Driving Off the Cliff

Title: Driving Off the Cliff

General Information about Item:

  • Joke
  • English.
  • United States

Informant Data:

  • Stephanie Guo is a Dartmouth ’18. She majors in Computer Science. She is most familiar with Java, but has also worked with Python, Javascript, and C.

Contextual Data:

  • Social Context
    • This joke would most likely appear in the company of others in the STEM fields. Although it would probably be more common among engineers, physicists, and computer scientists. Age or language, assuming translation, would not be relevant. Typically, this type of joke would be more common among groups of people who are beyond the introductory level or who only have a passing interest in a STEM field.
  • Cultural Context
    • Like the “Red Ball” joke, this mocks those within a certain field by hyperbolizing certain behaviors and much of the cultural context of that joke applies here. Typically, computer scientists spend a lot of time trying to find sources of error because a program working in one scenario does not mean it will work in all of them. Doing this usually involves a process of identifying where errors may occur by trying to create and repeat scenarios in which the program could break. This is even more relevant when post-release bugs are reported and a computer scientist must try to recreate a reported error before they can even attempt to fix it. Additionally, when the error is not related to the code and thus not within the computer scientists control, it is important to evaluate the error to estimate the accuracy of the results as a consistent and bounded error is much better than an inconsistent one. Both of these things require recreating the same error multiple times. This joke mocks this behavior by explaining how after encountering a dangerous situation, the physicist and engineer try to figure out what went wrong through calculation and  examination of the car respectively, but the computer scientist wants to try and repeat the dangerous situation before even trying to address it.

Item:

A physicist, [an engineer], and a computer scientist are driving down the road when something goes wrong with the car and it turns uncontrollably towards a cliff edge. Somehow they manage to just barely veer away before they go over the edge. The physicist tries to figure out what went wrong by doing a friction calculation. [The engineer tries to examine the car to figure out what was broken.] The computer programmer sat in the car and said, “Let’s try to replicate the error.”

*Items in brackets indicate revisions to the joke by the interviewee after the interview.

Transcript:

    • Robert: Could you please give your name and background?
    • Stephanie: My name is Stephanie Guo. I am a Dartmouth ’18 and a computer science major.
    • Robert: Could you please tell your joke?
    • Stephanie: A physicist, [an engineer], and a computer scientist are driving down the road when something goes wrong with the car and it turns uncontrollably towards a cliff edge. Somehow they manage to just barely veer away before they go over the edge. The physicist tries to figure out what went wrong by doing a friction calculation. [The engineer tries to examine the car to figure out what was broken.] The computer programmer sat in the car and said, “Let’s try to replicate the error.” [Modified for clarity according to post interview comments by the informant]
    • Robert: Could you tell me where you heard this joke and who told you?
    • Stephanie: I think I first heard this joke from my high school CS teacher back in 2013 or 2012.
    • Robert: Could you briefly explain the joke?
    • Stephanie: There are two [STEM field] characters. Two of them have a rational response to almost being in an accident while the computer scientist is being made from of here for wanting to [recreate the accident] instead of doing the [sensible] thing and walking away.

Associated file (a video, audio, or image file):

 

Collector’s Name: Robert Sylvia

Tags/Keywords:

  • Joke. Interdisciplinary. Computer Science. Programming. Hyperbole.

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