What happens when we can’t tell the intentionally preposterous from the incidentally ridiculous? Does it mean we’ve reached the end of our rope? When we can’t tell hoaxes from reality, it serves as yet more evidence that we don’t have any solid way to judge.

Most recently from my adopted home state of Wisconsin, we see the hilarious story of Chop & Steele. These two goofs pretended to be innovative fitness instructors. They went on local TV news shows to demonstrate their stupid workouts, including smashing Easter baskets, hitting each other with sticks and racquets, and doing a variety of things with tires. As Steele explained about one maneuver: “This one works your delts, your tris, your plaps.”

Work those plaps.

It was hilarious and obviously ridiculous. But the news shows couldn’t tell. They welcomed Chop & Steele as fitness experts. And now they’re mad. Chop & Steele are being sued for their fakery.

The local TV news shows aren’t the only ones who look idiotic. As SAGLRROILYBYGTH may recall, the academic world was embarrassed by a similarly ridiculous hoax twenty years ago. Professor Alan Sokal at NYU published a garbled nonsense essay in the journal Social Text. As Sokal explained later, his satire was an attempt to prove how ridiculous academic politics had become. The fact that his nonsense essay could be published, Sokal wrote, proved that “some fashionable sectors of the American academic Left have been getting intellectually lazy.”

No one likes to be goofed on. It seems, though, that when satire moves so close to reality, we’ve reached some sort of sad equilibrium.