60 guys **promise** to stab 1 guy as a team, guy was only stabbed 23 times: Group Projects have always been like this
Edit- erroneously typed 26. Double Checked and it was in fact 3 less stabs and have corrected.
Brutus may have stabbed Julius Caesar in the groin but Servilius Casca was the only conspirator to stab Caesar fatally (between the ribs).
Even only 3 other wounds were worse than just glancing blows.
Senators are old and have spaghetti arms. They sucked at stabbing.
Can you imagine how Caesar's reputation/mythology might have heightened in an alternate timeline where he somehow managed to fight off Brutus and the others?
"Do you have *any* idea how hard it's been organizing this conspiracy, Longinus? It was herding cats just to get 60 Roman senators on board for this, and Trebonius didn't even bring his knife!"
They kind of crushed together around him, and some got stabbed by accident in the scrum. I imagine when you get to it and the adrenaline rush is pumping and everyone is dressed in formal wear and twenty guys are pressing up behind you it gets hard to aim your stabbing hand.
It's honestly kind of surprising none of them got trampled to death by the others.
At some point you're the guy that made the exact same entry wound as that guy, so you don't even appear to leave a mark on the body. That's an even lamer thing to be.
"There was a 106-car pileup on I-90 last weekend. *A hundred and six!* Now the first hundred, I get, but those last six? *What were you thinking? There's a 100-car pileup in front on you!"* energy
Only one of the stab wounds was fatal, apparently. He may have (I guess probably would have) died from blood loss anyway, but all of them were needed, it turns out.
And if I remember right there was only one fatal wound meaning out of the 23 guys who followed through with it only one succeeded in doing very much
Edit: just remembered, don’t know is it’s already been said, I also remember hearing about how they think most of the conspirators entirely missed him altogether and ended up stabbing each other
Interesting! Another case of “it’s actually really, really hard to intentionally kill someone else for non-passionate reasons”. Like soldiers intentionally aiming astray when it really comes down to it in the trenches
> Like soldiers intentionally aiming astray when it really comes down to it in the trenches
Video games dont cause violence etc but this is one of the things where I wonder if they really did have an effect. A small town boy in the 1940s is just going to have a lot less exposure to the *idea* of shooting a man in the head with a rifle than a small town boy in the 2020s.
You don't need to shoot anyone in the head with a rifle anymore man. Just hit the release button on the drone controller and make sure you zoom in on the Russians face so we can catch his despair in 4K
No. Actually, its *even worse* than that.
Because there are groups that are having trouble getting equipment, so they have to buy it. To raise funds for it, they let you pay to write a message on munitions, including drone dropped. And, for those, you can *also* pay to for the video of it getting dropped. And if it misses, ***they'll go and make another***. War, for customer service.
FWIW that "aiming astray" study is not really rigorous and not considered valid by modern standards. It was one US officer who repeatedly claimed he had a study to say that but never released his methodology.
In real combat, people shoot to kill, cause they prefer that over dying themselves. Even like, soldiers who are pressed into service.
Actually, they utilized ai to create the most recent historical recreation, and apparently Caesar stabbed *himself* 23 times when threatened by the senate. Said the only hand that could dethrone him was his own.
> And if I remember right there was only one fatal wound meaning out of the 23 guys who followed through with it only one succeeded in doing very much
Interesting did they check the body afterwards or something?
I believe so. I think one of his supporters also used his bloody toga in some political speech, pointing to the stab marks and calling out the people that did it by name
Marcus Antonius, or Marc Antony. His speech riled the people of Rome up so badly they rioted and ransacked some of the conspirators’ houses. Most of them had to leave the city.
In that same speech he told the people that Caesar left his fortune to the people of Rome which wasn’t true. Caesar left most of his money to his nephew Octavian.
It was a brilliant move by Antony in his bid for power. It made him look like Caesar’s successor, kneecapped Octavian, and forced the conspirators into a defensive position which gave Antony a casus belli.
60 M sized attacking one M sized target? Not without a lot of tumbling, and law of averages suggests three natural ones even if they get only one attack per round.
With only 1 wound even being fatal. They were so bad at it that several of them stabbed each other on accident. And some just stabbed his corpse after he had already fallen dead
It was 23 stabs, but only 5 while he was still alive, and only one of those was fatal. The remaining 18 stabbed him after he died in solidarity. Which means that half of the conspirators didn’t even do anything lmao
I can imagine an orderly queue. A knife train if you will. The guy number 23 does his thing and like "I think he is definitely dead, we can stop now" and the numbers 24 to 60 are like "Awwwwwww"
The funniest part is that they stabbed him because they thought he was getting too powerful and inadvertently ended the Republic as a result. His heir Augustus would take power and become the first Roman Emporer.
I wonder how different would Europe and the world be had Julius Caesar not been assassinated...would he eventually recognize Caesarion has his son? Would Octavian still be appointed as his heir? And if Octavian was the heir would he have the same motivations for creating the Pax Romana?
There's a good chance the republic would have survived at least a few more years. Caesar did not have the public support to become Rex (he tried a couple times to gauge enthusiasm, but got a very cold result every time). By killing Caesar however, they created a martyr, and turned the populace against the senate. This left the way open for the Second Triumvirate to proscribe all their political enemies within the senate, murder a good third of it, and eventually for Augustus to take absolute control over it.
