Bryan Caplan: prediction

Transcript context

…What should we infer from the fact that your sense of the comic is so segregated from the rest of your aesthetic, if it is? Yeah, that one is harder. If I were to go and try to list things that I like in comedy, a lot of them are very lowbrow. Like The Three Stooges is hilarious to me. If someone were to say, “But why is The Three Stooges better than a sitcom that you would turn your nose up at today?” I would have trouble having a really good answer. The Three Stooges is sublimely stupid. They’re taking the stupidity to a level that you or me or sitcom writers aren’t capable of. Maybe you might say that it is just the extremism. Or the fact that just they take a joke and they run with the idea of a guy in a gorilla suit meeting an actual gorilla. For me, comedy — it is much more idiosyncratic. I’ve said Shakespeare I love except the comedy, which just isn’t very funny to me. I get the joke, but why especially is that funny? You said comedy’s more culturally specific. That does make sense to me. There is sort of a class of things that I almost certainly won’t like, like whenever my dad emails me a thing of lawyer jokes. I do say, “Look, if you find it funny, good odds I won’t think it’s funny because anyone can understand it. ” But if you say, “What about The Three Stooges?” All right, that isn’t really a full theory. But that’s almost becoming hermetic these days, The Three Stooges.…

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