Did you know the first "reply guys" were actually ancient Greek scholars who scribbled jokes in the margins of the Odyssey ? In this episode, host David Carson traces the lineage of the "Scholiast" to prove a wild theory: the comment section is now the true art form, and the content is just a prompt . From a viral video of a deep-sea fish to the rise of Letterboxd, we explore how the audience has seized the means of production—and why the funniest person in the room is usually the anonymous lurker .

You’ll also meet the "Claque," a 19th-century Parisian mob of professional ticklers and weepers hired to save bad plays, and discover the secret of the "Laff Box," a padlocked machine that manufactured the laughter for The Brady Bunch . It’s a history of heckling that connects the dots between Roman soldiers and Reddit trolls, proving that for 2,400 years, the people in the cheap seats have actually been running the show.

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Dumbify celebrates ideas so weird, wrong, or wildly impractical… they just might be brilliant. Hosted by David Carson, a serial entrepreneur behind multiple hundred-million-dollar companies and the go-to secret weapon for companies looking to unlock new markets through unconventional thinking. Dumbify dives into the messy, counter-intuitive side of creativity — the “dumb” ideas that built empires, broke rules, and ended up changing everything.

[upbeat music] I'm sitting on the couch last Tuesday night, and my seventeen-year-old daughter is right next to me. She's got her phone, [chuckles] like six inches away from her face, which is, I guess, the mandated viewing distance for anyone born after two thousand and eight. But she's watching something 'cause I can hear it through the tiny little iPhone speakers, and it's some guy talking about, I don't know what, a fish, something about a fish. And she's not laughing. She looks kinda devastated. She scrolls down, and then her mood just changes suddenly, and the sound that comes out of this child, just like full body, can't breathe, tears running down her face, laughter. The kind of laughter you hear maybe four or five times a year, if you're lucky, out of your kid. The kind of laugh that I've been trying to get out of her since she turned thirteen and decided that everything I do is a federal crime. But naturally, you know, I lean over, and I wanna see what's so funny, and she tilts the phone towards me, and I realize she's not watching the video anymore. She's since scrolled past it, and she's reading the comments. And the video, I guess, was this clip that had gone massively viral. You have probably seen it. It's this deep-sea anglerfish, a black sea devil, I think they call it, and it's filmed swimming near the surface of the coast in Tenerife, which basically, like, never happens 'cause these things live like a mile down in absolute pitch darkness. But this one, this one little fish had drifted up, probably sick, probably dying, and a photographer named David Jara captured it on camera. And this tiny nightmare creature, it just has these fangs. It's just a goofy, weird-looking fish, but it's paddling around in bright, shallow water, probably seeing sunlight for what was almost certainly the first and last time in its life. It died shortly after, and the whole internet got kind of emotional about it. A lonely, deep-sea monster [chuckles] finally reaching the surface, and it killed her. So really genuinely moving stuff. But my daughter, she wasn't crying. She didn't look devastated anymore. She was, she was howling because, well, she was reading the comments, and the comments had turned this tragic nature documentary into the funniest thing she'd seen all week. So as an example, someone wrote: "This is literally my ex. Dangles one nice thing in front of you, then devours you whole." That one comment got forty thousand likes, and someone else just wrote: "My therapist doesn't need to see this," and that somehow had a hundred and twenty thousand likes. I looked at my daughter, she looked at me, and she said something that I haven't been able to stop thinking about. She said, "Dad, nobody watches the video. The video is just kind of the excuse to get to the good part." The good part? She means the comments. And [chuckles] here's what's been keeping me up at night. I think she's right.

I think the most important creative force in modern culture isn't the filmmaker or the musician or the creator or the influencer. It's the anonymous person in the comments who wrote something funnier than the thing they're commenting on. I think this has been true for a lot longer than any of us want to admit. Welcome to Dumbify. I'm your host, David Carson, and today we're going to explore why the person who's never made anything, never shot a video, never written an article, never picked up a guitar, might be the most important creative force alive. We're going to argue that the heckler is a higher art form than the performer, that the peanut gallery is the real gallery, and that twenty-four hundred years of evidence says the anonymous weirdo in your comment section is doing more culturally significant work than you are.

So let's do that. Let's get dumb.