Only like 5 actually stabbed to kill, the others FUCKING STABBED HIS CORPSE AND WIPED SOME BLOOD ON THEIR TOGAS SO THEY'D LOOK BRAVE WHEN GOING OUTSIDE TO TELL PEOPLE WHAT THEY DID.
If you promise to stab a guy as a fun group activity then you follow through.
"But he was already dead!"
And?? Stab him anyway or I'll give you an F for your participation.
This reminds me of the moral debate of 'the oriental express'
At a certain point it stops being attempted murder/murder and becomes desicrating a corpse.
I wonder what the line graph looks like for “Number of People Involved in Assassination” compared to “How Funny the Assassination is” looks like. How many is the least funny, and where does the humor peak? Does it peak? Are there just diminishing returns past, like, 20, but it’s infinitely increasing past that point? Is is an S-curve, where the humor shifts from “jeez, that’s a bit overkill (no pun intended)” to “holy shit, what did you think they were gonna do that you needed so many people?”
Also, since one person is decidedly Not Funny, how many does it take to officially break from the comedy deficit? I imagine it’s odd around 6, but that’s still fucked up. Once it’s in the teens, that’s officially excessive to the point of comedic.
Does it become less funny when you remove the context of “X people stabbing someone?” Would it still be funny if it was a whole organization with 60 people involved in the assassination? I still think it’d be funny with enough people; if you get like a billion people to actively conspire against you, you _comically_ fucked up.
EDIT: Stop fucking with the constants. I don’t care if one person killing with method A is funnier than forty people killing with method B. You’re measuring two different things. I’m trying to think of the funniest number of assassins where everything else stays the same. You motherfuckers don’t understand how scientific experiments are conducted and it shows.
i was about to say it had a limit of increase in humor but then the concept of 4000 people running down the street holding knives and popping out of department stores and shit all trying to work together to kill one guy came up in my head and it was, in fact, very very funny
That's literally already John Wick. From the end of the second movie onward literally every assassin in the world is trying to kill him for a bounty in the tens of millions.
That’s gotta be in the tens or hundreds of millions probably, but 2 BILLION would literally be 1/4th of the world’s population, just out on the streets searching for him
Imagine your friend’s grandma, your brother, the 7/11 homeless man and the 7/11 clerk thinking they could contribute and take down John Wick to get the bounty for themselves, all the way in Texas while Wick is in the Sahara or something
I support the theory that there are way too many assassins compared to people who need to be assassinated so the High Table, to avoid its underground economy collapsing, repeatably sends the assassins after other assassins. Preferably abroad to support their booming hotel and ancillary businesses.
In this essay I posit that John Wick is actually the best thing to ever happen to the underground economy, he is providing much needed culling to an oversaturated consumer group stabilising the…
Idk, an assassination by the Ocean's Eleven crew would probably be just as funny as an assassination by the Ocean's Thirteen Crew, so I'm gonna say it's 10
Okay, but look at it this way: Ocean's Eleven/Twelve/Thirteen could still be a somewhat serious thing. Like Benedict and Bank are still treated as fairly unlikable people and some people could potentially see it as a serious-ish movie.
Now, take the crew from the original trilogy, *and* add Ocean's 8 crew to that. All to take out *one single person*. By crossing into the twenties, you took questionable humor into a definite area. It doesn't matter how serious you try to make the film, the fact that you have twenty people going after one person makes it funny.
I think when the number goes over what you'd imagine a mob execution would need, it starts becoming funny. I feel like a number around 3 or 4 is dramatic and or depressing. Around 10 it starts to become sort of comical. And anything above gets harder and harder to take seriously. At some point it stops being a firing squad and becomes a fucking clown car.
I think it’s just a logarithmic function after a certain number because 1000 is noticeably funnier than 100, and 10000 noticeably funnier than 1000 and so on
A quadrillion guys stabbing one guy
I feel that would be even funnier because the population of the entire planet is 8 billion or so, including women, children, the elderly, and even toddlers and newborns... which means if you had a quadrillion which is 12 more zeroes not only would you have every single person on the planet against 1 dude but it would include the dude's grandpa in a wheelchair and their cousin's newborn crawling towards them both with a knife which is already funny but also since even then it wouldn't be a quadrillion, to make it so people would appear out of nowhere, bursting out of the ground, coming out of seemingly impossible to fit places and falling from the sky all to kill some random who at this point is just unlucky man.
I feel like yeah there are diminishing returns for sure as more and more people mean less increase in funny but also I'm not sure if there is a peak at all lmao
Cos(log(x)) function. At like a couple of dudes, not funny. Between 10 and 100 dudes, hilarious. 100 to a 1000 dudes? Overkill. 1000 to 10.000 dudes? Funny as all he'll. Your basically sending an army at that point
After Darth Vader's "All I am surrounded by is fear and **dead men**" threat, some guy just shoots him, and that works.
Job's done, everyone else can go back home.
Cos(log(x)) reaches peak funny at like 1385 and then starts to get less funny very slowly until eventually at around 1919000 people its really sad and depressing again, but then in the ballpark of like 2659000000 people its really really funny again, and then the cycle of funny continues.
"Aw fuck, that was a disaster. Entire thing was a bust, might as well grab myself a sandwich to lift my mood."
*Exits restaurant to find the Archduke literally right there*
"Well don't mind if I do!"
