If you want to predict the future, just make a joke about it.
I went down a bit of a rabbit hole this morning reading about Schoolhouse Rock because it's the 50th anniversary and there was a good retrospective piece written about it and what I'm saying is I really had no good reason to spend a half hour of my morning reading about Schoolhouse Rock but I did. And in the process of doing that, I stumbled across this clip from The Simpsons where they parodied the famous "I'm Just a Bill" song. The clip left me in awe, not because of how funny it was, which it was, but because they literally predicted the January 6th insurrection.
At the end of the clip, Bill yells, "Door's open, boys!", and a bunch of gunslinging bills in cowboy hats storm into the Capitol.
You can take this a few different ways. On one hand, there are literally over 700 Simpsons episodes making for well over 200 hours of content, and when you write that many jokes, you're bound to get a few random things right.
On the other hand, you could take this information and say, "Maybe we're actually just smarter when we're being comedians?" And somehow I think there's a lot of truth to that answer.
A similar thing happened a few months ago as I was rewatching HBO's Silicon Valley. At the start of season 4, Richard goes off and brainstorms how he can use his compression algorithm to start an entirely new company, which soon becomes the focal point of the series. What Richard comes up with is a concept for a "new internet," a reconfigured version of the web that runs off of a bunch of scattered mobile devices, making it entirely decentralized and secure.
Aka Web3.
And if you so much as utter the word "Homer" within five feet of your smartphone, Facebook will soon slap you across the face with a listicle of all the best Simpsons predictions. Once again, some of this will inevitably be random chance, but it seems like we're hitting above the league average in getting these predictions right in comedy shows.
Maybe we're not getting lucky after all. Maybe our view of the future is less blurry when seen through the lens of comedy. Maybe when we think we're making jokes about the future we're really just revealing what our subconscious secretly can sense is going to happen even if we're not bold enough to state it.
After all, the key to the best comedy is truth.
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