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Complex Numbers #1017439 added September 15, 2021 at 12:03am
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Uh huh. Sure.
Finally, vindication! This isn't confirmation bias talking at all.
Yeah, sure it does.
“Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit but the highest form of intelligence,” that connoisseur of witticisms, Oscar Wilde, is said to have remarked.
No, fart jokes are the lowest form of wit.
The reason is simple: sarcasm carries the poisonous sting of contempt, which can hurt others and harm relationships. By its very nature, it invites conflict.
That's only if people detect it. Or, in my case, when I do detect it, I play it straight, like I didn't. That sometimes throws them off balance.
Sarcasm involves constructing or exposing contradictions between intended meanings.
Because no other forms of expression do that.
And yet behavioral scientists Li Huang of INSEAD business school, Adam D. Galinsky of Columbia University and I have found that sarcasm may also offer an unexpected psychological payoff: greater creativity.
Sure, yep. That's why I'm so damn creative.
And sarcasm can be easily misinterpreted, particularly when it is communicated electronically...
All of my attempts at turning Comic Sans into the Official Sarcasm Font have failed miserably.
Anyway, the article goes on to describe a psychology experiment -- like most psychology experiments, the guinea pigs were college students -- to test the author's claim in the headline.
Given the risks, your best bet is to keep conversational zingers limited to those you know well, lest you cause offense.
Nope. I'd rather piss off strangers on the internet. Not here, usually - I have other sites for that.
Anyway, it's an interesting result though, to be serious about it, I have doubts concerning the sample size and lack of diversity in experimental subjects. But it's probably worth pursuing further. Not by me, though. I'll just have to read about it (this article is five years old and for all I know, they've already followed up).
But I'm reminded of an old story -- could be a joke, could be real; I can't tell -- about a college English class where the professor was talking about the double negative. He said something like, "You can string two negatives together to make a positive, but there's no instance of stringing two positives together to make a negative."
To which one student muttered, "Yeah, right."
Great comments! Thanks for all of them. Hard to pick just one that stood out, because everyone had some real gems, but I'm going with Kåre เลียม Enga's five rules (though I must note that Lilli's point about tequila is absolutely true). For everyone else, I'll do this again soon! I really want to do MB entries more often; it's just that usually I get caught up in the post and then I forget. I'll try to be better at it, at least 2-3 per month (spaced out so I don't have to worry as much about CR eligibility).
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