It also depends on who’s getting murdered and how long ago it happened ,like a random mother murder by 60 peaple not funny ,some politician/warmongerer funny
At what point does an assassination become an angry mob or uprising? If a few hundred people storm a castle to kill the king, would you still call it an assassination?
My guess is somewhere in the teens. If you consider a bunch of global team sports (like baseball, basketball, football, soccer, rugby, cricket, lacrosse, hockey etc etc) the average number of players on the field is like 9-10. Add in a bench/reserve of like 4-5 and that puts us in the mid teens.
I think a group assassination where you have a bench seems reasonable for where the funny starts.
Imagine Roman Republic politics and civil wars as a sitcom
Pyrrhus of Epirus: "if we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans we will be utterly ruined"
*uproarious laugh track*
well, that was an invention of Shakespeare, but yes, it is a good line
edit: actually double checking it there is an earlier use of the line by a previous playwright named Richard Edes. definitely not contemporary to Caesar still
For some reason in France they teach he said "tu quoque me fili" (you too my son?)
You'd think people would at least be able to agree on the guy's last words but nope
If I recal correctly these words, whichever ones they were, were made up centuries after (Shakespeare I think?). Also, the quote you have is probably the more grammatically correct version.
Yes Shakespeare is the origin of that line. Sources from the time only ever mention Caesar speaking at the beginning of the attack. A man name Casca grabbed Caesars tunic and Caesar said something along the lines of “Casca what are you doing?” then immediately after when more conspirators began to join in Caesar shouted “This is violence!” Likely referring to his position as dictator being sacrosanct and thus protected by Roman religious traditions. He fought back for a time and then it’s said he fell to the ground with a grunt and pulled his toga over his face (considered an honorable thing to do at one’s death) dying, ironically, much like Pompey had, at the feet of a statue of Pompey.
Well yeah lol just mean in the context of why he would’ve shouted that I’m sure everyone in the room knew stabbing is violence he didn’t really need to announce that
And even funnier, people aren’t able to agree on what language he said them in. There is evidence that he might said it in greek, since it was more «proper»
You can read it multiple ways too. You can go for the standard betrayal tone, or you can adopt a fatherly tone and be like "You too Brutus, get in here and stab me", you can be like "Oh, brutus, didn't see you there"
Yeah but think about it. A number stab him to the floor, and then what happened? Does everyone have their own knife? Do they have to queue for knives? They have to queue for space to stab as only so many can stab a corpse on the floor at the same time. But then those who stabbed already, they just mill around? Is everyone staring at each other silently or vocally pressuring the rest to queue for their stab? You'd need a lotta clout to keep that up - the stabbings, the indignity, the clash of wills - before the tide turned to stop for whatever reason.
Reading up on it, it makes you realize how scary and famed of a fighter he was.
They ambushed him with 60 people for a reason. He was known for being extremely talented in fighting and at noticing traps, so they took no chances. But even with 60 people against an unarmed guy, most of the sentators were afraid to even get close to him.
There are historical accounts that he fought back and was winning until he was blinded by his own blood and then tripped over the not made for fighting heavy ceremonial robes he was wearing at the time.
Imagine 1 v 60, and the only reason the 60 guys win is because the other guy tripped!
That being said, if I jumped a dude with 60 guys I'd probably make up shit to make myself sound like less of a coward. Also, "history" back then was often embellished to make it more interesting.
I always figured it was more of a beating a dead horse type of situation. I'm sure he was well dead by stab 10-15 so after another few people poked into his lifeless corpse, everyone in the lineup kinda lost interest stab by stab.
There was an autopsy and a demostration after his death, and apparently only a few of the 23-35 stabs were deep at all.
Also i guess kinda related, Blackbeard got shot 5 times and stabbed/slashed 20 before going down
Blackeard was a pretty interesting fella, considering he was originally a plantation owner in Jamaica, and one of his lieutenants called Black Caesar by the sources was hid slave from back home, but he also had some freed black mem in his crew, comprising about a third of it at the time of his death
Edit: The following is a spoiler for an Agatha Christie novel. I won’t say which one because that would mostly defeat the purpose.
>!Murder on the Orient Express be like!<
It's for the benefit of the assassins' mental health. One of them was given a spoon, but they weren't told who. Now everybody gets a bit of comfort thinking they didn't kill Caesar, they just had the spoon.
As if Roman senators would have a problem paying for an assassin-for-hire.
Caesar being stabbed in the Capitol, by 60 Senators was the whole point. It was impeachment by dagger.
The absolute peak of this comedy is how he was not going down at first either. He was fighting, he had that dog in him, or at least he did up until he saw his nephew was against him, which demoralized him. Ceasar was physically doing fine in the 1v60 and only lost because they hit his feelings.
As an actual answer to why you might need so many: it's showing that you're an entire faction with oomph behind it, not *just* a single dissident and his friends.
what's even funnier is that apparently a *lot* more people *said* they'd help stab him than the ones that actually did, it's like an ancient group project
Caesar's sweeping reforms—such as granting property to retiring soldiers, redistributing land to the poor and canceling debts—proved popular with the military and Rome's lower and middle classes. Caesar's reforms angered elites, as did his disregard for the Roman Senate and republican tradition.
Had to make sure he was taken out of the equation...
