VOA标准英语2012--Artist Gets Laughs by Doing Simple Things the Hard Way

Artist Gets Laughs by Doing Simple Things the Hard Way

It took a complicated series of preposterous¹ and unexpected actions to set up this smashing punch line in a video called The Creamed Egg. Nearly two and a half minutes of mechanical zaniness included balls rolling down troughs, bouncing off the floor, tripping switches, engaging pulleys, lifting cups of water and other surprises along the way.
The Creamed Egg needed six months of trial and error to prepare. It took three days and 200 attempts to film a successful sequence. Above all it took patience, something artist Joseph Herscher describes as a belief in an end goal, in his case - making people laugh.
“And as long as I never let go of it, that vision, and I never stop believing that it’s going to pay off, then I can just keep on working forever," he said. "It’s the trial and error that’s time-consuming. So you know what trial and error means: trial means hope and error means reality.”
Herscher says he has gotten ideas from the drawings of farfetched machines by the late American cartoonist Rube Goldberg, whose name is associated in the United States with preposterous complexity². Herscher turns the implausible into reality, using familiar objects in unfamiliar³ ways. That, he says, makes people think about them not as a means to an end, but rather as potential forms of amusement.
“Parts of our lives are so mechanical that it’s sort of nice to stop and think about these parts and have a bit of fun with them," said Herscher. "I guess because I’ve been making these sorts of things my whole life, I’ve built up a library in my head of everyday objects and what you can do with them.”
And he continues to expand that library, for example, spending time in hardware stores to tinker with objects to learn how they roll, fall or collide.
Herscher earns a living in New York creating cell phone apps. He was born in the city, but raised in New Zealand. He began playing with contraptions at the age of five and says he got his sense of humor from his father. Both parents were performers.
“We’re human beings, we like to play, and I’m trying to inject playfulness into machines again," he said. "And not necessarily just trying to do the job as efficiently⁴ as possible, but actually playing around along the way and doing the job as inefficiently⁵ as possible.”
Joseph Herscher’s latest work, The Page Turner, has gotten more than four and a half million hits on YouTube. And probably even more laughs.

1 preposterous   

adj.荒谬的，可笑的

参考例句：

• The whole idea was preposterous.整个想法都荒唐透顶。
• It would be preposterous to shovel coal with a teaspoon.用茶匙铲煤是荒谬的。

2 complexity   

n.复杂(性)，复杂的事物

参考例句：

• Only now did he understand the full complexity of the problem.直到现在他才明白这一问题的全部复杂性。
• The complexity of the road map puzzled me.错综复杂的公路图把我搞糊涂了。

3 unfamiliar   

adj.陌生的，不熟悉的

参考例句：

• I am unfamiliar with the place and the people here.我在这儿人地生疏。
• The man seemed unfamiliar to me.这人很面生。

4 efficiently   

adv.高效率地，有能力地

参考例句：

• The worker oils the machine to operate it more efficiently.工人给机器上油以使机器运转更有效。
• Local authorities have to learn to allocate resources efficiently.地方政府必须学会有效地分配资源。

5 inefficiently   

adv.无效率地

参考例句：

• The small family farm is steeped in inefficiently and struggles just to survive. 小农场主陷于无效率的境况中，只为生存下去而苦苦挣扎。 来自辞典例句
• You can't afford to run businesses inefficiently in this day and age. 在现今，经营商店无能是不行的。 来自互联网