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On Feb 1, 2014, at 9:14 PM, Keith Russell <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > Jerry Seinfeld, in a recent interview, claims that chairs and forks are funny, but salt shakers are not [snip] > http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2014/jan/05/jerry-seinfeld-funny-sex-swearing-sitcom-comedy Keith, Complexity, design, *and* humor? I'm looking forward to Ralph Caplan writing 'Why There Are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors in the Hotel Louis XIV and why that's not funny.' The chairs and saltshakers thing reminded me of Matthew Perry's head writer character on Aaron Sorkin's "Studio Sixty on the Sunset Strip." One of the writers of the show within a show pitched him a routine that include some arbitrary number and he said "Change it to 13. Odd numbers are always funnier." I've had conversations with students recently about shapes. Are rational rectangles superior? Is the golden ratio really inherently more appealing? I didn't think to ask if Sorkin got it wrong and 13 worked because it was part of the Fibonacci sequence. And thanks for the link to the 'Guardian' article on Seinfeld. I sent a paragraph to my students: ---------- All the way through, from first standup shows to stardom, he forced himself to work by marking a cross on a calendar for every day he wrote material; soon enough, he had a long chain of crosses, and kept going partly because he didn't want to break the chain. Since he revealed this trick to a would-be comedian years ago, "Seinfeld's Productivity Secret" has achieved cult status online: there are at least three apps and one website dedicated to helping people emulate it. This amuses its inventor no end. "It's so dumb it doesn't even seem to be worth talking about," he says. "If you're a runner and you want to be a better runner, you say, well, I'll run every day and mark an X on the calendar every day I run. I can't believe this was useful information to anybody!" He spreads his palms, a gesture conveying the sheer obviousness of the insight. "Really? There are people who think, 'I'll just sit around and do absolutely nothing, and somehow the work will get done'?" ---------- Gunnar Gunnar Swanson East Carolina University graphic design program http://www.ecu.edu/cs-cfac/soad/graphic/index.cfm [log in to unmask] Gunnar Swanson Design Office 1901 East 6th Street Greenville NC 27858 USA http://www.gunnarswanson.com [log in to unmask] +1 252 258-7006 ----------------------------------------------------------------- PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]> Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design -----------------------------------------------------------------