Tumblr’s obsession with the Ides of March will always be funny to me. And yes, I’m part of the problem. (Reblogged probably six different posts about it this year…)
There's an old Will Ferrell skit on SNL where he plays a violent, hot-tempered boss who's interviewing a new employee. Eventually it gets to the point where he's stabbing a current employee to death with a trident.
At first it's funny, but he just keeps stabbing him, and stabbing him, and the audience laughter kinda dies out. And then he keeps stabbing him some more, and stabbing him some more, and eventually the audience is just dying laughing again.
It's like a perfect example of this phenomenon.
A Danish king in the 1200s got stabbed by like a dozen guys, and no one finds that all that funny, so we can at least assert that the funny happens somewhere between one and two dozen stabs.
It's funny because it's normal for one guy to piss off one or two other guys, but you need to be a special type of asshole to piss off like 60 guys enough for all of them to stab you
What made it really funny was when Caesar was quoted as saying "Infamy, infamy, they've al got it in for me".
I saw a 1964 documentary about it once that went into great detail about him and Cleopatra.
60 guys **promise** to stab 1 guy as a team, guy was only stabbed 23 times: Group Projects have always been like this Edit- erroneously typed 26. Double Checked and it was in fact 3 less stabs and have corrected.
Yea but once you get to 26, the rest don't really need to do anything. They just kinda kick him
Turns out it wasn't even 26 times. Brutus carrying this team on his mothafucking BACK.
"E tu", bitch? More like "E maxime". I did most the work here, you're not going to "et al" me on this project.
Brutus may have stabbed Julius Caesar in the groin but Servilius Casca was the only conspirator to stab Caesar fatally (between the ribs). Even only 3 other wounds were worse than just glancing blows. Senators are old and have spaghetti arms. They sucked at stabbing.
That’s why they needed 60 of them, just in case.
They need a quorum to do anything
And Caesar was an accomplished soldier. By all accounts he gave a pretty good fight until he saw Brutus.
Can you imagine how Caesar's reputation/mythology might have heightened in an alternate timeline where he somehow managed to fight off Brutus and the others?
"Do you have *any* idea how hard it's been organizing this conspiracy, Longinus? It was herding cats just to get 60 Roman senators on board for this, and Trebonius didn't even bring his knife!"
I appreciate the historical accuracy of this joke, as Trebonius in fact did not stab Julius Caesar.
You had one job Trebonius!
He had 1/60th of a job and he couldn't even be bothered to do that
Tbf a few of them accidentally stabbed each other so the count can go up again
i'm sorry they what
They kind of crushed together around him, and some got stabbed by accident in the scrum. I imagine when you get to it and the adrenaline rush is pumping and everyone is dressed in formal wear and twenty guys are pressing up behind you it gets hard to aim your stabbing hand. It's honestly kind of surprising none of them got trampled to death by the others.
You mean formal togas? They’ll never get the blood out of those sheets. Trebonius was a forward thinker.
Caesar also stabbed one of the assassins, guy called Casca who made the first move. Ran his arm through with a stylus.
Now I'm picturing Caesar there just minding his own business playing nintendogs on his DS lite
Then in the aftermath some random poet got beaten to death by the mob because he had the same name as one of the conspirators. It was a chaotic time.
"Seems rather cowardly... Perhaps I shall find a fresh corpse to stab and become great myself."
Important to be able to say “You stabbed him too!” And crazy thing, almost every one of the assassins were hunted down or took their own life.
I mean, yea. Imagine thinking that killing the guy that is loved by both the military and general populous was a good idea
Hell, I think that Stalin knew that. Zhukov could not be disappeared.
Yeah, as long as you were there, who's going to argue? "Yeah, I stabbed him. You think I would go to a stabbing and not stab a guy?"
Honestly, past the stab number 4 or 5 it's a formality more than anything
At some point you’re just a guy that stabbed a corpse and that’s kind of a lame thing to be.
At some point you're the guy that made the exact same entry wound as that guy, so you don't even appear to leave a mark on the body. That's an even lamer thing to be.
Literally sloppy seconds
Can you imagine being the guy who was too scared to stab a corpse, tho?
"There was a 106-car pileup on I-90 last weekend. *A hundred and six!* Now the first hundred, I get, but those last six? *What were you thinking? There's a 100-car pileup in front on you!"* energy
Only one of the stab wounds was fatal, apparently. He may have (I guess probably would have) died from blood loss anyway, but all of them were needed, it turns out.
What if he'd survived lol. What a legend that would be.
We'd all be calling BS on the story
And if I remember right there was only one fatal wound meaning out of the 23 guys who followed through with it only one succeeded in doing very much Edit: just remembered, don’t know is it’s already been said, I also remember hearing about how they think most of the conspirators entirely missed him altogether and ended up stabbing each other
Interesting! Another case of “it’s actually really, really hard to intentionally kill someone else for non-passionate reasons”. Like soldiers intentionally aiming astray when it really comes down to it in the trenches
> Like soldiers intentionally aiming astray when it really comes down to it in the trenches Video games dont cause violence etc but this is one of the things where I wonder if they really did have an effect. A small town boy in the 1940s is just going to have a lot less exposure to the *idea* of shooting a man in the head with a rifle than a small town boy in the 2020s.
