The Rule of Threes

Something I Should Have Seen Before

Basically, not sure what I’m doing with this, but in my previous story on the Curious Incident involving Jon Stewart’s allegedly dead dog, allegedly named Dipper, I included a section called “The Art of the Callback.” It was all about how they ran the dog joke back for a second round, with John Oliver’s alleged dead dog named Hoagie.

But honestly, they did it a third time. I’m still rewatching videos to get the details here, but this one involved Seth Meyers. Several months after John Oliver’s farewell to Hoagie, Seth Meyers announced that he, too had recently lost a dog, this one named Frisbee.

So really, in the timeline in which that whole thing really was a satirical dig at the lack of fact-checking (a supposition on which we should remain highly skeptical, given the lack of concrete evidence), then it might be the case that they were following a longstanding tradition in comedy: The Rule of Threes.

Yeah, I don’t know what to do with that, and I’ll be back to edit this post, once I get some more thoughts together. But I just wanted to put it out into the ether.

(Also worth noting: when I went down to see the shows, both Oliver and Meyers made references to, including jokes about, their dead dogs. And Kosta made a joke about his dog being terminally ill. Idk what to make of that either. Still treating the dog story as a thought-exercise for now.)