[singing] Dumbify, let your neurons dance. Put your brain in backwards pants. [upbeat music] Genius hides in daft disguise. Brilliance wears those googly eyes, so honk your nose and chase that spark. Dumb is just smart in the dark. Dumbify. Yelling like a goose! It's thinking wrong on purpose with juice. [upbeat music]

Okay, so I guess here's the thing we're told from the moment we can hold a crayon, creators create. Audiences, well, they consume. That's the deal. There's a stage, and there are seats, and the people on the stage are doing the important work, and the people in the seats, well, they should be grateful that they were even invited. The message is always kind of the same. The work is what matters. The audience reaction is kinda secondary. A great film doesn't need the audience's help or approval. A brilliant song doesn't require someone underneath it writing, "This slaps," to achieve its potential. If you work in media, if you're a journalist, a filmmaker, or a professional critic, this hierarchy isn't just something you believe. It's pretty much your identity. [gentle music] You went to school for this. You have a degree. You have a portfolio. You've spent fifteen years developing the taste and judgment to tell the rest of us what's good, what's important, what matters.

So here's today's dumb idea, and [chuckles] I need you to really sit with how offensive this is.... The heckler is the real artist. The content is just raw material, and the person who never creates anything, the anonymous commenter, that lurker who surfaces once a year to drop a one-liner, is the most important person in culture. Now, if you're a creator, I can really feel your blood pressure just kind of rising. You're telling me the person who spent four seconds typing L plus ratio under my video that took forty hours to edit is doing more important cultural work than I am? Yeah, that's exactly what I'm telling you, and I have twenty-four hundred years of evidence. Let me take you to Paris. It's eighteen twenty, and you are a playwright. You've spent months writing your magnum opus. Opening night arrives, the theater is packed, the curtain rises, your actors deliver their lines just, mwah, beautifully, and nobody claps. Not because it's bad, because the audience hasn't been told to clap yet. See, in eighteen twenty, in Paris, there was a man named Satan, who had just opened what might be the most extraordinary business in the history of entertainment. He ran this agency, and his agency supplied just one product: professional audience members for hire on demand. They were called the claque, from the French word claquer, to clap. And by eighteen thirty, the claque wasn't a novelty. It was actually an institution, like every major theater in Paris, apparently, had one, and they were, they were pretty organized, with the kind of precision usually reserved for military operations. Each claque apparently operated under a chef de claque, a leader who surveyed the production and deployed his specialists accordingly. And yes, I said specialists, because these people, well, they, they weren't just people who clapped. They had actual job titles, actual roles, an actual org chart of audience participation. Commissaries memorized the best parts of the play and loudly pointed them out to their neighbors. Think of them as sort of the original, oh, wait for it, comment person. The rieurs were professional laughers, and their job was to laugh loudly at every joke. [laughing] And then there's the chatouilleurs. The ticklers kept the audience in good humor between scenes. The ploureuses, am I pronouncing that right? [chuckles] Were women hired to cry during melodramas, dabbing their eyes with these handkerchiefs so convincingly that the real audience members would start crying, too. And then there's the bissours, and their entire job was to stand up at the end and scream for an encore. So this is an actual professional hierarchy of fake audience reactions that existed for over a century in the cultural capital of the Western world. A literal comment section performing live every single night. But I think this part's kind of more interesting. The chef, the claque, right, the leader, didn't just help shows to succeed. He actually had more power than the director, more power than the actors. The Parisian theater historian, W. Laurent Cristin, documented how these men could make or break careers.

Actors and singers were regularly extorted to, to pay these people, to pay the claque, or your opening night gets booed into oblivion. Apparently, Richard Wagner, one of the most important composers in history, pulled his opera, Tannhäuser, from the Paris stage in eighteen sixty-one because the claque of the Jockey Club destroyed its first three performances. Wagner, defeated by the audience! And I think what sent me down the rabbit hole was that this wasn't even new in the eighteen twenties. It goes back further. It goes all the way back to ancient Athens in the fourth century BC. A playwright named Philemon repeatedly beat the superior playwright, Menander, in comedy competitions at the Theater of Dionysus. Not because his plays were better, but because he packed the audience with his own claqueurs, who swayed the judges. Emperor Nero, never one for subtlety, toured with a claque of five thousand soldiers whose job was to cheer his singing, apparently. [chuckles] Five thousand soldiers! History's first hype squad. For twenty-four hundred years, the smartest people in entertainment have understood something that creators still refuse to accept: the audience isn't watching the show, the audience is the show.

Okay, so now let's go, like, two thousand years ahead in time to the part of the story that I find kind of genuinely haunting. It's the early nineteen fifties. Television is brand new. Comedy shows are trying to figure out a problem. When you watch something funny alone in your living room, it's just kind of less funny. Something's missing. If you're in a theater, a joke lands because three hundred people all laugh together. But on a TV set, it's just you and the cathode ray tube, and a silence that feels deeply personal.