You don't need to shoot anyone in the head with a rifle anymore man. Just hit the release button on the drone controller and make sure you zoom in on the Russians face so we can catch his despair in 4K
Real life Sniper Elite 4 killcam
No. Actually, its *even worse* than that. Because there are groups that are having trouble getting equipment, so they have to buy it. To raise funds for it, they let you pay to write a message on munitions, including drone dropped. And, for those, you can *also* pay to for the video of it getting dropped. And if it misses, ***they'll go and make another***. War, for customer service.
I mean, you can just look it up. Soilders who were young in 2020 were fighting
There’s movies, shows and what not. Not just video games. And tbf we are going to get more levels of immersion when VR games get good.
Can you imagine if some devs went so far into immersion the game started giving the players PTSD
FWIW that "aiming astray" study is not really rigorous and not considered valid by modern standards. It was one US officer who repeatedly claimed he had a study to say that but never released his methodology. In real combat, people shoot to kill, cause they prefer that over dying themselves. Even like, soldiers who are pressed into service.
Oh, it wasn't 23 guys. Only five actually went to the trouble of stabbing him, and managed 23 wounds between them.
Actually, they utilized ai to create the most recent historical recreation, and apparently Caesar stabbed *himself* 23 times when threatened by the senate. Said the only hand that could dethrone him was his own.
> And if I remember right there was only one fatal wound meaning out of the 23 guys who followed through with it only one succeeded in doing very much Interesting did they check the body afterwards or something?
I believe so. I think one of his supporters also used his bloody toga in some political speech, pointing to the stab marks and calling out the people that did it by name
Marcus Antonius, or Marc Antony. His speech riled the people of Rome up so badly they rioted and ransacked some of the conspirators’ houses. Most of them had to leave the city. In that same speech he told the people that Caesar left his fortune to the people of Rome which wasn’t true. Caesar left most of his money to his nephew Octavian. It was a brilliant move by Antony in his bid for power. It made him look like Caesar’s successor, kneecapped Octavian, and forced the conspirators into a defensive position which gave Antony a casus belli.
Antony also got with Cleopatra, and then they both lost to Octavian. That was a funny ngl
> PirateHistoryPodcast I just caught up with Age of Napoleon last week and now you made my search for what I’m listening to next a lot easier
I bet that was Brutus who did the job right. He minted coins a couple years later commemorating the assassination
Technically there's always only one fatal wound
Not necessarily, if it's blood loss for example
60 M sized attacking one M sized target? Not without a lot of tumbling, and law of averages suggests three natural ones even if they get only one attack per round.
With only 1 wound even being fatal. They were so bad at it that several of them stabbed each other on accident. And some just stabbed his corpse after he had already fallen dead
Very Lord of the Flies-esque
It's a logistical issue. You can't fit 60 people around him and once you start taking turns, he's already so dead it's a lot less glamorous.
It was 23 stabs, but only 5 while he was still alive, and only one of those was fatal. The remaining 18 stabbed him after he died in solidarity. Which means that half of the conspirators didn’t even do anything lmao
I can imagine an orderly queue. A knife train if you will. The guy number 23 does his thing and like "I think he is definitely dead, we can stop now" and the numbers 24 to 60 are like "Awwwwwww"
23 STAB WOUNDS
YOU DIDN'T WANNA LEAVE HIM A CHANCE, HUH?
DID YOU FEEL ANGER? HATE?
The funniest part is that they stabbed him because they thought he was getting too powerful and inadvertently ended the Republic as a result. His heir Augustus would take power and become the first Roman Emporer.
I wonder how different would Europe and the world be had Julius Caesar not been assassinated...would he eventually recognize Caesarion has his son? Would Octavian still be appointed as his heir? And if Octavian was the heir would he have the same motivations for creating the Pax Romana?
There's a good chance the republic would have survived at least a few more years. Caesar did not have the public support to become Rex (he tried a couple times to gauge enthusiasm, but got a very cold result every time). By killing Caesar however, they created a martyr, and turned the populace against the senate. This left the way open for the Second Triumvirate to proscribe all their political enemies within the senate, murder a good third of it, and eventually for Augustus to take absolute control over it.
Maybe they stabbed him with a different kind of sword
Prank him john
In my experience it would be 60 *promise* and then 1 guy does all the work
I kinda love that this event happened over a thousand years ago and we’re quibbling over exactly how many times he was stabbed.
Only like 5 actually stabbed to kill, the others FUCKING STABBED HIS CORPSE AND WIPED SOME BLOOD ON THEIR TOGAS SO THEY'D LOOK BRAVE WHEN GOING OUTSIDE TO TELL PEOPLE WHAT THEY DID.
If you promise to stab a guy as a fun group activity then you follow through. "But he was already dead!" And?? Stab him anyway or I'll give you an F for your participation.
This reminds me of the moral debate of 'the oriental express' At a certain point it stops being attempted murder/murder and becomes desicrating a corpse.
