Do you read my columns? They are hilarious, laugh-a-minute journeys into the heart of mirth. They are rollicking riots of rib-tickling jocularity, side-splitting expeditions into the ironic arts. They are witty and waggish and wildly amusing. They generate guffaws and giggles and snorts and chortles and cachinnations, whatever they are, and provoke pee-in-the-pants incontinence. They are bust-a-gut funny — risible, jocose, whimsical, piquant and droll.
That should do it. If things go right, I will soon be declared the funniest writer in America, and it will be an established scientific fact. It will be based on data.
I am looking at a breathless press release from a British company called OnBuy.com, which claims to have empirically determined, and ranked, the funniest movies ever made. The company has done this through a process it developed and seems to believe is beyond challenge: It sifted through user reviews on the movie-rating website IMDb, film by film, compiling the number of times the reviews contained words that meant "funny." That's it. That's the Method. The company is proud of it, and is hyping it: Apparently, all you have to do is mine the internet for synonyms of any desired attribute, then you match them for any person or product, count 'em up and, blammo, you are global experts in quality.
Through this mathematical paradigm, OnBuy declared the funniest movie ever made was "Superbad," the 2007 coming-of-age epic starring Michael Cera and Jonah Hill.
Full transparency: OnBuy has represented itself as the European competitor to Amazon, which in turn owns IMDb. Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos, the richest man on Earth, who also owns the Washington Post, which employs me. If he wanted to, Mr. Bezos could fire me at any moment and probably see to it that I could never find employment anywhere again except in one of his warehouses as a toilet-seat technician. Conversely, should he have reason to be pleased with my work, Mr. Bezos could reward me with a half-scale replica of the Chartres Cathedral built entirely of 17th-century solid gold doubloons. But I am not going to let this influence me. I am going to deal only in facts, such as the true historical detail — this is part of "Superbad's" official backstory — that the screenplay was created by two horny 13-year-old boys. I agree "Superbad" is a timeless classic, a profound cinematic allegory about how war is a direct, compensatory consequence of middle-aged male sexual insecurity in conflict with overweening lust; we are left to ponder the Freudian question of how an allegedly omnipotent and benevolent deity could plague humanity with such a calamitous collision of id and superego.
Oh, wait. That was "Dr. Strangelove." My bad. "Dr. Strangelove," alas, did not make it onto OnBuy's top 20 list. "Superbad" is about three foul-mouthed adolescent males who are ineptly trying to get illegally drunk and bonk girls. Spoiler alert: Menstruation!
How did the movie get its high rating? I did some research of my own. The average age of the IMDb reviewers of "Superbad" seems to be roughly "12" and the average gender seems to be roughly "boy." Statistically, the most frequent adjective in these reviews is "awesome." Here is one direct quote: "AHHHHHHH!!!!!!! THIS MOOVIE IS GOOD SORRY IM IN CAPS LOCK I YHAVE A VIRUS WHERE ITZ STUCK." Here is another: "The movie was awesome and I give it that [but] i really didn't like Jonah hill and Michael Cera in the movie. To me they could have choose someone better then them but they were on each other's nuts and I didn't like how they treated their friend who was more cool then them." And another: "hilarious every time I watch it I dye of laghter very funny movie." And finally: "This movie is beyond eBic because in the movie they half alchol i think and alchol is very eBic."
My point is: Funniest movie of all time, established scientifically. This rating system is so good, and it is being pushed so hard by OnBuy, it is bound to expand into other venues, which is where my plan comes in. I am going to seed my own work in online forums all over, just waiting for people who rank writers, trawling the web, to find and tally synonyms. For example, I just submitted this one on IMDb's "Superbad" page, where it will sit forever, plump for picking:
"Good movie but not as mirthful as Gene Weingarten's latest book, which is funny, funny, funny, funny, funny, funny, funny, and hilarious, and causes cachinnations. (Cachinnations, I have discovered, are high-pitched laughs inappropriately blurted by the mentally ill, like the Joker in "Joker," which was also a good movie, but not as funny as Gene Weingarten's latest book, which was totally LOL, ROFL, LMAO and also six of those laughing-crying emoticons.)"
Gene Weingarten can be reached at [email protected] Follow him on Twitter, @geneweingarten. He is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and writes "Below the Beltway," a weekly humor column that is nationally syndicated.
The Link LonkMay 25, 2021 at 12:21PM
https://ift.tt/3vo4bZZ
Commentary: Finally, a proven method to show just how funny I am - Jefferson City News Tribune
https://ift.tt/3eOfySK
Funny
No comments:
Post a Comment