[chuckles] At CBS, there was a sound engineer named Charlie Douglass, and he noticed this, and what Charlie Douglass did was shape American culture more than almost any writer, director, or actor of the twentieth century, and almost nobody knows his name.... But Douglas, who had spent World War II working on naval radar systems, went home after his shifts and started doing something that would sound completely insane to anyone who witnessed it. He'd bring home tapes of TV shows and sit at his kitchen table night after night, poring over the soundtracks. He was listening for one thing: audience laughter. [laughing] He was hunting for the perfect chuckle, the ideal guffaw, the precisely calibrated titter, and he found them. And when he did, he isolated them, and he spliced them onto analog tape reels. And then, because this is a man who worked on radar during the war and was clearly not interested in half measures, he built a machine. He called it the Audience Response Duplicator. Everyone else called it the Laff Box. It kind of looked like a filing cabinet designed by a mad scientist, and it was padlocked shut. Only immediate family members were allowed to see what was inside. A nineteen sixty-six TV Guide article called it, "The most sought after, but well-concealed box in the world." And the journalist wrote that mentioning Charlie Douglas in Hollywood was like Cosa Nostra. Everybody just starts whispering. But inside the box, [laughing] thirty-two tape loops, ten laughs per loop, three hundred and twenty total laughs, ranging from a single person's quiet titter to a full room eruption. And Douglas played it like a musician. [laughing] He was just kind of patching holes, fixing spots where a live studio audience didn't laugh hard enough, or maybe they laughed too long, and they called this sweetening. But by the early 1960s, TV sitcoms stopped filming in front of audiences entirely, and suddenly, Charlie Douglas wasn't sweetening anything. He was creating the entire audience from scratch. Shows like The Munsters, Bewitched, Beverly Hillbillies, Gilligan's Island, The Brady Bunch, The Andy Griffith Show. Every laugh you heard was Charlie Douglas's. That was him sitting in a dark editing room, playing his machine like a pipe organ, manufacturing a community of people who did not exist.

Douglas actually won a lifetime Emmy for technical achievement in nineteen ninety-two. Think about what that means. The Television Academy gave its highest technical honor to a man whose life's work was fabricating audience reactions. [upbeat music] And here's the coda that's almost too perfect. After Douglas died in two thousand and three, his Laff Box ended up in a storage locker, and I guess his family just stopped paying rent to the storage locker place, so the contents got auctioned off, and some guy bought the whole locker for, like, six hundred and fifty bucks, mostly for the washer and the dryer. [chuckles] He almost threw the Laff Box in the trash, but then he, he Googled it and brought it to the Antiques Roadshow, and it was appraised at ten thousand dollars. So the machine that shaped fifty years of American television was almost tossed in a dumpster, which, if you think about it, is exactly what we do to the audience. We treat them like background noise, and then we can't figure out why the show doesn't work without them.

Time for science. Time to get unnecessarily nerdy with it 'cause nerding out is what we do, and we're not going to apologize for it. Get ready for science. Ooh, oh.

A trend research firm called Ok Cool just surveyed twenty-seven hundred people across four different continents about how they consume culture in twenty twenty-five. And the data confirms something that I think we all feel but haven't said out loud yet.

The comment section isn't a reaction to the content anymore. The comment section is content, original, consumable, often better than the content, the original thing that it's attached to. People don't scroll to the comments to find out if the video is any good. They scroll to the comments because that's where all the good stuff is. This is not the clack. This is not a laugh track. This is something genuinely new. The audience hasn't just seized the means of reaction, they've seized the means of production. Ninety-one percent of Ok Cool's respondents lurk in comment sections, but only twenty-nine percent actively participate. Only twenty-nine percent. Ok Cool calls them the real ones, and they aren't just shaping how the other seventy-one percent feel about the content, they're actually creating a parallel entertainment stream that the seventy-one percent actively seek out. The video is just kind of the, the lobby, and the comments are the concert. Sixty-five percent of respondents said anonymous strangers are the funniest people online. Not comedians, not creators with ring lights and editing software and Patreon supporters, anonymous strangers, people with default profile pictures and screen names like, at Film Goblin four twenty. They're not funny in the way a laugh track is funny by signaling, you know, laugh right now. They're funny because they're producing actual jokes, actual observations, actual creative work, but it's all just in the margins. One-third of people under thirty self-describe as

haters, and they don't mean it as a confession. They mean it as a job title, a creative identity. Think about what this actually means. Remember the, the anglerfish video my daughter showed me, the black sea devil dying in the sunlight of Tenerife? The original content was beautiful and sad. This rare creature, surfacing for the first time, experiencing light, and then dying.... That's legitimately poignant, but the comments didn't just react to it, they more or less transformed it into something the creator never even made. Sort of a collective real-time therapy session about toxic relationships. Remember the quote, "This is literally my ex"? That's not a reaction, that's kind of a bit. That's a creative act. That's an original piece of comedy that happens to be stapled to someone else's nature documentary. The video got views, the comments became the reason people sent the link to their friends. It's fan fiction for hot takes, except fan fiction at least acknowledges the source material as the main event, but this is different. The source material is the prompt, the comments are the art, and this keeps happening everywhere you look.