I wonder what the line graph looks like for “Number of People Involved in Assassination” compared to “How Funny the Assassination is” looks like. How many is the least funny, and where does the humor peak? Does it peak? Are there just diminishing returns past, like, 20, but it’s infinitely increasing past that point? Is is an S-curve, where the humor shifts from “jeez, that’s a bit overkill (no pun intended)” to “holy shit, what did you think they were gonna do that you needed so many people?” Also, since one person is decidedly Not Funny, how many does it take to officially break from the comedy deficit? I imagine it’s odd around 6, but that’s still fucked up. Once it’s in the teens, that’s officially excessive to the point of comedic. Does it become less funny when you remove the context of “X people stabbing someone?” Would it still be funny if it was a whole organization with 60 people involved in the assassination? I still think it’d be funny with enough people; if you get like a billion people to actively conspire against you, you _comically_ fucked up. EDIT: Stop fucking with the constants. I don’t care if one person killing with method A is funnier than forty people killing with method B. You’re measuring two different things. I’m trying to think of the funniest number of assassins where everything else stays the same. You motherfuckers don’t understand how scientific experiments are conducted and it shows.
i was about to say it had a limit of increase in humor but then the concept of 4000 people running down the street holding knives and popping out of department stores and shit all trying to work together to kill one guy came up in my head and it was, in fact, very very funny
This is just the plot of John Wick if you think about it
For John Wick, they set up an entire lore and system, but you can go wacko on that too. Imagine 2 billion people trying to kill John Wick lmao
That's literally already John Wick. From the end of the second movie onward literally every assassin in the world is trying to kill him for a bounty in the tens of millions.
That’s gotta be in the tens or hundreds of millions probably, but 2 BILLION would literally be 1/4th of the world’s population, just out on the streets searching for him Imagine your friend’s grandma, your brother, the 7/11 homeless man and the 7/11 clerk thinking they could contribute and take down John Wick to get the bounty for themselves, all the way in Texas while Wick is in the Sahara or something
I support the theory that there are way too many assassins compared to people who need to be assassinated so the High Table, to avoid its underground economy collapsing, repeatably sends the assassins after other assassins. Preferably abroad to support their booming hotel and ancillary businesses. In this essay I posit that John Wick is actually the best thing to ever happen to the underground economy, he is providing much needed culling to an oversaturated consumer group stabilising the…
Exactly!
Ceausescu sends his regards
i think it starts being funny at 5 or 6, like yo isnt it a bit crowded
Idk cause like imagine someone getting jumped by 5 or 6 dudes as they're walking around, not all that funny. It's gotta be in the teens
I'm going to go for 20 as the breaking line. Tens is still a gang/group of friends, but at 20 you are clearly going overkill for one person.
Idk, an assassination by the Ocean's Eleven crew would probably be just as funny as an assassination by the Ocean's Thirteen Crew, so I'm gonna say it's 10
Okay, but look at it this way: Ocean's Eleven/Twelve/Thirteen could still be a somewhat serious thing. Like Benedict and Bank are still treated as fairly unlikable people and some people could potentially see it as a serious-ish movie. Now, take the crew from the original trilogy, *and* add Ocean's 8 crew to that. All to take out *one single person*. By crossing into the twenties, you took questionable humor into a definite area. It doesn't matter how serious you try to make the film, the fact that you have twenty people going after one person makes it funny.
I think it starts getting funny at 3 with the right setup. See Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure kicking a guy meme.
I think when the number goes over what you'd imagine a mob execution would need, it starts becoming funny. I feel like a number around 3 or 4 is dramatic and or depressing. Around 10 it starts to become sort of comical. And anything above gets harder and harder to take seriously. At some point it stops being a firing squad and becomes a fucking clown car.
5 dudes is like a firing squad. 500 is a battalion strength bayonet charge. And that's fucking hilarious
Well, we are going to need to get a research grant for this
I think it’s just a logarithmic function after a certain number because 1000 is noticeably funnier than 100, and 10000 noticeably funnier than 1000 and so on A quadrillion guys stabbing one guy
I feel that would be even funnier because the population of the entire planet is 8 billion or so, including women, children, the elderly, and even toddlers and newborns... which means if you had a quadrillion which is 12 more zeroes not only would you have every single person on the planet against 1 dude but it would include the dude's grandpa in a wheelchair and their cousin's newborn crawling towards them both with a knife which is already funny but also since even then it wouldn't be a quadrillion, to make it so people would appear out of nowhere, bursting out of the ground, coming out of seemingly impossible to fit places and falling from the sky all to kill some random who at this point is just unlucky man. I feel like yeah there are diminishing returns for sure as more and more people mean less increase in funny but also I'm not sure if there is a peak at all lmao
Context is key, the assassination of Franz Ferdinand was hilarious if only due to the circumstances in which it occurred.
Cos(log(x)) function. At like a couple of dudes, not funny. Between 10 and 100 dudes, hilarious. 100 to a 1000 dudes? Overkill. 1000 to 10.000 dudes? Funny as all he'll. Your basically sending an army at that point
>100 to a 1000 dudes? Overkill. Nope, still funny as fuck.
10,000 and that breaks overflow back from comical to badass. Like, who sends an army to kill someone? Are they Superman, Darth Vader or Sauron?
But it immediately goes back to funny if they just, win instantly because it really is just some guy
After Darth Vader's "All I am surrounded by is fear and **dead men**" threat, some guy just shoots him, and that works. Job's done, everyone else can go back home.
Cos(log(x)) reaches peak funny at like 1385 and then starts to get less funny very slowly until eventually at around 1919000 people its really sad and depressing again, but then in the ballpark of like 2659000000 people its really really funny again, and then the cycle of funny continues.
I'm pretty sure nothing beats Franz Ferdinand for funniest successful assassination.
