Fade-22 - Fade22

19

i love how everyone on this website is kind of pathetic it brings such a sense of understanding and community

Y’ever read something and have understanding that has eluded you interminably suddenly stop, curl up, and snuggle neatly into a fold in your brain because a new way way opened to it?

Every 21st century piece of writing advice: Make us CARE about the character from page 1! Make us empathize with them! Make them interesting and different but still relatable and likable!

Every piece of classic literature: Hi. It's me. The bland everyman whose only purpose is to tell you this story. I have no actual personality. Here's the story of the time I encountered the worst people I ever met in my life. But first, ten pages of description about the place in which I met them.

*beginning to suspect my roommate is a pulley* hey man would you mind picking up this big crate by changing the direction of applied force, thereby reducing the force needed? no reason

i love being a fag and a pansy and a fairy and a pervert and awhat who the fuck is egg bacon

Help two disabled trans women keep building a new internet and other new tools to optimize and make communication more fun

Also we have a cute cat @rickybabyboy

ID: A sleepy orange and white tabby being pet

We need to raise rent so we can stay housed until we can bring in enough to support ourselves, we are working on multiple projects to this end including stickers and a special extra blog for Ricky. Until we have those ready please help us stay afloat

Venmo: AGIEF

Paypal: agieocean@gmail.com

Ko-fi: wizdevgirl

$290/$1675 raised

europe is in danger

People sometimes ask me how to do the Internet comedy thing, and the biggest piece of advice I can give – and the one I see violated or misunderstood most often – is don’t step on the laugh.

Basically, since you can’t rely on tone or timing to push a punchline in text, you need to avoid making people keep reading after that punchline has been delivered. If there’s still more text, your readers’ natural inclination is going to be to stifle their visceral reaction with the expectation that there’s still more to come – and when there isn’t, the joke just deflates.

Ideally, the specific word that makes the punchline click into place should be the very last word of the post, or at least the last word of the paragraph. Going even one word beyond that point diminishes its impact.

To pose an example I’ve seen doing the rounds, let’s consider the monkey-with-anxiety meme:

god: i have made Mankind angels: you fucked up a perfectly good monkey is what you did. look at it. it’s got anxiety

Here, the word “anxiety” is the punch. When people quote it or do their own variations, I very often see them render it as “it’s got anxiety now” – and just like that, it’s not even half as funny, because that extraneous “now” dangling off the end is stepping on the laugh.

Obviously, this isn’t always going to be possible without resorting to contrived phrasing, which you also want to avoid because calling attention to the sentence structure is another common laugh-killer, but you should always make your best effort to identify the exact point at which the reader will have enough information for the punchline to snap into focus, and to put that point as close to the end of the post or paragraph as possible.

(This also applies to spoken comedy, albeit to a lesser extent, since you can just pause for the laugh if you need to. Ever wonder why a joke or anecdote isn’t funny when you tell it? Sure, your delivery might just suck, but I find the more common culprit is that you mangled the phrasing and ended up putting the punchline in the middle of a sentence rather than at the end.)

at the library and i know im supposed to be "volunteering" for "college credit" but theres a dude at the other end of the room playing yu-gi-oh on the computer and let me just say. he is not good at it