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Intro

I haven't thought much about humor before. I mostly just laugh and can pick out what is highbrow, lowbrow, and highlowbrow humor. If I'm feeling daring, I'll try and figure out if something truly is ironic*. But there was a conversation recently where someone insisted something that I thought/knew was funny, was is fact not funny. And that shook me to my core. So much so that I started trying to look for a framework on how to explain the difference in humor.
Why spend this effort?† I'm honestly not sure. I guess I see differences in understanding as an accessibility issue. At least in the "does everyone have the ability to participate" sense. This interest, at least partially, stems from a design article from MaRo about inducting new players into the game via Sliding Scale complexity. ie there needs to be an easy mode to get people hooked, then a scale of difficulty to keep them on the line while not disenfranchising more experienced players.‡ The goal here was to bridge that gap and make humor, or at least the understanding of it, accessible.

Humor

I started this by trying to figure out all the kinds of humor. Surely from there I could identify categories! Nope! Webpages on the subject were, uh, not helpful. This one in particular was extra useless. They lacked a focus on fundamental building blocks that one could build off of. Without a clear theory, I tried the naturalistic approach: looking through Hellscube§ cards to "find the funny." This got me closer, in that a couple themes emerged, but I was still having trouble articulating said themes. This likely was an effect of the cards being so weird, so I took when step closer to the familiarity of "normal" Magic, particularly where it got weird: the Time Spiral block.

Time Spiral

Of all the sets, the Time Spiral sets are in my top five¶ favorite sets to just look through to kill time.# I like them because they're the first meta sets. Each set before them took Magic in a new direction, adding abilities, rules, lore. Time Spiral went a different way and was focused on Magic in itself, in a way that hasn't officially happened outside of the Un sets.♠ Each third of the block examined magic in a new way and asked its own questions. I've tried to pull out examples below.

Time Spiral (The Set): Recognizing/Referencing

You can most clearly see TSP's theme in the over-obvious Magus cycle. "Hey do you 'member Nev's Disk? Boy do we have the thing for you."


Neuron monkey activation etc. That's it, that's the theme. This style of direct referencing included cards like Jaya Ballard, Flavor Text Extraordinaire, Hey What if the Kor Flanked, and the tribe that exists solely as "Hey that thing is like this thing!".

Planar Chaos (The Set): Reimagining/Repositioning

PLC is the South Park♥ of Magic sets. Edgy for unclear reasons in ways it probably didn't need to be. It spit in the face of the norms and "dared" to ask "What if this was a different color?" and "How could we do this in another way?" The first question led to notoriously bullshit edh staples like Damnation and Harmonize♦, the second gave us things like Dread Return, answering the question "how many Narcomoebas do I need to sac for a free Griselbrand, whenever I want." This was once my favorite of the block, but the design space it explored got old, fast.

Future Sight: Inventing/Exploring

IMO, this set is the strangest to look through, especially after the last two. Not because of it being wild, but because of how strictly it adheres to the rules. It barely invented anything (just Fateseal, Absorb, Aura Swap, Fortifications, Contraptions, ... okay maybe it did♣) – where it truly excelled was asking "Are there rules that say dogs can't play basketball?". Spellweaver Volute, Lumithread Field, and Vedalken Aethermage don't invent new things; they're fully understandable within known rules†* but they really push those rules to the limits. While FUT might not be peak play experience, it is peak WotC navel-gazing.

Humor (for real this time)

Okay let's tie that back to humor. What was just outlined are recognizable as the three pillars of comedy: references, what-ifs, and actually funny stuff.

Wow that sucks. I can do better. Okay let's look at another cycle of concepts. Bear with me.

How You Learn

As mentioned before, learning is important to me. I believe that there are always new things to learn and MaRo identifies it as the 4th best thing about magic.†† Learning is the process that bridges differences in understandings. A quick google search turned up the four stages of learning: Acquisition, Fluency, Generalization, and Adaption.



To put it into terms of MtG, you acquire knowledge about cards and rules, then you learn to interact fluently, eventually you learn themes and generalizations, and finally you adapt to build decks/do creative things. After that, for most people, the cycle repeats and you learn more, either deepening expertise or parsing each new pretty rectangle that gets printed.
If you think of learning magic as the Acquisition stage, the other 3 stages line up perfectly with the Time Spiral block's themes. Fluency is recognizing, Generalization is understanding shared patterns, and Adaption is exploration. That's not too far of a stretch right? That WotC's most experimental sets reflect how humans learn? I hope not, because it gets wilder.

