Unintentional comedy

With these two words, “unintentional comedy”, Damon Edwards finds the perfect description of the IT management standards scene. In a very restrained way, he captures it all:

• the irony,
• the predictability,
• the unstated rules of the genre,
• the stereotypical roles that keep reappearing: the bully, the calculator, the rambler, the simple-minded (that’s the one I used to play),
• the pretentiousness,
• the importance of appearances,
• the necessity of conflict and tension,
• the repetitiveness,
• and the fact that after a while people tend to behave as caricatures of themselves.

I don’t mind being (with many others) the butt of the joke when the joke is right on. Plus, I made a similar analogy in the past: Commedia dell (stand)arte (once there, make sure you also follow the link to Umit’s verses).

To be fair, I don’t think this is limited to IT management standards. Other standard areas behave alike (OOXML vs. ODF anyone?). You can also see the bullet points above in action in many open source mailing lists. And most of all in the blogosphere. BTW Damon, why do you think the server for this blog is stage.vambenepe.com and not a more neutral blog.vambenepe.com? It’s not that I got mixed up between my staging server and my production server. It’s that I see a lot of comedy aspects to our part of the blogosphere and I wanted to acknowledge that I, like others, assume a persona on my blog and through it I play a role in a big comedy. Which is not as dismissive as it sounds, comedy can be an excellent vehicle to convey important and serious ideas. But we need people like you to remind us, from time to time, that comedy it is.