Now Tragedy - That's Funny

Found this little gem in my recommendations this evening:



Only my second post, and already I have a reason to mention what I find most intriguing about personal recommendations on websites like YouTube: a computer has no capacity for irony; it can only be sincere.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's talk about the clip first.

Obviously it's a movie trailer, and my guess is one for a student film of some kind. I suppose it could just be a no-budget offering from a legit film crew, but I'm not willing to google KonnectProductions to find out. It would spoil all the fun. I like pretending that the MPAA would actually approve a preview for all audiences that has an F-bomb in the first ten seconds. I also like pretending that the 100,000 plus views and relatively good ratings on this trailer indicate that the movie has some merit.

Which is probably why YouTube recommended it. I occasionally watch movie trailers. I even occasionally watch trailers and clips from "gay" movies (notice the "gay" tag on this clip). I also occasionally listen to classical music on YouTube, and this trailer's use of Yo-Yo Ma playing Bach is absolutely top-notch...

So what I do think of this recommendation? Well, each of the three times I've watched it, I have laughed myself breathless, so I guess you could say I *enjoy* it...But come on, this trailer is just awful. The cynical pleasure I derive is from the extreme close-up at 0:50 (and all the subsequent eye close-ups), the utter camp permeating every scene, and especially the line "How would it be like if you killed me right now?" Pure. Gold.

But YouTube couldn't have known that - could it? Surely it was a genuine offering, and the fact that my enjoyment is on a totally different level is beyond the scope of the algorithm...right? What I mean is, surely there is no intersection between the reasons I love this clip and the reasons why YouTube recommended it, right? Because after all: the day that computers can anticipate irony - the day they can recognize that I will love a movie trailer because it is so hilariously bad - is the day that all those artificial intelligence nightmares come true...