A distinctive style of shared intellectual humour found among hackers, having the following marked characteristics:
1. Fascination with form-vs.-content jokes, paradoxes, and humour having to do with confusion of metalevels (see meta ). One way to make a hacker laugh: hold a red index card in front of him/her with "GREEN" written on it, or vice-versa (note, however, that this is funny only the first time).
2. Elaborate deadpan parodies of large intellectual constructs, such as specifications (see write-only memory ), standards documents, language descriptions (see INTERCAL ), and even entire scientific theories (see quantum bogodynamics , computron ).
3. Jokes that involve screwily precise reasoning from bizarre, ludicrous, or just grossly counter-intuitive premises.
4. Fascination with puns and wordplay.
5. A fondness for apparently mindless humour with subversive currents of intelligence in it - for example, old Warner Brothers and Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons, the Marx brothers, the early B-52s, and Monty Python's Flying Circus. Humour that combines this trait with elements of high camp and slapstick is especially favoured.
6. References to the symbol-object antinomies and associated ideas in Zen Buddhism and (less often) Taoism. See has the X nature , Discordianism , zen , ha ha only serious , AI koan .
See also filk and retrocomputing . If you have an itchy feeling that all 6 of these traits are really aspects of one thing that is incredibly difficult to talk about exactly, you are (a) correct and (b) responding like a hacker. These traits are also recognizable (though in a less marked form) throughout science-fiction fandom .
(1995-12-18)