandalism can be seen as relative here.
410 new answers in a day on a thread about internet messageboard posters: ILX’s self-obsession springs to the fore once again...
see wiki vandalism is y know kinda like a watercooler thread. except the communication of banalties and cute yet mystifying injokes take place er on wikipedia with the added bonus that someone, somewhere might really believe that young jezzy is in sucession to the british throne or something.
‘we want Hen FAP’ and similar is not a particulary good example of the technique. it’s deliberately obscure and rather weak as a ‘meme’.
altho i also agree with pashmina’s point re incongruousness of placement
ILX’s self-obsession springs to the fore once again...
is there anything wrong with this tho? human behaviour is fascinating—esp. on the internet.
i.e. if i was reading the Kid Creole wiki and not expecting to see ‘hen fap’ in there, i may well have LOLd when i did see it—even if i was not aware of the ‘meme’ (because the nonsense and incongruosness of it would probably still be quite amusing on it’s own)
Louis is only irked cos we got to 400 posts without anybody calling for him to be banned.
Also, I suppose it also comes down to the thing that Monty Python/The Fast Show/Dom Joly (delete according to your tastes) is funny, but 14 year olds (or your colleagues) repeating the catchphrases from said programmes endlessly over the lunch table simply *isn’t* funny.
yes it is.
Jeez, I wasn’t expecting the Spanish Inquisition.
AARRRGGGGHHHHH!!!
Workday over. Going home. ::insert comedy catchphrase::
And I’ll leave these for certain other posters to take in the morning:
NV, I hadn’t even read the thread when I posted that. Now I have I’d understand it fully if you all turned towards each other, nodded, and rapaciously tore into the flesh of whoever happened to be standing in the doorway disputing your careful days’ work... ;-)
BAN LOUIS JAGGER
Posting before reading the thread = really fucking annoying (well not really but still)
i dont get it. but, carry on!
all this thread lacks is some pussy jagger-baiting
Hen Fap is starting to get legs if only from the moderators there dissing it.
I, by no means advocate disrupting wikipedia in a permanent sense, and I think the comments on the appeal of wikipedia vandalism are OTM here. If you had read the edit history for Israel-related stuff as the events unfolded this summer, it was a very clear way to see all aspects of the zeitgeist.
There’s been a number of fairly high profile ILX related wikipedia edits than have gone unnoticed and gained credibility over the past year. Some of them are pretty easily refuted, but there’s a sense of wonder in thinking that someone in LA may be crate digging for a collaboration between a legendary guitarist and a man who only existed as an injoke ysi. Or that an extreme sport founder is actually a twee office drone in California. Why do we have to chronicle reality as if it actually is objective? It makes the world more amazing to me.
I’ve perpetuated a pretty funny YSI hoax on ILX, but I’d love to try a bigger one.
Now I can’t find my list of funny edits to wikipedia and I wanted to share my gems with you. (My personal funny edits are almost only additive and easily refutable.) I’ve noticed a number of people who cleanup vandalism find it funny and use their cleanup as a method of appreciating the vandalism. It remains in the edit history, much like that Roman Graffti that ILX loved so much. Don’t you think it’d be wonderful for some graduate student in Star Trek to write a thesis on Hen Fap?
Also, in the future, all archaeologists will be computer scientists
As I said.
I dunno if this counts in RL, but in sexclubs they are ppl who don’t understand “No thanks.”
Maybe this will tell you guys why wikipedia vandalism can be funny:
TROLLING OR ART:
He is a former Maxis employee, who was fired after secretly adding code into the game SimCopter, which would cause sprites of males in swimming trunks kissing each other to appear on certain dates. This was not discovered until after the game had been released.
art
The Denny Lethargy/Vertigo stuff is outright brilliant.
ssh jaymc
The Quake article claimed it was released in Japan under the name “Hen Fap” for nearly four months.
still funny
Adam Cadre = HILARIOUS
(I totally feel like it’s 1996 all over again)
the best wikipedia hen fap trolling was the one with the Celtic song
Why do we have to chronicle reality as if it actually is objective? It makes the world more amazing to me.
