Python's Law

Have you ever cracked a joke, assuming that your audience understands that you’re being ironic or sarcastic, only to find out that many (or most) of them took the joke literally?

This happens so often on the internet that there’s a term we use to describe it: Poe’s Law. The idea is that without a clear indicator of the author's intent, it is difficult or impossible to distinguish an extreme parody from a sincere expression of the parodied views.

That’s why people like to ruin jokes nowadays with little emojis, letting you know they’re just kidding, or that you’re supposed to laugh at the joke.

I’m only half-kidding about ruining the joke, by the way. If you tell someone who doesn’t already understand that you’re being ironic, that really helps them out: it lets them know you’re just kidding and making a different point. By contrast, for someone who already understands that you’re probably joking, a juvenile emoji letting them know to laugh is…

Well, it’s like having a laugh track on a sophisticated comedy show. Know who had one of those? None other than the Beatles of comedy, Monty Python.

Well, okay, it was a live studio audience, and not a laugh track, but the effect on viewers at home was the same: they had a little cue to let you know when something funny was happening.

By contrast, the actual Beatles ran into a great deal of controversy by suggesting they were bigger than Jesus, but of course John Lennon meant to point out the absurdity of how popular they had become, not to pick a theological fight that resulted in the burning of millions of Beatles records. Yikes!

Very well, yes. Let’s get on with it.

If anyone in comedic history has experience in dealing with Poe’s Law in real life, it was the Pythons. Now, I grew up loving (and still love) Monty Python films and shows, and I’ve written a bit about the corollary between the Trojan horse and a certain large wooden rabbit, about how Graham Chapman died at a tragically young age, and the group keeps creeping into my work by way of analogy.

I watched as these all-time comedy greats struggled with the very line I struggle with today. Like Monty Python, I want to assume that my audience is very smart. I want to say the things that are important to me, to make points about difficult, challenging subjects—but at the same time, I want my audience to walk away smarter, not more confused.

I don’t want to imagine that I can’t say anything provocative at the risk of inadvertently offending someone, mind you! Offense is never the goal, but cutting humor will almost always offend someone. Rather, I want to make sure the half of the audience that gets it aren’t disappointed by the joke being revealed too soon, while the other half at a minimum understand that I don’t mean the exact opposite of what I said.

When Monty Python’s Flying Circus aired on the BBC in 1969, there was a live studio audience for much of the recording. This mean that there were at least some people who got these types of jokes, which was really important—Python pushed right up to the edge of what you could show on TV, and sometimes they even went too far, at least according to censors.

One good thing about the live audience was that if they didn’t laugh at a joke, the team knew right away that they needed to navigate away from the humor. This live feedback helped the expert crew to drive toward the laughs at all times, and it also allowed them to walk right up to that line.

With the movies, Python had to be a bit more absurdist to get the point across, but I think they did a great job:

Here on Substack, I don’t have the real-time feedback of the live audience, so I tend to follow more of the absurdist path, so it’s very obvious when I’m using irony or sarcasm. In deciding to do so, I tend to strike a balance that errs on the side of being slightly less risky, largely because I will often go as much as a day without checking in on the comments (though I do read them all and respond to many of them).

These comments mean the world to me! I put an idea out into the world every day, and then a bunch of thoughtful folks will help me to consider other aspects of that idea.

In spite of modifying my own risk/offense ratio, I’m rather pleased with all the stuff I’ve gotten away with writing about poop. You can see that growing little collection here. This is one way to use humor to talk about something I’m interested in.

By contrast, if you tell a sophisticated joke and then end it with, “JK LOL”, does the joke even seem funny any more? I don’t usually think so.

But falling flat with comedy is less concerning to me than it was for Monty Python, whose main line of work was… well, comedy. My main job here is to share a sense of wonder with you every day. If I think it’s interesting, I think you probably will, too.

Sometimes I do like to push boundaries a bit, and I’ll continue to do that, but it’s not like it was during my early punk rock years. Back then, the entire point was to break away from the norms of society so that young Andrew could point out how messed up certain things were.

I still like to make those points today, but my toolbox is an awful lot more well rounded. I don’t need to reach for knee-jerk offense in order to get a point across, and that feels pretty cool. Instead of a middle finger, I can use Python’s Law: give the audience a clear indication of your intent by being extra silly, but only if you don’t have real-time feedback.

To that end, let’s continue the discussion here! Have you had issues with something you’ve said being misinterpreted? Have you ever said one thing, and then had it convey the exact message you didn’t want to convey?

What’s your favorite Python sketch?