funny stupid people — how to tell the genuine from the performance, in steps

the doctor’s waiting room had a magazine open to a page that used the phrase. funny stupid people. as a header. i sat there for twenty-eight minutes thinking about the order of those three words. how to recategorize the phrase without flattening it takes steps. i had time to draft them. the steps are below.

the magazine was a year old. the cover boy was older than the magazine. the doctor was running late, as doctors do, and the chairs were the color of an unpaid bill. i’m writing this from my desk now, on a friday, at 1:42pm, while carla is in the all-hands two floors above me. i have something like fifty minutes. that should be enough for a proper investigation, conducted with the seriousness it deserves, into funny stupid people as a category of person.

i need to be clear early. i may be in the category. i’m conducting the investigation anyway. that’s the kind of move only a member of the category would make, which is itself a clue. anyway. the stupid pillar refusal rule says i can’t define the umbrella term, so i won’t try. i’ll just sort what walks under it.

step one, observe the recovery time of funny stupid people

the first step is recovery time. how long does the person stay confused after the bit lands. a genuine specimen stays confused for, in my running tally, somewhere between four and nine minutes. they do not snap out of it on cue. they keep looking at the thing that just happened the way you look at a microwave that briefly caught fire — not in horror, not in pride, just in quiet civic interest. that’s the tell.

a performance specimen, by contrast, recovers in under thirty seconds. they look around. they angle the head. they want a witness. the genuine one already forgot there was a bit. dave once watched me lose a key for an hour and a half before remembering i had put the key inside a cereal box because the cereal box was, at that particular moment, the natural place. dave timed it. dave times everything. he works in insurance. it’s a hobby.

the supermarket is the cleanest lab for this test. the supermarket gives you cart, list, time pressure, fluorescent light, and other humans. all four conditions to expose the grade. i once watched a man ask a stocker, in earnest, where they keep the “milk that doesn’t go bad”. the stocker said “uht, aisle nine”. the man stood there for, i’d estimate, four full minutes. genuine grade. recovery time off the chart.

step two, the doctor laughed at my recovery time

i went to the doctor on tuesday. routine. a thing about my back, a thing about a number on a form. the doctor — a man with a job — read my chart, asked me three questions, and on the fourth question stopped, looked at me, and said “wait, you what”.

i had told him, accurately, that i had attempted to fix my back by sleeping on the third yoga mat under the couch from 2023, possibly evolving down there into a small civilization. i thought this was a normal sentence. the doctor disagreed. the doctor laughed, then apologized for laughing, then laughed again. then he wrote something on the chart i could not see. i suspect it was a small drawing.

my recovery time on the embarrassment, measured against my own scale, was approximately eleven minutes. that’s borderline. that puts me on the line between funny stupid people of the genuine variety and the milder undiagnosed variety. i’ll take it. any doctor who laughs is, on balance, a doctor who’s listening.

RECOVERY TIME REVEALS EVERYTHING THE BIT HIDES.

step three, performance fades, genuine endures

the deeper test is whether the bit survives a week. the performance grade has a shelf life of about forty-eight hours. they do the thing at the wedding, they tell the story at the office on monday, they post the photo, and then it’s gone, replaced by a new bit they workshop at brunch.

the genuine grade keeps the bit forever. years later they still have the receipt of it, sometimes literally. i have a fork in a drawer with a small black mark on it. i call it sparky. it is older than two of my haircuts. it survived the seventh microwave. when i tell people about it, the people who laugh too quickly are performance grade. the people who go quiet for a beat, then nod once, are genuine. they’re recognizing the species.

this connects to a thing i ought to call by name. there is a kind of person — and you know the kind — who plays the role of the harmless dunce at parties. the role is rehearsed. the lines are the same every time. that person isn’t funny stupid in the way i mean. they’re funny stupid as a stage direction. the genuine fool has no stage and no audience and would not know what to do with either.

step four through six, the residuals of funny stupid people

the next three steps are residuals. things the genuine grade leaves behind without meaning to.

step four — they keep an artifact. a fork. a yoga mat. a parking ticket from 2017 they cannot explain. the artifact has no use. it has only meaning. they cannot throw it out, even though throwing it out would not change a single thing about their day. the performance grade throws everything out. clean countertops. spotless drawers. nothing to remember.

step five — they get the same look from a stranger twice. the look is amused, slightly. concerned, slightly. you know the one. the genuine grade gets it from cashiers, doctors, dental hygienists, and one specific barista who once said “are you okay” without prompting. the performance grade does not get this look. they get a different one. they get the smile that’s reserved for nodding at a story you’ve heard before.

step six — productivity bro hates them. productivity bro, the villain of all online life, the man with the whiteboard and the unblinking ring light, has a category of person he is allergic to, and that person is the genuine funny stupid one. productivity bro can’t optimize this person. there is no funnel. there is no pipeline. there is just a man eating cereal in the kitchen at 11pm wondering if cereal is, technically, soup with rules. productivity bro logs off, defeated.

that’s three more residuals. the artifact, the look, and the productivity bro repulsion field. you can use any one of the three. you’ll know it when you see it, and if you don’t, that itself is data — about you, not them.

step seven, the close

step seven is the close. the close is what you do with the diagnosis once you have it. the answer is, with apologies to the magazine, nothing. you do nothing with it. you don’t correct the person. you don’t intervene. you don’t recommend a book. funny stupid people do not need a book. they have a fork.

this is also the difference, by the way, between the kind of stupid the magazine was talking about and the funny kind. the magazine, i later flipped through, had ten paragraphs of advice about how to “manage” the funny stupid people in your life. manage. the verb is a tell. the magazine is performance grade. it doesn’t recognize the species. it thinks it’s a behavior.

the genuine person isn’t behaving. they are existing. those are different verbs. you can manage behavior. you cannot manage existence. anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something, probably a course, probably for $97 a month, probably with a guarantee that doesn’t survive a careful read.

verdict, recovery time reveals everything the bit hides

my verdict, after seven steps, is the same as the headline. recovery time is the whole game. you watch how long the person stays inside the moment after it has happened. genuine funny stupid people stay inside it long enough to leave the room with a souvenir. performance funny stupid people are already out the door, checking the group chat, optimizing the story for the next telling. one of these is a person. the other is a brand.

and i’ll tell you which one i’d rather drink with at the corner bar at 11pm on a tuesday. it’s not close. one of them will tell you about a fork from 2019 and mean every word. the other one will pull out their phone. you don’t need a seventh step for that. you’ve already been through it.

if you want a movie about the genuine grade — i mean the patron saint of it, watched without irony — there’s a film called The Jerk that captures the species in motion. steve martin’s 1979 character is the cleanest case study i can recommend, and it’s funnier than any magazine page has the right to be.