 Ahoy Ahoy and welcome to the channel. I'm Dr. Sumerian, not a real doctor, and today we are going to talk about what makes or breaks a joke SCP. Now, first of all, we're going to talk a little bit about comedy in general. You can do comedy and have it be a mainstream serious work. And for the SCP Wiki, we can talk about main list SCPs. There are plenty and I'd like to think that a few of mine are funny and also main listers and there's plenty of SCPs on the Wiki that fit that mold. So is it funny is not in and of itself the only thing you need to worry about when it comes to the quality of work. And moreover, this is important too, because the standards of quality for comedy have gone down. I don't think they've gone down. I think they've always been low. But every new batch of young people come up with their own versions of cringe comedy. It's whatever is less acceptable socially right now. And they think to themselves, well, if I make someone laugh or I make them smile, I have succeeded at being funny. This is not true. Believe it or not, humans laugh and grin for reasons other than comedy. Comedy is the primary reason, but that's the problem with cringe comedy and trying to make it work. And then you sort of sort of mainstream remain in the SCP cases. Main listing or even a dash J is just not going to work because just because you made somebody laugh doesn't mean what you said was funny. You could have just made somebody uncomfortable and for all most people, not everybody, but most people uncomfortable leads to a smile, a grin or a laugh. They can really hate what you said and still laugh at it. But what we talk about when it comes to funny jokes on the SCP wiki or elsewhere is a subverting of expectations really in the end. I like to equate a dash J to a good joke or a good narrative twist. And you can do a narrative twist that isn't funny at all, but it follows the same sort of structure. A twist is a recontextualization of a past thing. So if you do a joke and let's just stay with a rant, let's we're going to be very basic here because I do not have time nor the expertise to be honest with you to talk about everything that makes a joke funny and like what is the fundamental concepts of comedy. You're not going to get that here. We're just talking about the SCP wiki and dash Js and specifically joke articles. But we talk about let's talk about rule of three, right? You do a joke that has a line, then another line that confirms the what's the word I'm looking for here, the reality of the joke, the the framing of the joke then becomes confirmed by your second line and then a third line which subverts everything. So you set up expectation, confirm that expectation and subvert that expectation. That's a standard rule of three joke. And a lot of these jokes come from a lot of these jokes are quite insensitive in general, because a lot of people will use like, you know, a blonde or redhead and a brunette or this nationality or this ethnicity and so on to make the expectations up, which is literally talking about stereotypes. That is, we can push that off to the side just because people do that with rule of three doesn't mean the rule of three is inherently that you can do a rule of three joke that doesn't involve, you know, insulting an entire group of people. But it requires you, this is the thing requires you to establish your characters in some way very quickly. We can talk about when I say rule of three, it's not just useful for jokes. It's useful for writing as well, setting an expectation confirming that expectation and subverting it is exactly how you can best do a narrative twist, right? But not every article with a narrative twist is a joke. And not every joke follows a rule of three. There are other ones which are like a particularly funny concept treated seriously or a completely absurd thing that just continues on and on and on and on until it wraps back around to being funny. There are different ways to do this. But you may have noticed something as we talk about this comedy, none of it indicates that your articles are of less value and almost every version of it can be one to one compared to an actual serious thing. And herein lies the problem. Because when you define a joke as less than a main list or article, what you're saying is that, you know, we could do whatever we want to as long as it's a little bit funny that makes up for it. Absolutely untrue. First of all, whatever failings your article have are not going to go away just because you've switched it over to becoming a joke article. You can't be like, it's bad because the joke is that it's bad. No, that's not how it works. And anyone who tells you that your article would be better as a joke article is giving you some of the worst advice they can give you. Now, if they tell you this is funny, a lot of people use that phrasing as they stand in for this is funny. That is a terrible way to communicate that. And moreover, generally, this could be a dash J, but doesn't quite work as a main lister is the kind of advice that says to you. This has deep fundamental flaws, but don't bother fixing