Fish Nonsense
I like Twitter. I don’t care if the dude who owns it is unpopular with the Murican pseudo-left, and I don’t share the notion that it’s a hotbed for evil Nazi-propaganda and the like. I have blocked or muted all the shitstorm aficionados and other annoying people I had come across, and now it’s a source of nature photography and new papers in ecology for me. I contribute nature, mostly underwater, photos and videos.
So I tweeted this piece of underwater humor:
Goat fish making actual goat vocalizations. Unbelievable, what a gem of natural history this recording is. #fish #underwater pic.twitter.com/QBMM4ScXbb
— Klaus Stiefel (@Pacificklaus) January 19, 2023
The fish is called a goatfish, but the goat-like sounds clearly I made, through my regulator.
No one reacted to it in a way indicating that he or she found this – obviously humorous post – funny. So, there are three options:
- No one cares about my Twitter feed, my reach of 1+k followers is simply not big enough for most but the most spectacular posts to get any attention, folks just pressed “like” while scrolling by, and few thought about what they just saw. This could be.
- The joke is too subtle and Twitter users thought it’s actually the goatfish making goat sounds.
- The joke is cringy and not funny.
Which one is it?
I also put this video on Youtube a few months ago, where I had held my GoPro in an angle, by mistake. I thought it would be funny to talk about a new fish species which I had discovered which can swim uphill. This is such an obvious joke, and I still explained that it’s a joke, and added all kinds of joke/humor/parody tags. STILL, some folks whom I know in real life thought I had found a new species, after just seeing the title of the video and not watching it.
No Humor Zones
On airports these days you can see signs that warn “not to make bomb jokes”. I can see the point of such signs in the special situation of an airport. But humor seems to be on the way out, generally Is the mainly written/image based mode of communication in social media particularly non-conductive to jokes? I the culture of brief attention spans unconducive to seeing a second, ironic meaning in a message?
And..
Any discussion of underwater humor needs mention of The John Belushi of the Coral Reef who here saves souls/soles:
