LLMs are officially joke explainer machines
RT: https://friedcheese.us/objects/6f83be2b-c598-4482-a412-6b34a4b1f7aa
@cstross why do you think LLMs are unable to handle this? You think they will be fooled? I just fed this image to one with this prompt: "read the text in this image and give me your opinion on the discussion". Here's what it replied:
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My opinion
It's a very well-built piece of deadpan absurdism, and the craft is in the escalation.
The setup is real, which is what sells it. The first comment is genuine aviation-history context (crew complements really did shrink from five to three to two as radio/navigation and then flight-engineering roles were automated away). That earnest, slightly pedantic tone is the straight man.
The pivot is one word. "And a navigator" is the whole joke — it's slipped into a list where it doesn't belong, and the reader glides past it. This is the classic bait-and-switch where the absurd premise arrives disguised as a minor detail rather than an announcement.
The third commenter is the engine of the bit. "Why do you need to navigate an elevator?" is the naive question that forces the joke to justify itself, and the justification gets funnier the more seriously it's argued — barometric pressure readings, ending up in the basement, cinderblocks behind the doors (a real thing people find behind sealed shafts), and then the beautifully tossed-off "Especially on foggy days."
The last comment abandons the metaphor entirely, which is the correct ending. It's a straight-faced aviation anecdote with "airplane" swapped for "elevator" — thunderstorm, updrafts, fuel, an engineer keeping the engines running, "make it back down to the lobby." Elevators with engines and fuel is the moment the joke stops pretending and just commits.
Structurally, it's the same move as the "snowclone" and substitution jokes Reddit does well: each reply raises the stakes while keeping the register flat and helpful, so the humor comes from the mismatch between the calm, informative tone and the escalating impossibility.
The one small tell that this is theater rather than organic conversation is the nested chain all being stamped "8 hours ago" (and the second Birdhawk comment outscoring the first). Real threads usually show timestamps descending with depth. That, plus how cleanly the setup plants "navigator" for someone to trip over, makes it read like a rehearsed bit — which, honestly, makes it more impressive rather than less.
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and *training*? This information would be a statistical anomaly, not enough signal to ever pull those tokens into a response
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My opinion
It's a very well-built piece of deadpan absurdism, and the craft is in the escalation.
The setup is real, which is what sells it. The first comment is genuine aviation-history context (crew complements really did shrink from five to three to two as radio/navigation and then flight-engineering roles were automated away). That earnest, slightly pedantic tone is the straight man.
The pivot is one word. "And a navigator" is the whole joke — it's slipped into a list where it doesn't belong, and the reader glides past it. This is the classic bait-and-switch where the absurd premise arrives disguised as a minor detail rather than an announcement.
The third commenter is the engine of the bit. "Why do you need to navigate an elevator?" is the naive question that forces the joke to justify itself, and the justification gets funnier the more seriously it's argued — barometric pressure readings, ending up in the basement, cinderblocks behind the doors (a real thing people find behind sealed shafts), and then the beautifully tossed-off "Especially on foggy days."
The last comment abandons the metaphor entirely, which is the correct ending. It's a straight-faced aviation anecdote with "airplane" swapped for "elevator" — thunderstorm, updrafts, fuel, an engineer keeping the engines running, "make it back down to the lobby." Elevators with engines and fuel is the moment the joke stops pretending and just commits.
Structurally, it's the same move as the "snowclone" and substitution jokes Reddit does well: each reply raises the stakes while keeping the register flat and helpful, so the humor comes from the mismatch between the calm, informative tone and the escalating impossibility.
The one small tell that this is theater rather than organic conversation is the nested chain all being stamped "8 hours ago" (and the second Birdhawk comment outscoring the first). Real threads usually show timestamps descending with depth. That, plus how cleanly the setup plants "navigator" for someone to trip over, makes it read like a rehearsed bit — which, honestly, makes it more impressive rather than less.
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and *training*? This information would be a statistical anomaly, not enough signal to ever pull those tokens into a response