The company Letterboxd, the film logging app that now has over, like, fourteen million users, they don't really sell films, it sells reviews. One-line joke reviews have become so culturally powerful that professional critics have started writing about the Letterboxd reviews instead of writing about the movies. Martin Scorsese joined Letterboxd. The New York Times has profiled its most popular reviewers, and people open the app after seeing a movie, not to rate it, but to read [chuckles] what @filmgoblin420 thought. The commentary isn't enhancing the film, it's kind of replacing the film as the thing you consume. Or there's platforms like Reddit, the platform that was historically unsexy, as OK Cool puts it, is now the fastest growing social media platform in twenty twenty-five. And Reddit has zero creator class, no influencers, no content, just commentary all the way down. This, to me, is the leap. The Claqueurs were the stagehands of audience reaction, where Charlie Douglas was the laugh engineer. But what's happening now is that the audience walked out of the seats, climbed onto the stage, and started performing their own show, and half the original audience turned around in their chairs to watch that instead. The comment section has become the biggest, most fun, most intelligently stimulating part of what we're consuming. It's not a side dish, it's a main course, and it's growing every single day.

Dum, dum, dum, dum, Dumb Word of the Day. Dumb Word of the Day. It's a word, it's dumb. Use responsibly.

[upbeat music] Yes, it's time for my favorite part of the show. It's time for Dumb Word of the Day, and today's dumb word is [harp music] scholiast, spelled S-C-H-O-L-I-A-S-T, scholiast. A scholiast is an ancient commenter who wrote notes in the margins of literary texts. In ancient Greece and Byzantium, these anonymous scholars would take works by Homer, Sophocles, Aristotle, you know, the A-list creators of the ancient world, and they would scribble these notes in the margins, corrections, jokes, observations, little disagreements. Their annotations were called scholia. And here's what's beautiful about this: For many ancient texts, the scholia have turned out to be more historically valuable than the works themselves. Scholars today study the margin notes to understand how audiences actually received and interpreted these texts in real time. The scholiasts were literally the first comment section, anonymous voices in the margins, and their marginal scribbles outlasted empires. We've spent this whole episode talking about how the person in the margins, the commenter, the heckler, the anonymous reactor, does the real cultural work. Well, the scholiasts proved... They proved it two thousand years ago. The original texts were the video, the scholia were the comments, and guess which one scholars are still reading? Let's use it in a sentence.

[harp music] I tried to post a thoughtful Letterboxd review of Oppenheimer, three paragraphs, specific references to Nolan's use of IMAX aspect ratios, but some scholiast named @filmgoblin420 wrote, "Nolan really said, 'Let me cook... a nuclear bomb.'" And got forty-seven thousand likes, while I got two, one of which was my mom. [upbeat music] Okay, [chuckles] so here's your challenge for the week. I'm calling it the margin note experiment. Step one: pick one piece of content this week, a TikTok, an article, a YouTube video, whatever, but don't watch it first. Read the comments first. Before you consume the content, consume the reaction. Notice how it changes your experience. Does the content feel funnier, smarter, worse? Step two: now flip it. Find something you actually liked, a video, a post, a song, and add to it. Not a hot take, not a snark, not first. Actually, try and write the comment that makes the content better than the creator made it. Be the railleurs, be the chateliers, be the Plutus weeping into your handkerchief, if that's your thing. Add something. Step three: send both the original content and your comment to a friend. Ask them which they like more. Bonus points if your comments get more engagement than the original post, and double points if you become someone's reason to scroll to the good part. [upbeat music] And that's our show. Thank you for getting dumb with me today. I'm David Carson. If you want more marginalia-fueled irreverence, subscribe to the Dumbifying newsletter at david-carson.com. And hey, tell your friends, or better yet, tell a stranger in a comment section. They are apparently more influential than you are. Also, I'd love it if you loved this show, to give a comment or a review. Every little bit helps. Till next time, stay curious, stay anonymous, and remember, the person in the peanut gallery was never watching the show, they were making one. [upbeat music]