them. The joke or whatever is it about it else wise is good enough to make up for that. Well, guess what? If you keep whatever it is that makes the article good, and then go and fix the problems rather than giving up on it and saying, you know what? It's just a joke. You're going to have uneven, funnier article, and it may be appropriate for the main list. But if you just take that advice and say, all right, I guess I give up on it, it is what it is. It's a joke now. You're failing yourself. And this is the reason why the vast majority of what I have written have been main listers. I've done a few dash J articles and they were they they meet a particular standard for me, which is the joke is important enough or funny enough for me to tell. And secondly, the setting or the setup for the joke is too ridiculous for main list, not of lower quality. And that's always been my standard for what makes a dash J a dash J. And there's the what is it, the procrastination rock. That could be there. There's no reason it has to be a dash J. The fact that it is a dash J makes it probably more popular rather than less. But it doesn't have to be that it could have been a main list or there's nothing about it that's particularly outrageous or silly. Well, I mean, that's the wrong way to put that. Of course, it's silly. But it's not silly in the same way that an article about a doctor redacted a agent expunged and a researcher black box working together. And that's their actual names is ridiculous and and silly. That version. And I think there is an article someone I was talking with somebody on Discord. And I think they mentioned that one of their articles actually has an agent redacted in it. And it's like part of a small joke. But and one character named that is already ridiculous. And I think personally pulls you out of the narrative. But having three characters with similar ish names all about redaction would of course be too silly to actually create a real article out of unless you justified it some way, which is entirely possible. They're core anomaly or something around the core anomaly could cause you to have those names, for example, then you've justified your thing. But you don't have to if that's not the purpose of your joke, which I believe the purpose of the joke for that was again, talking on discord and somebody mentioned this, or be like a who's on first sort of thing, like, Oh, you know, agent redacted. Oh, agent redacted. Yeah, yeah, agent redacted did it. Well, who's that? No, agent redacted did it. Who's that works in anti memetics, and that sort of thing. Obviously, that joke works. It's the who's on first thing. And again, this isn't my core. I should be clear. It's not a super original idea. But also, I didn't come up with it anyway, in this iteration. So just be clear about that. Also be very careful about like anything you just jokes are not open to steal any more than any other creative content is, by the way, don't steal jokes. If you hear a joke, and it's not yours, but you want to retell it, start with this isn't my joke or end with that wasn't my joke. Don't do the don't don't pretend like you're funny by stealing other people's funny. It's not cool. Anyway, that's a whole different aside. What I want to get through to people more than anything else is anytime you hear the phrase, this would work better as a dash j. I'm not going to say that whoever's telling you that is inherently a bad critiquer, but it is an inherently bad critique. I I can imagine a world or an article where it's not a bad piece of feedback. But I can't actually imagine what what could inspire it in such a way, like I'm of course, there's probably an article, but I have no idea what it would be, because it's just a silly way to phrase things. It's saying, I have critique for this, but don't worry about it. That's terrible. Anyway, I thought about doing this video and doing the cliche thing of trying to be funny and inserting things here and there, and I was like, you know what, no, I'm going to take this as a serious examination. Also, my microphone, I believe the microphone cord is breaking, which is super bad. And I guess I need another one now. Um, hopefully there's no buzz or anything like that, because I was listening to it earlier, and there was a little bit of a buzz, but I think I think I cleared it up. I haven't touched it. I've stayed far away from it to make sure that I don't touch it. But if you notice the audio quality is a little lower in the next video, maybe because I'm using my backup microphone, which is a USB microphone. Anyway, that's it. Thank you very much for watching. If you enjoyed the video, hit the subscribe button, and then hit the notification bell next to that so you're notified when I upload new videos, and then head on over to patreon.com forward slash D Samarian and pledge at any level, like everybody here on the screen already has, I could really, really use your support, especially if I have to get a new cable for this microphone. That's an unexpected cost. Anyway, it's nice to know that I'm not alone out here, and I will see you all again on Tuesday.