hacker humour

hacker humour

A distinctive style of shared intellectual humour found amonghackers, having the following marked characteristics:

1. Fascination with form-vs.-content jokes, paradoxes, andhumour having to do with confusion of metalevels (see meta).One way to make a hacker laugh: hold a red index card in frontof him/her with "GREEN" written on it, or vice-versa (note,however, that this is funny only the first time).

2. Elaborate deadpan parodies of large intellectualconstructs, such as specifications (see write-only memory),standards documents, language descriptions (see INTERCAL),and even entire scientific theories (see quantum bogodynamics, computron).

3. Jokes that involve screwily precise reasoning from bizarre,ludicrous, or just grossly counter-intuitive premises.

4. Fascination with puns and wordplay.

5. A fondness for apparently mindless humour with subversivecurrents of intelligence in it - for example, old WarnerBrothers and Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons, the Marx brothers,the early B-52s, and Monty Python's Flying Circus. Humourthat combines this trait with elements of high camp andslapstick is especially favoured.

6. References to the symbol-object antinomies and associatedideas in Zen Buddhism and (less often) Taoism. See has the X nature, Discordianism, zen, ha ha only serious, AI koan.

See also filk and retrocomputing. If you have an itchyfeeling that all 6 of these traits are really aspects of onething that is incredibly difficult to talk about exactly, youare (a) correct and (b) responding like a hacker. Thesetraits are also recognizable (though in a less marked form)throughout science-fiction fandom.