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Last week, debutante-user-experience blogger Michael Grossman gently ripped on NYT tech columnist David Pogue for his less-than-sophisticated humor. His barely-out-of-diapers blog got the attention of The Pogueanator, who aimed the barrel of his next video's less-than-sophisticated humor directly at the semi-hapless Grossman. Pogue makes great use of the classic rhetorical technique of repeating someone else's words in a duh-duh-voice (I had a boss who used to do that) and manages to make the word blogger sound like a filthy insult.
Isn't it funny (a word I choose carefully) that if you don't like someone's particular style of humor, you must therefore have no sense of humor yourself? If you aren't with us, you're against us! Grossman demonstrates his humor and pretty fair mashup chops in his potentially viral response video.
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Comments
Steve, your point about us against them mentality is pretty well taken.But aren't you guilty to some extent of doing the same?
It might just be me, but your post reads as if you picked your favorite (Grossman) in advance based more on the fact of his inexperience relative to Pogue than to any merits that he himself possesses. You either find Pogue's schtick funny or not but at least he does have some sort of definable personality. Grossman might too, but I didn't see it in either of those posts. The first one he uses Pogue's personality and content to draw a conclusion - David Pogue is a clueless doofus at least compared to me- that isn't particularly insightful and that he could have just as easily made by simply stating it. The second one does the same thing but takes longer. Neither one is particularly funny. Both of them are, except for a caption insert here and there, all Pogue, no Grossman.
I too find it a little odd that Pogue would care enough one way or another to devote an entire segment to it, but you seem to have ascribed some sort of moral dimension to the story that I can't see anyplace. Was it worse for Pogue to notice Grossman's criticism and respond to it in kind than it was for Grossman to offer it in the first place? Even if you believe so, isn't it offset by the fact that making fun of someone because they're nerdier than you is itself kind of immature whether they're more successful than you are not? personally, I don't think there's anything wrong with what either one of them did, whatever the motivation but Grossman plainly has more to gain by baiting Pogue than Pogue does by baiting Grossman. Bottom line is Pogue's successful now. Grossman, I assume, hopes to be someday. To get there he'll most likely have to rely on more than mash-ups and put-downs of other more famous personalities. I think it's safe to say that David Pogue gave him a lot more exposure than he would have gotten on his own, so why is he the bad guy?
Daniel - you make a lot of points below; this format (the comments) is way too non-interactive to discuss this properly. Email me if you'd like to IM about this, which we can either post somewhere or not.
I appreciate the time you took here to critique.