This is comedy gold. I would have laughed. The teacher having no sense of humor I get, but the other students? WTF is wrong with them? Maybe the culture is too different now - at 45 now, I can confidently say that back in my day this would have gotten some solid laughter.
This kind of awkward humor walks a really fine line between funny and just plain old awkward. Stand up comedy is a real deal skill, you couldn’t just go up at an open mic and kill, you probably aren’t doing it in a classroom of your peers barely paying attention.
Script is solid. Failed the delivery.
Real comedians practice their skit until it’s not even funny for them anymore. Many never laugh at their own jokes when they’re killing it.
It sounds like he did to the point people actually believed he was accidentally fucking it up to the point they couldn’t see past it to the joke. Either that or it’s 4chan so it’s fake
Yeah and I don’t suspect most people on 4chan have any stage work abilities. I’m talented at stage work, and by that I mean in my public speaking class in high school I fell flat on my face for most of a semester but was charming about it by the end and in college was able to relatively quickly pick up the skill and hold onto it for a long time. Without comedic timing it’s going to start bad, and if you can’t call it and say “I’m sorry it’s all gonna be more of this, it was funnier in my head” you just become the embodiment of cringe.
I hope anon does some open mics. They’re good not just for building skills but also for the soul. Sometimes the soul needs to bomb in a safe space.
Yeah it sounds to me like anon was shooting for Joe Pera or Andy Kaufman but landed on Sweet Dee
My guess is that this person’s class is at 7 AM and everyone is too hungover to appreciate humor.
Including the professor. Hell, by my sophomore year I wouldn’t have been paying attention to another presentation regardless of the time of day. Either it mattered and I was worried about my own, or it didn’t and I was on reddit.
This is genuinely very clever and I’m amazed that the teacher came to the conclusion that this person didn’t prepare anything
Delivery is everything. This is a great idea, but if the person was too socially awkward to nail the timing or tone, I could easily see how this idea could flop.
I don’t know, the mere fact that each action was followed by a slide detailing that previous action should be more than enough to show effort. Even if it wasn’t received as funny, it is still provable as an attempt.
I feel if he is brought to explain himself, it explains itself. It is just down to whether anyone can identify actual creativity in his school. Odds aren’t in his favor.
The point is to get more comfortable talking in front of a crowd, and learning to present your ideas.
This accomplishes none of that.
Definitely not when met with this sort of reaction. It easily could have.
I dunno, this kind of meta commentary could easily accomplish both, if executed well. Shows that you’re thinking of things in terms of overall social norms and trends, and figuring out how to present that idea in front of a crowd in an approachable way. I still think that the delivery is the most important aspect of this idea, though, as a piece of comedic satire.
Ohhh yes, makes sense
Yeah fuck him. Tell the counselor the faculty should all get together and see if with their collective strength they can remove the stick shoved up his ass.
The faculty seems like a bunch of snotty nerds. They probably dont combined have the muscle mass to remove a toothpick much less a full stick.
I did this once, well twice.
Although one time, the assignment was how to improve the university with a couple thousand dollars.
So I made a slide about amenities that would be cool to have. Like soda machines in the same building as the classrooms (the refillable kinds)
The professor said my slides were insulting.
Well fuck me for not having the idea you wanted me to have.
Of course it’s insulting, how do you expect a school to make a profit if there isnt a corporation selling overpriced food in every hallway? You insulted not just the school, but capitalism itself.
Humour is hard, the idea is great, but it’s all about the delivery.
when the delivery fails, i like to default to a old Mitch Hedberg joke.
That joke was funnier than you people acted.
if dude wants to really fuck with his teacher, he should show up with a detailed report on the creation of his joke, how the execution of his joke failed, and why the audience was wrong to misunderstand it. possible bonus points would be to veeeeery subtly insinuate that the joke was just over their heads, as meta humor sometimes is.
you could conclude the study with thoughts on how subjective and varied humor is. maybe bring up how that joke slayed when you performed it for your test audience, but then fell flat with the actual audience.
Or lean into the humour not working and write a report about how humour never works and no one likes it.
I would have found this hilarious.
it probably was if anon wasn’t a terrible comedian
Don’t try to be funny. Try to have fun.
The “teacher” called the “counselor”? I know these are never real but anon clearly thinks college is just like high school.
Colleges definitely have counseling staff and I don’t think it’s far-fetched that you could be referred to one.
I mean, this post is definitely fake but that’s not why.
I hear ya but I don’t know, when I was in college it was always “the professor”, never “the teacher”, and I think it’s far-fetched that a prof reached out to the counseling staff over some dumb kid in a 101 class goofing off.
Since not everyone who teaches in a university is a professor, instructor (formal) and teacher (informal) feel more common where I live
I’d have busted a gut when someone actually revealed step 1.
It’s brilliant. If it were real, anon deserves a handjob
Fuck it. Even if it’s not, feel free to give OP one!
If the execution was merely failing tasks and then revealing that the failure was planned, then I can understand why the teacher was pissed. The goal was obviously to get people talking, so if they didn’t actually talk about the material on their slides then they didn’t fulfill the project.
Eg: if slide 1 was revealed to be “Display a broken video” then OP should have then started talking about the importance of a broken video in a 5m presentation. Answer the question “Why is displaying a broken video important?”. Talk how no presentation is complete without a technical glitch, talk about how people can test their videos before presenting, etc.
I’m not saying that the idea wasn’t funny, but the goal was to present 5 minutes worth of material, not to shuffle awkwardly for 5 minutes and then reveal a joke.
It’s funny. It’s clever, but it’s college. Not many people appreciate humor there. It’s not a big deal, he knows now to Just do things like its boring dumb professor likes it next time.
I don’t know that I could make a 5 minute presentation about anything. It’s either 30 seconds or 2 hours, nowhere in between
2008, had to do a5 minutes presentation about anything, did it on the new cold war that was brewing with China and Russia forming a block against Europe and North America. I hope some of my class mates remember when I talked about that and looked a bit crazy and they tell themselves “Well, turns out he was right!”
The whole plan is backwards. Anon got the punchline before the setup.
Putting the punchline first can be funnier, but it require even better timing and a complete hold on the audience’s attention. Also it’s too on the nose.Nah that shit is both funny and clever
If he has experience given pointless and bad presentations he’s got executive written all over him.
this is one of those things that seem funny but would be incredibly awkward irl