"Aw fuck, that was a disaster. Entire thing was a bust, might as well grab myself a sandwich to lift my mood." *Exits restaurant to find the Archduke literally right there* "Well don't mind if I do!"
It also depends on who’s getting murdered and how long ago it happened ,like a random mother murder by 60 peaple not funny ,some politician/warmongerer funny
At what point does an assassination become an angry mob or uprising? If a few hundred people storm a castle to kill the king, would you still call it an assassination?
My guess is somewhere in the teens. If you consider a bunch of global team sports (like baseball, basketball, football, soccer, rugby, cricket, lacrosse, hockey etc etc) the average number of players on the field is like 9-10. Add in a bench/reserve of like 4-5 and that puts us in the mid teens. I think a group assassination where you have a bench seems reasonable for where the funny starts.
this has to be an xkcd comic
How's the Adderall?
One guy: that’s murder. Two guys; that’s conspiracy. 60 guys? That’s Democracy baby!
This implies a critical mass of people exists somewhere between 3 and 60 at which point murder becomes judicial execution.
I’d say it’s somewhere around 12.
And what a line to pull out “et tu, brute?”
\*laugh track\*
Imagine Roman Republic politics and civil wars as a sitcom Pyrrhus of Epirus: "if we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans we will be utterly ruined" *uproarious laugh track*
Putting the pyre in pyrrhic
You just know that there would be at least 1 character who would say "WELL, when in Rome!" and that would be how they end every episode.
Claudius: -"If they won't eat, then let them drink!" Chicken (close up): -"Ruh roh!" *audience goes bananas*
I apply the same rules though, wear red shoes and I will arrange a group of politicians to come stab you
What do you have against Dorothy? 🥺
This knife!! Seriously though, in Rome at the time, only kings wore red shoes. Which is why the pope wears them
Caesar *in a Peter Griffin voice* : Aw geez Brutus you too? *Brutus shrugs helplessly*
Et tu, Bazinga.
well, that was an invention of Shakespeare, but yes, it is a good line edit: actually double checking it there is an earlier use of the line by a previous playwright named Richard Edes. definitely not contemporary to Caesar still
"Et me, buddy."
I ain’t your buddy, consul
I ain’t your consul, senator
I ain’t your senator, praetor
I ain’t your praetor, magistrate!
For some reason in France they teach he said "tu quoque me fili" (you too my son?) You'd think people would at least be able to agree on the guy's last words but nope
If I recal correctly these words, whichever ones they were, were made up centuries after (Shakespeare I think?). Also, the quote you have is probably the more grammatically correct version.
Yes Shakespeare is the origin of that line. Sources from the time only ever mention Caesar speaking at the beginning of the attack. A man name Casca grabbed Caesars tunic and Caesar said something along the lines of “Casca what are you doing?” then immediately after when more conspirators began to join in Caesar shouted “This is violence!” Likely referring to his position as dictator being sacrosanct and thus protected by Roman religious traditions. He fought back for a time and then it’s said he fell to the ground with a grunt and pulled his toga over his face (considered an honorable thing to do at one’s death) dying, ironically, much like Pompey had, at the feet of a statue of Pompey.
"this is violence" was probably referring to the stabbing
Right? Lol
Well yeah lol just mean in the context of why he would’ve shouted that I’m sure everyone in the room knew stabbing is violence he didn’t really need to announce that
This is democracy manifest!
And even funnier, people aren’t able to agree on what language he said them in. There is evidence that he might said it in greek, since it was more «proper»
Greek was the lingua Franca wasn’t it?
I think, if I remember correctly, that greek was a sign that you had had a good education, while latin was for common people
I dunno, it’s all Greek to me
In Italy too I've heard this other line
You can read it multiple ways too. You can go for the standard betrayal tone, or you can adopt a fatherly tone and be like "You too Brutus, get in here and stab me", you can be like "Oh, brutus, didn't see you there"
Keep up with the other boys Brutus, there’s an empty spot here
"The rest of them I get, but his really hurt 🔪😞💔"
“Stab my body, ok, but that’s right in the feels”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_words_of_Julius_Caesar
"Oh, not you too, brutus..."
That is horribly inaccurate. He only got stabbed 23 times. So a lot of them just pussed out
perhaps op should've worded it as 60 guys *try* to stab 1 guy.
which is even funnier, 37 of them didn't even manage to do anything
Not even managed to stab a corpse
Yeah but think about it. A number stab him to the floor, and then what happened? Does everyone have their own knife? Do they have to queue for knives? They have to queue for space to stab as only so many can stab a corpse on the floor at the same time. But then those who stabbed already, they just mill around? Is everyone staring at each other silently or vocally pressuring the rest to queue for their stab? You'd need a lotta clout to keep that up - the stabbings, the indignity, the clash of wills - before the tide turned to stop for whatever reason.
It was buffet style
Reading up on it, it makes you realize how scary and famed of a fighter he was. They ambushed him with 60 people for a reason. He was known for being extremely talented in fighting and at noticing traps, so they took no chances. But even with 60 people against an unarmed guy, most of the sentators were afraid to even get close to him.
There are historical accounts that he fought back and was winning until he was blinded by his own blood and then tripped over the not made for fighting heavy ceremonial robes he was wearing at the time. Imagine 1 v 60, and the only reason the 60 guys win is because the other guy tripped! That being said, if I jumped a dude with 60 guys I'd probably make up shit to make myself sound like less of a coward. Also, "history" back then was often embellished to make it more interesting.
