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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1551 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 14, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Before seeing it, I was expecting a rather gritty survival movie, sort of like The Revenant IN SPACE! When I finally got round to watching it, what surprised me about it was its lightness of tone and comedic elements. In principle that's the sort of thing that should survive a first watch, but on the second watch I was disappointed that I didn't find it nearly as funny as the first time round. A lot of the quippy dialogue sounded positively MCU-tier to my ears.

on the second watch I was disappointed that I didn't find it nearly as funny as the first time round. A lot of the quippy dialogue sounded positively MCU-tier to my ears.

This is just Andy Weir's style of writing and if the movie captured that (I have not watched the movie) it succeeded surprisingly well at adapting the book, I guess.

I have DNF'd all of Weir's books because of that. His prose and dialogue is just grating; the constant ironic quipping and attempts at relatable humour in impressively dire and panic-inducing situations feel very out of place. One of the most horrendous examples of millennial ahh writing in existence. I find it honestly surprising that he isn't actually within their age range because he shares that same pathological inability to take anything seriously that is so typical of that whole cohort.

attempts at relatable humour in impressively dire and panic-inducing situations

I think it's not the direness of the situation that doesn't fit. When a situation is utterly dire, with nothing to be done to escape the worst of it, gallows humor (see the Real Life tab) often kicks in. Later when a dire situation is over, for better or worse, the people who worked on the situation are also often prone to humor: consider the facetious "towing bill" Grumman sent to Rockwell after Apollo 13 for an example of "better", or Giuliani's SNL appearance after 9/11 for "worse". A situation which merely may become dire isn't an exception either; the disastrous explosion on Apollo 13 wasn't the first "bang" the astronauts heard, because Haise thought it was funny that he could futz with the cabin repress valve and his cabin mates would feel "our hearts jump in our mouth".

I think it's the precise timing of the humor where modern writers fail. Loads of people joke about dire situations when they're fine afterward, joke when they've merely survived afterward, and even joke when they're doomed not to survive and there's nothing to be done, but I'm having a hard time finding good examples of people being jokers in the very middle of dire situations in real-life, at the points when every second counts and the outcome is still up in the air ... and yet that's exactly when too many e.g. MCU writers think it's the perfect time to balance out the tension with a quip.

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