I don't give a shart!

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Cruising on Twitter the other day, a post gave me brief pause. It was from a man named Will Brown, who is apparently a machine learning researcher at Morgan Stanley, a job that is definitely very evil, even if Will Brown himself is not. But the tweet was thought-provoking.

“it’s interesting,” wrote Will Brown in studied lowercase, “that 1.5 billion parameters is all you need to crush math competitions, but you need like 15 trillion to make the model be funny”.

“maybe,” he concluded, “humor is the right measure of intelligence”.

My first thought upon reading Will Brown’s tweet was ‘don’t let Elon Musk see this’. My second was that there was something wrong with his inference. I don’t think being funny is a measure of traditional intelligence, not the type that wins math competitions or pulls off a successful pitch to the LRB, anyway. Some of the ‘smartest’ people I’m acquainted are ones you would dread being trapped in a bathroom queue with at a party.

Rather, bringing the lols is about intuition or reading a room. It’s mastering the art of surprising others — interrupting the anticipated with the unexpected.

There’s shortcuts to achieving this — adding ‘diva’ unnecessarily after every sentence seems to work for every gay man I know — and to try and boil down the exact science of what makes something funny has a) been done before and b) is too much for my scrambled little brain at this juncture. Instead, please accept this short list of things I can remember belly laughing at in recent weeks: