*sigh*

[serizawa3000]

 One type of comedy I kind of have difficulty with comes from where the comedian feigns cluelessness about what would seem to be common knowledge. Philomena Cunk might be the pinnacle of this brand of humor. Before Cunk, Mo Rocca did well by it on those VH1 "I Love the 70s/80s/etc." shows. Even the SOL gang on MST3K got into it a bit when (during their Sci-Fi Channel specials) Mike keeps referring to Halloween H2O as "Halloween Water" and Crow MANGLES Djimon Honsou's name into something I won't repeat here. 

So... it exists, and, well... I find it irritating. And I'm trying to figure out whence the pebble in the shoe. 

Part of it is probably that urge to correct a mistake (which SNL touched on in a decades-ago Weekend Update where Jimmy Fallon (I think) bellows "NERD ALERT!" at Tina Fey as she starts correcting him because he was mangling some LOTR-related news). A lot of "I'm right, you're wrong" back-and-forth, as well.

But I find myself thinking about when Jay Leno took over The Tonight Show. One of Jay's segments was "Jaywalking", where Jay would take microphone and camera crew on the street and ask questions of people they met (a tradition as old as television itself at least, and presumably older. Fry and Laurie call this sort of thing "Vox Pops"). Really EASY questions. And four times out of five, the people questioned would get those answers wrong. Some of these people became popular enough to appear repeatedly, eventually at the Tonight Show studio itself to participate in a quiz segment to provide more wrong answers to easy questions... 

It was one of the most depressing things I'd ever seen.