Enough with the “I was shocked, SHOCKED to find blah blahing blah blah”.
Dan Savage is the most recent purveyor of the shock-shock I’ve seen.
You’re “shocked”, we get it. If you need to modify it, try “very shocked”. If you’re from Boston, try “wicked shawcked”. Gen-Y, you’re “hella shocked”. Valley girl, you’re “like totally shocked to the max.” Barista, “double shocked, half-decaf, skinny latte”. Marketer, maybe you’re “Sup-A-Shocked” or “Meg-A-Shocked”.
What you no longer shall be is “shocked, SHOCKED”.
Captain Renault was “shocked, shocked” to find gambling going on in Rick’s. You, you’re just repeating a 50 year old joke which has been repeated by 8 million other people.
Worst of all, you’ve devalued my normal amount of shock.
“I’m shocked that you would urinate on my carpet.”
Well, Trunk can’t be too shocked, or he would have said “shocked, shocked”. I shall now defecate on his couch.
I am shocked SHOCKED that you would resort to a trite and shopworn phrase like “blah blahing blah blah”, when then you could have used “etcetera”, “so on & so forth” or the much more clever “yadda yadda”. Oh, and your apartment stinks.
I am not shocked anytime American Electric Power has an outage. I am grounded in the reality that they do not have the juice to get things fixed. I can no longer generate outrage. There’s no utility in it.
The point behind the reduplicated “shocked” is that Claude Rains’ character is portrayed as being an amoral hypocrite – as he utters the line, he is picking up his winnings from the gambling that he is “shocked, shocked” to find going on at Rick’s Place. So it is said, originally and when properly used as a homage to Casablanca, with more than a touch of irony.
To give an example, I would be truly shocked to see a post from Otto opposing gay marriage – but I would be “shocked, shocked” to see a statement from Fred Phelps or James Dobson opposing it.
I just can’t wait until the sense-of-humor-police beauracracy is fully staffed so that I can run all my little in-jokes past them to ensure that someone who doesn’t share my sense of humor isn’t offended by my use of movie references, music references, Monty Python references, Fawlty Towers references, and/or Discworld references.
I can’t wait until the day that having a sense-of-humor, actually means HAVING. A. SENSE. OF. HUMOR. instead of having the ability to repeat what other people have already confirmed is humorous.
I, on the other hand, am neither shocked nor SHOCKED to discover a cornucopia of posters coming into this thread to do exactly what the OP was bitching about.
Yes, correct. That’s exactly what I said. There is no humor unless it is 100% original and derived from no other source whatsoever.
That was the entire point of starting this thread. To foster discussion so we could arrive at the one defining rule of humor: there is no humor unless it is 100% original and derived from no other source whatsoever.
