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Friday Fun Thread for May 3, 2024

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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Not mine; from a screenshot (of a Mastodon post, I think?) that was passed around Tumblr:

there once was a lamp that could turn anyone into a woman by merely standing in its light. people came from far and wide to see it, but to their dismay the lamp was rarely lit. for this lamp ran on a special fuel, and that fuel was heavily guarded. it had all been gathered up and stored in a fortress, and that fortress had only one way in or out, through a big iron gate. the only way to get the fuel was to get permission from the person in charge of the gate, the girl light gas keep gate boss.

It makes my brain hurt

I love it!

Am I missing some hidden message here? Is it just that the last words are "girlboss gaslight gatekeep" rearranged?

Yeah, it’s just word salad.

I’m a sucker for that kind of humor.

Yes.

"Trans people are oppressed because girl bosses who gatekep what it means to be woman and then gaslight them by claiming to be allies?"

That's my best guess

It reads like a joke that someone forgot the punchline to and butchered the delivery. Would have been much better if they had figured out how to get it in the correct order.

Being out of order is what makes it funny. If the punchline was "the gas light gate keep girl boss" then it would be mildly funny, but rotating the word pairs so that they're exactly one off, and all in the same direction, makes it hilarious. Like "man door hand hook car door"

I still don't unserstand. Is this some sort of absurdist zoomer meme humor I'm just not going to get? What about the random word salad of buzz words being slightly off makes it funny? It reads to me like an AI attempting to riff off the "don't dead open inside" meme without understanding that it's a visual gag.

I think it’s mostly funny because it’s kind of what you expected, but not right. Subverted expectations is the foundation of a lot of humor. Like with the Hook Hand meme, if you’re familiar with the urban legend then you expect the ending (she opens the door and sees a hook hanging off the handle) and instead of getting that you get a jumble of nonsense that contains all the elements you expected but in an order that makes them semantically meaningless. That surprise is funny to me.

It's not random. It's a popular phrase being shifted.

agreed