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Me_irl (lemmy.today)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/me_irl@lemmy.world
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[–] 10 points 5 months ago (18 children)

No

"/s" is the equivalent of ending a quip with a "haha geddit? haha"

If it's not clear you're joking or being sarcastic, perhaps the line isn't very good in the first place

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  • [–] 11 points 5 months ago (5 children)

    I have autism, so it really doesn't matter how good your joke is, I will misunderstand it in fresh and novel ways.

    /s is letting the audience know that it's a joke. If you think that makes things unfunny, then comedy clubs must be awful for you. "Why is everyone laughing, it's obvious he's telling a joke, that ruins the whole joke. Don't they know that ruins jokes? Jokes need to be secretive games where only clever people like me know they're funny in order for it to be funny!"

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  • [–] -2 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    Gonna preface this with: I completely understand your difficulty, I have several autistic people in my life and I know that it's important to make reasonable accommodations to help make life easier. However conversely, a reasonable accommodation must not invalidate the initial reason for the accommodation in the first place. If the point is humour, it's a hard sell to force someone to, from their point of view, remove the humour from the humour. You wouldn't knock down a monument to install a lift to get to the top, sure the people with mobility issues can get to the top now, but the monument is no longer there to see.

    Given that, an audience freely laughing at a joke is very different from a comedian demanding you laugh immediately after each joke, which would be a more direct comparison. The latter drains all humour from the situation, the former arguably elevates it.

    Personally, if the point of a comment is to post something that I think is amusing, there's no point in doing it if I have to compromise what constitutes the humour to me, otherwise I'd just be posting something unfunny, defeating the object of it entirely.

    That and it's the internet, we all have a better time if we go with the working assumption that the vast, vast majority of comments are entirely unserious.

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  • [–] 6 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    Man, infantilizing, condescending, and missing my entire point. Real hat trick, ya got there.

    Thinking /s is telling people to laugh at your joke or a demand that they view it as funny is entirely on you and has nothing to do with the tag. The tag is there so that there isn't confusion about what you're saying. People telling others to use the tag usually comes from them being massively misunderstood and then saying "I was being sarcastic".

    "But that ruins the joke for me". Question, do you deliver all of your sarcasm straight? Never use a tone when saying something sarcastic? Cause that is a thing, but it really only works if the audience knows who you are. The humor coming either from juxtaposing the idea against your nature, or from people knowing that most of the stuff coming out of your mouth is sarcastic. Most of the rest of the time, people use vocal tone to indicate their sarcasm. The tag is a stand-in for the tone. If the tone doesn't ruin the joke, then the tag doesn't either.

    we all have a better time if we go with the assumption that the vast, vast majority of comments are entirely unserious

    No joke, that's how 4chan brought the nazis back. Chucklefucks thought it was hilarious to talk like nazis, and they made a safe space for nazis by doing so. Not everything is serious, but you don't know where others are at in their lives. How does clarifying where you stand detriment anyone?

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

    infantilizing, condescending, and missing my entire point

    Firstly, apologies about the first two, honestly not my intention. And perhaps you're right about the last

    The tag is there so that there isn't confusion about what you're saying

    Yes I understand that, however especially with humour like sarcasm, it somewhat hinges on the ambiguity. If you remove the ambiguity, it kinda just becomes a non sequitur or contrarian. To add the tag removes something fundamental about it

    More subjective on this one, but frankly for jokes that don't rely on that ambiguity, they shouldn't need signposting as jokes if they're any good anyway. Though I'm actually less bothered about them in that circumstance, they're more like canned laughter, which still has a negative impact IMO but doesn't take away something fundamental from a lot of humour.

    People telling others to use the tag usually comes from them being massively misunderstood and then saying "I was being sarcastic".

    Anecdotal of course, but in my experience it's more often down to it being unfunny or just shitty. I'd say I've seen "I was being sarcastic" much more often as a cop out than any kind of genuine misunderstanding. i.e. they should probably have just not made the joke/quip

    do you deliver all of your sarcasm straight?

    Tbf, yeah as best I can when trying to be earnestly (lol) sarcastic. If I'm trying to be ironically sarcastic then I'd probably ham up the overly sarcastic stereotypical delivery.

    Maybe this is also something of a cultural clash too as someone else mentioned. Dry sarcasm based humour has been something of a key pillar in the gamut of humour throughout my life so far. It was a big faux pas growing up to laugh at your own jokes, that's probably gonna impact my views on this if we're gonna do an armchair psychoanalysis

    that's how 4chan brought the nazis back.

    A funny jump and technically a slippery slope fallacy, but also kinda a fair point. I didn't mean it in a black and white sense, but I guess that kinda is the problem. I don't think we can really include bad actors in a discussion about something they would simply just mimic to continue doing what they already do.

    How does clarifying where you stand detriment anyone?

    Hopefully elaborated above enough to answer that, but basically after thought there's more nuance than that question asks for. Some humour kinda hinges on ambiguity that is destroyed by flagging it, other cases it kinda dents it IMO but I guess I have much less of a fundamental issue with it in those cases

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    That's why the best sarcasm irl is entirely deadpan and ambiguous. And yeah, if you're getting heavily down voted (like the original image) for sarcasm, then at the very least most people reading it either didn't get the sarcasm or they didn't find it funny.

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago

    It's a combination of factors. Language/cultural barriers are a big one. What is obviously sarcasm in your area of the world won't necessarily make sense in another. Add in English as a second language, and it's a crap shoot, even with an obvious joke.

    The lack of tonal queues is also a problem. We communicate a lot via voice tone and body language. Without them, what is obvious to you can be read completely differently.

    The last is the elephant in the room. Bigots dog whistling. I've seen too many "obviously sarcastic" jokes that are very much not sarcastic in a different group. When those people get called out, they fall back on "it's just a joke", the armour of arseholes the world over. By adding the /s preemptively, you rob them of cover to spread hate. It's a variant of the nazi bar problem.

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago

    Sarcasm is very reliant on tone, which can't be conveyed via text. Intensifiers like "totally" or "definitely" can help, but there are so many horrible people out there now that Poe's Law can make it hard to tell what the true intent is. "/s" has value.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (6 children)

    And in Ireland and UK, we're all a sarcastic bunch. It's "a you problem" if the person can't get sarcasm. I refuse to add /s for the rest of the serious world!

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (5 children)

    No, you're shy, condescending dickheads who don't know how to be direct with what you're saying, so you learned to tie yourself into knots in order to get your point across. Congrats! Your humor is entirely the product of your repressed culture! Woohoo?

    "If people don't get my humor, that's on them" is really not a winning point. If you're not being understood, that's gonna affect you way more than other people.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago (4 children)

    As if many comments on the internet are not sarcastic!

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (3 children)

    Another environment of shyness, condescension, and repressed emotions. Not really doing much for your argument, mate

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (1 child)

    Maybe that's just how a lot of people are

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    Yeah, man. Do you know how much profit can be extracted from people without support systems? Exposing everyone to every one else without the ability for us to humanize each other has a tendency to do that.

    I don't think that means we need to gatekeep being clear with what we're saying cause "explaining jokes ruins them" or "being obtuse is my culture".

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