"Which One of You Is the Twelve-Year-Old Boy?": Children's Humour, Wittgensteinian Jokes, and the Sack Lunch Bunch
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article reads the comedic after-school special John Mulaney & the Sack Lunch Bunch (Netflix 2019) alongside philosophical accounts of humour, comedy, and laughter—collectively, Humour—and elaborates upon how Sack Lunch repurposes the conceptual binary of adult and child, neither reinforcing nor denying its formative role in the relationship between people of diverse ages. Interpreted as what Ludwig Wittgenstein called a grammatical investigation (or a study of how language is used), Sack Lunch inhabits the ambiguous and artificial boundary between child and adult to trouble an overly familiar picture of growing up. In showing how children's and adults' Humour is alike in showing what is funny, or off, in our world, Sack Lunch is a non-instrumental example of Humour as a pedagogical resource. Because it exposes the sedimented conceptions underlying how intergenerational social relationships perpetuate socio-political injustices, children's Humour in particular warrants further attention by philosophers of humour.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".