Humor and History

I was going to post this to Facebook, but then I realized I'd have people responding who just don't "get it." So I'm going to post this here, where I can warn you in an instructive sort of way that this is a humorous blog entry that makes great use of the irony of reality. If you scroll through the comments (skipping the one with the bad words) to the one by a German who doesn't "get it," you'll see the problem--humor relies on a shared frame of reference, and it relies a LOT on very subtle language cues, which the poor German guy realizes he's missing.

Here's an excerpt from the original:

I'm not even going to get into the whole subplot about breaking a secret code (cleverly named "Enigma", because the writers couldn't spend more than two seconds thinking up a name for an enigmatic code), the giant superintelligent computer called Colossus (despite this being years before the transistor was even invented), the Soviet strongman whose name means "Man of Steel" in Russian (seriously, between calling the strongman "Man of Steel" and the Frenchman "de Gaulle", whoever came up with the names for this thing ought to be shot).

And here's the "Stuff," by Scott (Squid314) via Joe Carter of First Thoughts.