^^best part of this thread
pointy nose = buttplug
^^2nd best part of this thread
ha my gift is baring fruit. i am the Mark Grout of wikipedia:
Alexis Petridis
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
Alexis Petridish is the chief music writer, as well as a columnist on matters of male fashion, for UK newspaper The Guardian. He is also the “under 50s” music critic for GQ, and was final editor of now defunct music magazine Select. In his writing he has praised a wide variety of musical acts, such as Kasabian, Girls Aloud, and Ricky Shakes, writing: “I have seen the future of ant simulation video games, and his name is Ricky Shakes”. Petridis is referenced by Nas in his song “Ether”, with the line “Remember Jay when I got you in Select/ Back then not even Petridis give you respect/ So we went to Wagamama’s instead/ Awesome chow mein”.
Petridis is a regular contributor to the internet forum I Love Music, under the sobriquet “Louis Jagger”.
I lolled and I don’t care who knows.
I wonder if the 15-year-old who just blocked me for 48 hours after slightly vandalising the entry for the May 1968 Riots understood the irony in that.
(Probably not.)
Besides, how do they know that Nous voulons le fap de poule! wasn’t a student slogan anyway...
the best wikipedia hen fap trolling was the one with the Celtic song
YSI
It was me that had the Dirty Vicar name. I changed it as soon as it was pointed out that a another poster had it. Funnily enough on the old board people mistook me for Passatino or even Steve Malkmus. WTF. The internets is an odd place.
the best wikipedia hen fap trolling was the one with the Celtic song
link plz
I feel this thread ending with a “Matt DC locking it” vibe.
You know, I just spent about 15 minutes fighting off the enormous temptation to delete every post on this thread and replace it with the words OBIE TRICE.
Or would TALVIN SINGH be funnier?
i wouldn’t ‘get’ either
anyway thread was pretty fun!
Anyway Steve why are you wasting your life on this thread rather than coming to meet us in the pub like you should be? (I am leaving now).
Merry Christmas ILE.
OK who removed “hen fap” from the Spanish Diplomats article >=(
Matt. Lock. it. Rock. it.
OMG at wiki
Random wiki vandalism—it wisnae me I was looking for a goose.
I love Matthew Perpetua.
what a fucking bore
Didn’t PYHUFLJ,HLTN record Scotland’s song for the ’98 World Cup? Somebody should mention that on the Wikipedia entry.
irony indeed
Hey, The Entire NHS is no longer banned from editing Wikipedia!
still it survives! this edit is here to STAY
i don’t get it
I think that, if this thread has conclusively proven anything, the answer is “someone who is very easily amused”.
esoj: the singer out of slipknot once went to rome to see the pope, and the pope said to his aide “who the fucking hell are slipknot in relation to me getting out of my bed?”. it was a heartwarming moment of humanity
oic
discovered this one by accident
T/S: Being Easily Amused vs Being Easily Po-Faced
where’s the ILX pines/pwns entry? that was always one of my faves.
And then there are people like your N*de Sp*cks and your Marissas who are actually genuinely mentally ill, and I don’t think they ever realise or understand what it is that is going on to get them into the messes they find themselves in, until it’s too late. Then they perceive themselves as being attacked, and freak out.
— masonic boom (kateotheremai...), December 21st, 2006.
This gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “takes one to know one.” Aren’t you a junkie in therapy on antidepressants or something?
Speaking of “not understanding,” let me quote for you from my pal Jon “Wizard Is Hungry” Guy’s old website where he quoted thusly, and I quote:
Advancement is a cultural condition in which an Advanced individual—i.e., a true genius—creates a piece of art that 99 percent of the population perceives to be bad. However, this is not because the work itself is flawed; this is because most consumers are not Advanced.Now, don’t assume this means that everything terrible is awesome, or vice versa; that contrarianism has no place in Advancement theory. The key to Advancement is that Advanced artists a) do not do what is expected of them but also b) do not do the opposite of what is expected of them. If an artist does the direct opposite of what is anticipated, he is classified as “overt†(more on this later). The bottom line is this: When a genius does something that appears idiotic, it does not necessarily mean he suddenly sucks. What it might mean is that he’s doing something you cannot understand, because he has Advanced beyond you.
hee hee hee. “Turd Crosby”