Editor | On 06, Nov 2019

Darrell Mann

We live in a strange world. Usually, these days, a world in which we’re all forced into personalized filter bubbles that makes us less and less able to empathise with people holding views different to our own. Irony is just about dead. And a whole host of topics have seemingly become forbidden territory as far as humour is concerned. But is that really true? Or does it mean humorists have to try harder?

One of the toughest humour-related tightrope walks these days relates to the area of double standards. Trawl the Internet for double-standard jokes and the large majority seem to relate to real or perceived gender or cultural asymmetries. Most of them tend to make your toes curl. Ones like these:

Classic instance where the politics (and dread ‘political correctness’) now suffocates the humour. The problem looks something like this:

All that said, we like a challenge here at Systematic Innovation Towers. Is it possible to find double standards humour that magically transcends the ‘this person should be fired and never work again’ filter bubble?

Let’s give it a go…

First up, we had several votes for this one:

And then there were these two…

…the key to all three being Inventive Principle 4C, ‘if an object or system is already asymmetrical, increase the degree of asymmetry’. i.e. if you find them funny, what makes them funny is the extremity of the asymmetry.

Funnily enough, that didn’t quite happen here:

…as it happens, a whole other kind of double standard. Or rather ‘standard double’ (thankyou, Principle 13), at the worryingly titled, Hotel Joke. I love the idea of the spinning options wheel above the bed, but someone chickened out quite badly when it came to labelling the different zones. They needed Principle 4C again.

That or yet another different kind of double standard…

Someone really needs to take the brewing industry to task over their beer naming foibles. There’s that Principle 4C again… or am I just falling in to yet another Asymmetry trap…