Zaza Pachulia making the All-Star Game is a joke

Contrary to the popular belief of people who make jokes on the internet, the internet is not good at making jokes. Humor is subjective, sure, but jokes themselves have a structure. In its most basic form, it’s two steps: setup and punchline.

Here’s an example:

Why did the chicken cross the road? (Setup)
To get to the other side. (Punchline)

Now you can delve a little bit into the nuance if you’d like (“the other side” means the opposite side of the road as well as “the other side” in the sense of the afterlife), but that’s less important to the joke-making craft than the fact the structure is there. There’s the portion that inspires the “what?” (setup) and then there’s the thing that inspires the “oh” (punchline). If the “oh” hits in a proper fashion, it can inspire a “hahaha” or a “ho ho, good one there, Keith.” Sometimes it doesn’t. Those times it can inspire a “boooo” or a “you should be ashamed of yourself, Zach.”

I get why, and I have sympathies for the jokemaker. Jokes are hard, and that’s why I don’t do them. However, a joke that isn’t funny is still a joke. Good or bad in terms of quality doesn’t necessarily enter into it.

Zaza Pachulia being voted into the All-Star game is a bad joke. Not because it’s somehow a miscarriage of voting justice or because he doesn’t fit in with most peoples’ semantic prototype of an NBA All Star, but because it’s incomplete. We have the setup (people tweeting “Zaza Pachulia #NBAVOTE” and hoping for a reaction), but there’s no punchline.

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Obviously, that has to change. In order for this joke to be successful and for the internet to fulfill itself, we need Zaza to be starting on February 19. This isn’t about your opinion, or my opinion, or even Zaza’s waning skill as a basketball player. This is about showing that the internet can make jokes. Not just slapping Jordan’s sobbing face orifices on a picture of a Golden State fan after Game 7. The internet can probably do better. Now it’s time to prove it. Zaza being in the All-Star Game isn’t a joke, but it needs to be.

Now, you can make the argument that the joke shouldn’t have happened in the first place, but again: humor is subjective. What makes an All-Star is subjective as well. If you believe in the nature of subjectivity, please tweet “Tobias Harris #NBAVote” over and over again. Thanks.