So my next n00b question: what the hell is min-maxing? too lazy to wikipeia it myself.

2. Rebecca is right. The D&Ders I know (and myself, yeah), at least, aren’t really all that uptight about the jibes- it’s almost a badge of honor. “Hey, they notice us enough to make fun of us, huzzah!” We really enjoy laughing at ourselves. Similar attitudes show up in the LARPing community, too.

5. I think that really depends on how deep into it you get when you make a joke like that. If you keep it really broad and general, it’s probably going to be common knowledge enough for anyone to understand. But if you start talking about things that are more technical and detailed, the number of people alienated from that increases. Stick to the basics, and it will be more unniversal; get technical and specific, and the crowd that “gets it” will shrink.

Here’s a nerdy example I experienced: I was on a forum where people were just posting useless information for fun (things like stats or weird laws or the acidic qualities of Coke), and I saw this post: “Vigilance means your creatures do not tap when attacking.” It’s a Magic: The Gathering reference that I totally got because I play (yeah, uber-nerd). So I thought it was friggin’ hilarious and brilliant. But how much of that would someone that doesn’t play understand? Not much. So would they find it funnny? Probably not. Not a lot of people that don’t play even know what “tapping” means (and in case you don’t know, in order to attack someone with a creature, you must turn that card sideways, and once it’s tapped/sideways, you can’t use it again that round unless it gets turned back somehow), so our double entendre jokes about tapping each other, this, that, or the other person/place/thing would be totally lost on the average non-Magic player, too. And pretty much all of that forum post would be completely lost on someone that doesn’t play because of this. (Not surprisingly, I was the only person to respond at all.)

2. I actually have a post on this about half-written. My answer to it is “Several weeks after you make or hear a joke like this for the first time — after it passes from your short- to long-term memory, source amnesia causes most of the sense of irony to be lost.”

3. As a Boston-area comedian, I’d say that it mostly depends on whether you’re north or south of the river. North of the river, yes, south of the river, definitely not.

I also have a half-written post about Jeff Dunham that addresses this point extensively.

I need to get on those!

2. Wherever the funny is.

3. My husband says that his boss is very Joe Nascar, but would still get jokes about +5 spells of distraction. He just wouldn’t have any context. Like how people get that “Take my wife…please” is funny, but have never actually seen the whole routine it comes from.