Jerry Seinfeld Interview: How to Write a Joke | The New York Times

My impression is that the bar for humor is higher on Hacker News than most other places. Perhaps at a minimum the joke should be intellectually interesting enough that there is no need to lawyer up behind a claim that the joke is on topic. Here the nexus is formulaic: ?X is, in fact, Satoshi Nakamoto! Chuck Norris, Paul Graham, my dog Spot for ?X are each about equally humorous. I think this is because each is about as clever an intellectual move. That's not to say that a joke connecting Stallman to Nakamoto couldn't work on Hacker News. Just that it would probably require a lot more work: e.g. better premise than a hackathoned machine learning classifier might be the singularity. Even here it might have worked if the author had gone all in and backed up the claim with examples, anecdotes, rationals that pushed the joke telling art via absurdity. [this video]