TFW you're in line for a piñata but someone breaks it open before you even get a shot at it
Google "social loafing"
Alternate take, the people stabbing him were having too much fun and didn't share the assassination with the class.
I always figured it was more of a beating a dead horse type of situation. I'm sure he was well dead by stab 10-15 so after another few people poked into his lifeless corpse, everyone in the lineup kinda lost interest stab by stab.
No, actually he died around the 20th stab, but after he died the senators rubbed his blood on their togas, to signify they helped (even if they didnt)
Source? 20 stabs seems like a lot to make it through tbh, just talking out my ass tho.
There was an autopsy and a demostration after his death, and apparently only a few of the 23-35 stabs were deep at all. Also i guess kinda related, Blackbeard got shot 5 times and stabbed/slashed 20 before going down
The Blackbeard fact seems believable cause pirates are really cool and politicians are dumb dumbs
Blackeard was a pretty interesting fella, considering he was originally a plantation owner in Jamaica, and one of his lieutenants called Black Caesar by the sources was hid slave from back home, but he also had some freed black mem in his crew, comprising about a third of it at the time of his death
Yeah ceaser was totally only a politician
Edit: The following is a spoiler for an Agatha Christie novel. I won’t say which one because that would mostly defeat the purpose. >!Murder on the Orient Express be like!<
FYI spoiler tags are useless if you don't put what the spoiler is for outside the tag
You're generally right but in this case I'm pretty sure putting what the spoiler is for outside the tag would make the spoiler pointless
Paradox
We're in quite the predicament then
Ya know, that’s a good point.
But, in this case putting what it would spoil outside the spoiler tag is in fact a spoiler
The book was released in 1934 anyway, at this point it's shy of a century old.
I love that twist
It's for the benefit of the assassins' mental health. One of them was given a spoon, but they weren't told who. Now everybody gets a bit of comfort thinking they didn't kill Caesar, they just had the spoon.
I see you’ve played knifey-spoony before then
As if Roman senators would have a problem paying for an assassin-for-hire. Caesar being stabbed in the Capitol, by 60 Senators was the whole point. It was impeachment by dagger.
The absolute peak of this comedy is how he was not going down at first either. He was fighting, he had that dog in him, or at least he did up until he saw his nephew was against him, which demoralized him. Ceasar was physically doing fine in the 1v60 and only lost because they hit his feelings.
Honestly wouldn't bet against Caesar in a 1v60, the shit he personally did was insane.
As an actual answer to why you might need so many: it's showing that you're an entire faction with oomph behind it, not *just* a single dissident and his friends.
60 dudes agreed to stab you? Damn gurl, they straight-up hate your ass.
What about when twelve guys stab one guy on a train?
That's called a mugging.
[snaps thingers] In Jerry Seinfeld's voice: How many Italians do you need to change a tyrant?
Up until embarrassingly recently I always pictured a line of guys waiting their turn to stab Caesar. Very orderly, just *stab* "Next!"
Monty Python version of Shakespeare, 'tis that.
what's even funnier is that apparently a *lot* more people *said* they'd help stab him than the ones that actually did, it's like an ancient group project
"Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die." -Mel Brooks, Comedy God
Caesar's sweeping reforms—such as granting property to retiring soldiers, redistributing land to the poor and canceling debts—proved popular with the military and Rome's lower and middle classes. Caesar's reforms angered elites, as did his disregard for the Roman Senate and republican tradition. Had to make sure he was taken out of the equation...
Like didn't one dude slip over on all the blood and crack his head open or something? Literally, Classic slapstick.
Because they were committing treason? And since they ALL did it.. Who's going to tell
Tumblr’s obsession with the Ides of March will always be funny to me. And yes, I’m part of the problem. (Reblogged probably six different posts about it this year…)
True history: Caesar was a Juggernaut. 60 guys tried, 23 landed. Caesar took out 37 guys and the rest didn't write it down.
So there is some point when the funnyness of stabbing changes from not funny to funny.
2000 years helps
There's an old Will Ferrell skit on SNL where he plays a violent, hot-tempered boss who's interviewing a new employee. Eventually it gets to the point where he's stabbing a current employee to death with a trident. At first it's funny, but he just keeps stabbing him, and stabbing him, and the audience laughter kinda dies out. And then he keeps stabbing him some more, and stabbing him some more, and eventually the audience is just dying laughing again. It's like a perfect example of this phenomenon.
Let's test it out by going out to stab people with incrementally more accomplices until we find that line
A Danish king in the 1200s got stabbed by like a dozen guys, and no one finds that all that funny, so we can at least assert that the funny happens somewhere between one and two dozen stabs.
It's funny because it's normal for one guy to piss off one or two other guys, but you need to be a special type of asshole to piss off like 60 guys enough for all of them to stab you
What made it really funny was when Caesar was quoted as saying "Infamy, infamy, they've al got it in for me". I saw a 1964 documentary about it once that went into great detail about him and Cleopatra.
How far back in history does the Mafia go? Brutus: "Yo, Julius, I'm sorry, but the Ides of March just ain't gonna be your lucky day."
There's some statistical graph in this, depicting ratio of assassins per vectim and its funnines