Development of Humor

Cool so we got humor and learning in play, what about learning humor? Take a quick gander at this chart (or not, i'm about to summarize it):


This chart is focused on the development of humor in children, which is a learning process. I'd venture to say that you go through the stages of humor with each new thing you learn. †‡. The chart also has a neat change that happens in the 3-5 year block: understanding humor extends from the physical to the semantic. ex "I want to milk the car" is only funny because of the meanings behind the word. Let's try to map the stages of humor to the stages to learning and the themes of the TS block! Fun times!

1. Difference between normal and abnormal behavior
- Quacking like a duck
- Acquisition + Physical

2. Intended use of objects
- Answering shoe like a telephone
- Recognizing + Fluency + Physical

3. Objects have names
- Calling a turtle a sofa
- Recognizing + Fluency + Physical/Semantic

4. Words are made of sounds
- Shoobibbity ladoof
- Recognizing + Generalization + Physical

5. Words make sense in combination
- "I want to milk the car"
- Recognizing + Generalization + Semantic

6. Words describe things in similar categories
- Dog head on cat body
- Reimagining + Generalization + Semantic

7. Existence of humor as language
- Jokes that make no sense
- Reimagining + Adaption + Semantic

8. Using humor to communicate
- Real-ass jokes
- Exploring + Adaption + Semantic

I like how these 8 stages can clearly be broken into two instances of the same learning cycle: a physical cycle, which then feeds into the same learning stages, but for semantics.†§ It's nice when things line up like this. Makes me feel like this isn't bullshit. Anyways, you could even say that the system can be described on two axi, Learning and Physical/Semantic.

Humor (For real for real this time)

Explaining why something funny is one of the least funny things that can be done. Let's see if that holds true for charts.
†¶

So hopefully this explains why certain cards are funny to certain people at certain stages of learning. It explains why new players design very similar cards by virtue of their experience level. It explains how HC has drifted over time. †# And that might be the punchline here. Here's a huge essay about why people don't think I'm funny.


fucking neato.















Wait no I can salvage this.

From theory to practice

Let's see if that list actually works by trying to apply it to cards. Here's a handful of cards I selected that I think stand out as clearly fitting into a theme. (I'm not going to bat for their quality, but for their definitiveness.)

4/4 of Hearts

The big joke here is Physical†♠/Recognizing. "Hey that's a playing card! I'm playing a different card came. Wacky!"
This joke is bolstered by the fact that it is Semantically†♥ aligned: "Yeah those stats like like 4, it's red, and heart means lifelink."

White Ramp

This card is a Semantic Reimagining, ie taking the name of something and putting it on a form that sort of fits.
There's the secondary joke of how Rampant Growth looks like a ramp, which is pretty solidly in the realm of Physical Recognizing.

Bear with Set's Mechanics

I think the main joke here is Semantic Exploring, it takes several themes (bears, Set's having core mechanics, otherwise plain creatures getting the Set mechanic) and asks "What would a timeless version of this look like?". (The main joke only works because of the smaller jokes and observations: "heh that's a bear", "Sets have mechanics").

Pschheewwww

This card is fantastic. It's impressive in just how many jokes it has. Again, that's what I hope the takeaway here is, the best way to improve a card's design is to make sure they work in several different ways (also make all those jokes good). So without further adieu:
Physical Recognizing - "Pschheewwww" this card is phonetically funny
Physical Reimagining - Dogs aren't rockets but this one sure is
Physical Exploring - yo just check out the card formatting, it's post-magic
Semantic Recognizing - Along with being silly, this card fills a role. It's lightning bolt/spark elemental/burn staple
Semantic Reimagining - This plays off of Recognizing, what if bolt was a creature? What abilities would it need to be a creature?
Semantic Exploring - Do cards need costs? What if their costs were actually alternative costs?

How to design good cards

Obviously this whole screed is about Hellscube†♦, which is really cool to me. It's an environment that makes fun of MtG within its ruleset†♣. It's a mix of mechanics and humor, both of which are heavily grounded in the environment (balancing power level with other cards and finding the right humor for the audience). This begs the question though, what makes a good card? Is it being at the end of the learning cycle? Is it FUT-style exploring?

Nah, it's do several things and do them all well.

In conclusion

thanks for coming to my ted talk