The 'Accidental Comedy' subreddit has been entertaining the Reddit sphere for a few years already, having been founded in early 2013. Since then, the community has grown to house a whopping 841k members who love to share the freshest unintentional and most surprising scenarios they spot while gliding through life or the digital landscape. There’s a bit of everything for everyone, which is part of the reason why the page is so successful.
The moderator team looking after 'Accidental Comedy' has a set of ground rules for the members of the subreddit. Obviously, they must be related to the main subject of the forum — they have to be unintentionally funny. Moreover, if the post doesn’t elicit a laugh or a smile, or is trying to be funny but fails in the most unfortunate way, it will be removed.
The community is also asked to avoid sharing music videos. Meanwhile, people should stay clear of low-effort posts, aim for quality, and craft a descriptive title that adds value to the situation it's trying to describe. And a brief scroll through this list will prove that the users are trying their best, and they provide much-needed entertainment to hundreds who eagerly scroll their feed every day.
Accidental humor is unpredictable as it creates a perfect situation out of something that was not supposed to be funny in the first place. In today's times, we could all do with a laugh, so no wonder we enjoy witnessing these artifacts so much. It's the ideal mood booster that helps us keep it all together.
If you spend enough time on the internet, and most of us do, you’re bound to see and read some amusing examples of the universe’s sense of humor. And it’s safe to say that unintentional comedy can be found just about anywhere, from unexpectedly synchronized social media feeds to random road or shop signs that are the results of some very poor planning.
We know irony when we see it, after all. And we can’t help but feel entertained by these unexpected surprises that catch us by surprise and get stuck in our heads by challenging our expectations.
"In situational irony, there is a clash between the professed or ostensible aim of some person or entity, and the situation that they’re in," philosophy professor Mitchell Green, author of Irony as Expression (of a Sense of the Absurd), explained to Bored Panda in a previous interview.
Professor Green provided a few examples. According to him, witnessing a house burning down is tragic, though not ironic. "But when a firehouse burns to the ground, that’s both tragic and ironic, and in particular is a case of situational irony. The reason is that firehouses are built for the purpose of helping to prevent fires. That purpose is dramatically foiled by the firehouse burning to the ground."
"Similarly, when the president of the local chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving gets pulled over by the police and arrested for Driving While Intoxicated, we have a case of situational irony," Green continued. "Her professed aim is to campaign against drunk driving, but it’s upended by the outcome of getting pulled over on a DWI." He added that we also take some schadenfreude-based pleasure (a German word meaning the pleasure we get from witnessing someone's misfortune) in seeing this person shown to be such a hypocrite.
However, situational irony is different from what is often called verbal irony. "In verbal irony, a person is attempting to communicate that some situation she has in mind is ironic or absurd. (I say, 'Nice job' in response to your backing up your car into a tree, for instance.) But a situation can be ironic without anyone commenting on it."
While we instinctively understand when a situation is ironic, we often have trouble defining and articulating the term. Professor Green pointed out that it can be hard to put into words and express what is needed for an incident to be ironic because these situations are complex and their features don’t always register at the conscious level.
"This is similar to the way in which we can often tell whether someone is lying to us, but we can’t say exactly what leads us to think that. In our social lives, we often respond to complex cues without attending to all the factors that guide that response. This may be why it’s hard to explain in words what irony is," he noted.
