CSotD: Foolish Jokes for Smart People

Dark Side of the Horse (AMS) on the dumb side of praise.

There are a couple ways of looking at this simple cartoon, the first being that paying to be told you’re smart is contradictory, and you can bet that vending machine never shows anything but 160, which is genius level, 100 being average.

According to a test that a lot of people who understand such things don’t much respect.

There are free IQ tests on Facebook and other sites, so you don’t have to put in a coin but you do have to allow them to harvest you in their like farm and sell you to the spammers.

Ditto with all the quizzes that say “9 out 10 can’t answer this,” to which my response is to wonder how they verified that claim, but, of course, 9 out of 10 are smart enough not to click on the link, so it’s kinda self-fulfilling.

Being told how smart you are, or aren’t, is of dubious value to begin with. Better you should just do your thing and let matters play out.

Social media is full of high-IQ people at the troublesome end of the spectrum, and I say that with a great deal of affection for Aspies but not so much for people who become quarrelsome when social norms and reality conflict with their opinions.

Funny story: I had a conversation with my ass’t editor about Mensa one day, in which I took the position that Mensa exists for people who feel a need to qualify as members of Mensa because they don’t appear to be very smart elsewhere. Within days, some guy stormed the Capitol and I remarked to her, “Must be a Mensa member,” to which she, of course, offered a sneer and we went back to work.

Turned out he was.

She said, “Shut up” but laughed.

 

Pardon My Planet (KFS) offers a view of how those sorts of certifiably smart dumbasses get themselves into big trouble, because they’re smart enough to have ideas but not socially adept enough to know when to STFU, a situation neatly captured in one of my favorite passages from Catch-22:

I think it’s akin to the fool who doesn’t understand that “Where do you want to eat?” really means “Guess which restaurant I want to go to,” which is a variation on a game couples once played in video stores but now play in the comfort of their homes while scrolling through Netflix.

 

And Agnes (AMS) and Trout illustrate yet another example of how being too smart can lead you to some very foolish conclusions.

Yes, I know the existence of Something Out There has been acknowledged. It’s the “knowing what they are” part where people like Agnes go astray.

I say this as someone who worked at a newspaper in an area that had its own cryptocritter, which meant we were the go-to place for people who were certain that they’d seen it.

There’s a big difference between “I’m willing to listen” and “I want to believe!”

 

Speaking of cryptocritters, Bizarro (KFS)  answers a question that long bothered me and should have bothered you, too.

It’s not so much a matter of whether mermaids are viviparous, oviparous or ovoviviparous, but simply the mechanics.

“Splash” dealt with it by having Daryl Hannah transform into human shape, but that makes her more of a selkie than a mermaid, and while that was infinitely more appealing than Wayno’s explanation, it’s the wrong legend. Selkies are seal people, not fish people.

Selkie stories are also better, and so is the only movie I know about them, though I suppose any film that teams John Sayles with Haskell Wexler (again) would be.

 

Man Overboard riffs on a different form of legend, and one in which arrogant disbelief is as foolish as unquestioning belief.

You can, after all, believe in George Washington without believing that he threw a dollar across the Potomac (or Rappahannock) or chopped down a cherry tree. That he inspired folklore doesn’t mean he never existed.

The Bible is challenging, because it’s a collection of folklore and laws by many authors written at many times, and, while Noah is likely pure folk tale, David is equally likely to have been a real person.

As for Jesus, if you compare the stories about him with other early histories, it’s not hard to believe he was a real person pumped up, as Parson Weems pumped up Washington and as Washington Irving pumped up Columbus, with admiring exaggerations and promotional fantasies.

A more contemporary parallel would be with Eusebius, a historian not of Jesus’s lifetime but of the period when the New Testament was being committed to writing.

He wrote a biography of Constantine which, in its early version at the beginning of the emperor’s reign, had him dreaming of a divinely-ordained victory before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge. A later version had him actually seeing a cross in the sky, and then, when he had become Constantine the Great, Eusebius added an audible-to-everyone heavenly choir and a proclamation of “In Hoc Signo Vinces.”

And smart people once dismissed the Trojan War as legend, until archaeologists proved the existence of the city. Was there a war there? Well, it’s not likely that Ares and Athena intervened, but using that to dismiss the historicity of the war itself is foolish.

Anyway, I don’t believe Jesus handed out donuts, but there’s no reason to dismiss the rest of that particular story and certainly no reason to disbelieve in his existence.

Other than thinking it makes you look smart.

 

Finally, in our round-up of smart and not-so-smart things, Guy Badeaux, whose blog is a must-read for comic aficionados, passes along this well-considered explanation and defense of editorial cartoons from Seven Days, a Burlington-based alternative weekly.

It’s a smart analysis, not full of self-back-patting nor of condescension but simply laying out how things work, in their publication but with universal implications for the art form.

 

Now here’s your moment of zen:

All the talk of “Summer of Soul” made me wonder if this Rufus Thomas clip was from that festival. It wasn’t — it’s from the WattStax concert of 1972. 

Still worth a play.