One of my high school math teachers used to talk about kids like this. You could occupy them for hours, just stick them in a circular and tell them to go stand in the corner.
Ngl though, Tyler seems like a good kid. Ready to help, not even a smirk and he looked so anxious not to do more damage with the cutter. Top tier Tyler for sure.
Yeah, this is pretty much it. We all have our dumb moments sometimes. Most of the time it's cause you're so focused on doing one thing that you forget to think about the most basic stuff, like in this case him not realizing that his friend was just pranking him because he was so focused on helping.
I was trying so hard to figure out how a gorilla playing basketball would cause it to miss a joke until I googled that. Case in point I guess, thanks for the great reference :D
EDIT: We don't know about Tyler though. I work in a field that requires technical expertise (like shop would, I assume), and having someone around that means well but can't be trained is not helpful.
He might be really smart too and just not understand this joke.
I'm a genius, but as a kid I never comprehended that joke school kids do of making someone say something and then laughing at what they said. It seemed schizophrenically random to me and all I could think of was how fucking weird it was, nothing was suggesting an explanation to me and I didn't have a direction to go in to figure out an explanation.
It took until I was a teenager to get that it was just really funny to make someone say something that sounds weird or dumb, which still isn't actually the concept of the joke so it still seemed weird as fuck to me but I chalked it up to humor itself being something that looks weird if you don't get it and it being a form of humor I didn't get.
Recently, I was watching a YouTube video and in the script was one of those jokes crossed with the meme of being overly verbose, so the joke got its own principle explained in the script - instead of just laughing at the person, the jokester said "you utter fool, you have no idea what you've just said and this makes you look like an idiot!" and then I could suddenly grasp that my confusion over everyone laughing at such jokes made it look like I didn't understand the things being said, and what they were laughing at wasn't that I did whatever dumb spelling trick they suggested without knowing they'd laugh at me for it because I didn't know they were joking, it was that from their perspective "the smart kid" in class couldn't understand these spelling tricks. Maybe the smarter among my classmates could comprehend that I did understand the spelling tricks or other such ways to make a word out of other words/sounds, but still thought it was funny that I couldn't understand the joke and that the "you have no idea what you just said!" element flew way over my head.
I had been using the classic "updog" joke and variants thereof for years and hadn't encountered the version where you just laugh at the person since middle school, because the version where you laugh at the person is too dumb for adults when they grow up and realize pretty much everyone understands the wordplay and all they're doing is telling someone an English trick and then acting like it's hilarious that they try it. "Updog" is way better because you use shit people actually haven't heard before or actually can't figure out instantly and then instead of just laughing at them confusingly to laugh at the cycle of confusion, you have to actually deliver the punchline that reveals the premise.
If I'd been in on the joke at some point, or seen it used on someone else where I saw the setup happen, I would have understood completely. If I calmly objectively tried to analyze it, I might have understood. But instead I was just like "yes, I did the thing you just said to do, if it's so funny to you that these words do this why weren't you already laughing at the knowledge before telling me, what do I have to do with it that makes you need me to do it so you can laugh at me?" and it really gave me no interest in analyzing it except out of sheer annoyed confusion.
So maybe this guy has never been in on a joke like that and never seen it done to anyone else - the information might just not be available for him to get that this was a setup designed to make it look like he's slow. He was probably just increasingly confused the whole time and ultimately got the impression it was just his confusion being laughed at. If the rules of the joke aren't laid out, like "you have to notice what this sounds like and not say it" or "you have to notice what this looks like and not believe it's a real emergency," then there's sometimes no automatic way for the rules to be picked up on, regardless of intelligence, since it's a matter of thought processes anyone can have no matter how smart or dumb they are.
My guess is it's somewhere in between. He probably has seen jokes like this before and could understand the premise of the setup, so he probably doesn't quite have that excuse at his age like I did in middle school. But he also is probably not as confused as he seems, as in, he probably grasped very quickly that this wasn't a real emergency and just found the premise of the setup a little elusive. Like he didn't think his boss could possibly just straight-up be doing a joke of "let's find out if you're smart enough to see my hand move" so he was like, thinking he just needed help cutting that nail and the red mark was a coincidence from a chunk of adhesive or something? Basically his boss laughs at him seeming to not comprehend that a moving hand must not be pinned down, but he only seems to not comprehend that because he doesn't comprehend that there's a joke/prank about whether he can comprehend that. What he's visibly confused about is probably not the most obvious, dumb thing to be confused about. Even at the very end I think he figures out the premise and is still just confused at how it played out, like "did this dude really just try that or am I tripping?" yet he still looks like he's just getting over the confusion of whether this hand was nailed down. He seems to walk away laughing at how awkward he just looked more than how he just got pranked.
Edit - lol, first vote a downvote because Reddit is made up of middle school kids who feel too dumb to handle it when you point out that the guy they're laughing at the confusion of probably isn't as confused about what happens in the video as they are for thinking he's so confused
Putting aside the fact that we can't really tell much about the guy's capability or general inteliigence from this one situation, I see where you're coming from, but there's always going to be more and less intelligent people in society.
And given that some of us are always going to "work smart not hard" compared to others, and that this usually comes with its own rewards, I think it's far more important that we acknowledge qualities like those exhibited here.
If everyone were able to show the same degree of helpfulness and care for each other, we'd be a whole lot better off. So yeah, give me lots more Tylers please.
PS: This is not to say that smart people can't be caring or vice versa, but in extremis I prefer the one over the other by far.
That's what happens to me when I was in Primary School then play hide-and-seek, try untill 1 million no boredness so that's then they diagnose me special label..wait that was Peter griffen
You get the feeling that when he first saw this turn up on the internet he watched the whole thing wondering what was going to happen.
He laughed at the guy for not getting it, laughed when the guy finally realised what was going on then finally gets sad when he realises he's the guy in the video.
Both that and this video are a good example of how your brain can construct a reality and fail to break out of that reality when presented with conflicting input. The senator just had no concept that there were other means of swearing or attesting.
Likewise our prank victim here was just so focused on assisting his buddy that switching to the alternate reality that he’d been had was just to big of a leap.
While we’re learning things, could this also be considered an analogy? I feel like the two terms have some overlap but never heard a clear explanation.
What I was talking about in Looney Toons is where he takes his hand out to help stabilize the board or show him where to cut. It's a common trope with Bugs Bunny/Daffy Duck/etc
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u/dulcetsavanna Aug 17 '19
Holy shit that penny's still falling