The show is funny because there are always answers that surprised people. Due to the rule of this game, there are two family member that compete each other by guessing the most popular answer of 100 people. The number of same answer in the survey will be showed on board as scores. The family which gets higher total score wins the game. In the game, the family members should think about answers from the perspective of both themselves and other 100 people. The rule itself is like a constriction that prevent people from thinking too far. Therefore, their answers should not be too absurd for others. After understanding the rule, audiences will not simply regard their answers as family member's own opinions. In other words, the game is aim to let people say the answer in other people's eyes. Therefore, this rule kind of reduces the embarrassment of answering awkward questions. There are questions are designed to make people think about something strange and those question are sometimes not proper to ask in the public. People usually will not answer those questions if they only represent for themselves, however, in this show, their answers are supposed to represent more people. Family member will say the repressed ideas in public in this situation. Due to the relief theory, if the answer they answered are the ones that always be repressed in the moral world, people will feel relieve and then laugh.
When watching the audiences struggle with guessing the right answer, we found them funny when they answer the answer too far from the best answer. Since every question have time limit, people will say the idea first came to their mind, which is always surprising and hilarious, even if it will embarrassed themselves. The time limit forces people to say their original ideas. Due to the superiority theory, the more embarrassing those ideas are, the more hilarious audiences will found. In this video clip, when he said gynecologist in the last second, people cannot help to laugh, because this answer is a little bit awkward for a man, but it is not a bad answer for this question. It like he was forced to say something embarrassing and this idea makes people laugh due to relief theory.
The element of expectation and empathy is indeed crucial here. It perhaps goes back to the comedy-empathy connection we've discussed before. Interestingly, I wonder if the people in the surveys, whoever they are, also try to guess what other people are thinking more than what they think. This is Smith's argument. The result would be a "Keynesian" beauty content, in which people are asked to predict the winner of a contents, and those who pick the most popular results win: they don't pick what they think will win, or what they think other people will think, but rather what they think other people think other people think will win. Something is working the same way here. People are trying to think what other people think other people think is a good answer.
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