David R. MacIver's Blog

I understand humour (insert caveats and footnotes)

A new phrase has entered into the local dialect of the discord I run recently. “I understand humour”. I’m a huge fan.

I coined the phrase off-handedly at one point by saying:

we’re doing the thing where we take the joke subject seriously because it’s interesting while still understanding that it’s a joke, but as a result failed to adequately signal that we understand humour

This is a problem I run into a lot. I got the joke. I was even amused by the joke. But the joke contained something that was more interesting to respond to than the joke itself, so I’ve done so, and I forgot to adequately perform the relevant emotional response to indicate I was amused because the interesting thing was more relevant to me.

Because my discord attracts the sort of people who have the same sorts of problems I do, this was apparently an extremely relatable experience, and now we say “I understand humour but…” at the beginning of doing that and the problem is now solved. We have adequately signalled that we understand humour.¹

If you read my writing there’s a decent chance you have similar problems to me, so I offer this partly as a useful conversational shortcut to you too, but it’s also interesting in the general pattern. This is a high context and high trust community, so we build ourselves a little local language that allow us to take shortcuts that you cannot necessarily take when talking to people you know less well or who have less relatable problems.

It reminds me of another conversational shortcut I developed with a friend of mine “Insert caveats and footnotes here”. What this basically means is “I understand that the thing I have said is not exactly right and there are a large number of edge cases, exceptions, and nuances where this breaks down, but I consider the central case where it is mostly true to be more interesting than the edge cases right now”. This requires quite a lot of trust in your conversation partner - it’s often the case that people want to brush over details that do matter, and that you need to call them on that,² and you have to be willing to at least entertain the possibility that your conversation partner knows what they’re doing and that it is worth focusing on the central case for now.³

Similarly, my family have the conversational shortcut “grasshopper” (usage: “This is a grasshopper but…” or similar) which means “I understand that this doesn’t seem to follow from anything we were currently talking about, but there were multiple intermediate jumps in my head that connect it up to it and it’s not worth explaining those intermediate steps and I’d like to talk about this new interesting thing…”⁴

A related concept I’ve tried to adopt in the past but actually never quite managed to get to work is having conversational safewords. A friend and I had a tendency to have disagreements that got unnecessarily heated where one or both of us thought the other was ignoring the core point or missing something, and we tried having a safeword for “Can we back off and chill out for a bit here?”. I don’t think we ever deployed it, although possibly it was useful to have anyway as part of why we never deployed it is that the problem mostly went away after we noticed and named the pattern.

I think these sorts of conversational shortcuts are worth noticing and cultivating when we have them. Anything where you’re interacting with the same people over and over again probably benefits from them.

Another more common example that comes up on discord is “wearing my moderator hat”. I try to be just a normal member of the discord most of the times, as do most moderators, but sometimes you need to speak ex cathedra and say things where you really mean it and people have to listen or there will be consequences. In the other direction, when you’ve got a position of power in a company, it can be useful to be able to say “with my CEO hat” or ideally also “in my capacity as just some guy with opinions…” when you want to explicitly take the hat off.

Some of these are even less context-specific. e.g. “just spitballing here”, “here’s a stupid idea”, etc. are often good preludes that allow you to signal that the following words shouldn’t be taken as a serious proposal and are more the start of a conversation.

There’s some overlap with in-jokes and shared cultural references of course, which are ubiquitous, but I think what I’m pointing at is more specifically a shared understanding that allows you to say “You might think the situation we’re in is X, but actually it’s Y”.⁵ As a result, I’m slightly surprised that I don’t have more and better examples of this pattern.

We’re currently in a process of retreating to something a bit like the goodbad old days of the internet, where rather than a single giant townsquare like the twitters⁶ we get to focus on the sorts of communities that enable these kinds of local languages with shortcuts built out of shared context and trust, and it’s worth cultivating them there. It’s also of course useful with in-person relationships, colleagues, etc.

I unfortunately don’t have a great conclusion to come to here. Mostly I just thought the pattern was interesting and useful, and I’ll be keeping an eye out for other instances of it in future.