Protocol comedy seems to happen when someone assumes a particular protocol to be a closed system that does not interact with the messiness of the real world. Such as the car rental episode from Seinfeld: > Jerry: But the reservation keeps the car here! That’s why you have the reservations. > Clerk: I know why we have reservations. > Jerry: I don’t think you do. If you did, I’d have a car. See, you know how to take the reservation, you just don’t know how to hold the reservation. And that’s really the most important part of the reservation
Other examples are Jeeves and Wooster by PG Wodehouse where Wooster assumes a certain power dynamic to exist between him and Jeeves because of social protocol but it does not. Nathan Fielder takes this idea of assumption of protocol to the logical extreme in The Rehearsal.
Great principle. They say comedy is tragedy plus time. In the same spirit maybe protocol humor is failure plus expectation of closure.
In the rental example you could interpret it as Jerry being clueless about the system trade offs (reservation being a probabilistic outcome of a tradeoff between overbooking level and fleet utilization). But you could also treat it as him being sophisticated about a disingenuous UX gambling on customer dissatisfaction being a tolerable cost and exploiting the human meaning of a word like “reservation.”
But mostly it’s the former. Humans perversely misunderstand complex systems and have unreasonable expectations based on the dynamics of their smaller-scale personal experiences. If you have 1 car, not using it most of the time is fine. If you have thousands and are trying to rent them out profitably it’s not.
Customers would not be willing to pay the rental cost of guaranteed reservations.
The master-servant improv game feels like first principles for failure plus expectation of closure for a (social) protocol
Humans perversely misunderstand complex systems and have unreasonable expectations based on the dynamics of their smaller-scale personal experiences.
: Feel like this is what lot of people refer to as enshittification