Official SLP Polling Statement:

They are not funny in the same way that Dave Chappelle, Jerry Seinfeld, Mitch Hedberg, or your favorite Blue Hill Comedian is funny.  

In other words, polls do not derive their humor from writing and performing good jokes.  

Another non-derivative of poll humor is the fact they are sometimes inaccurate, something people (including us) love to point out.  One reason this is not funny is because poll inaccuracy lacks the qualities necessary for good humor. Another reason poll inaccuracy is not funny is because it may not be accurate to say that polls are inaccurate.  

The alleged inaccuracy of polls depends on what they are compared to.  If the comparison is to Election Day results, then sometimes polls are accurate while other times they are not.  If the comparison is to what the guy or gal at the bar would guess the election results to be without the benefit of a poll, then polls are very accurate.  

By polls, we are referring to scientific polls, those with a tested method.  One way to know that such scientific political polls do have some level of accuracy is to compare them to political straw polls or political honor system polls, which are hugely inaccurate for a variety of reasons, including the fact that they are usually completely unscientific, there is no honor in political polling anyway, and probably the most famous straw poll is the Iowa State Fair Straw Poll.  

Yes, the State Fair. Fairs should stick to what they’re good at: accurately telling you who has the most powerful tractor, who has the prettiest pig, and which friend is strangely talented at weird carnival games (which should they beget follow-up inquiry questions like Why are you so good at this? Have you been practicing?, etc.).  Fairs should remind you that cotton candy is amazing, but also incredibly sticky and messy, so that’s why you don’t eat it daily.  Fairs shouldn’t tell you who the next president will be.  

Scientific political polls should, according to pollsters.

But don’t just take their word for it: another way to know that scientific polls have a decent level of accuracy and professionalism is to compare them to some of their biggest critics: the guy or the gal at the bar.  Without the benefit of professional or scientific polls to provide a starting point, the guy or the gal at the bar would guess the winner based upon who their friends are voting for, or by casually, less-than-scientifically polling the other guys and gals at the bar, who may be drinking on Election Day instead of voting anyway.  But if the guy or gal at the bar sees a poll where Politician A is up by 10 points, the bargoer may say, “I think she’ll win, but the margin will be smaller” and might have a chance of being correct (citation: luck).  But without consulting a professional poll first, that same bargoer has virtually no chance of accuracy–-and is thus less accurate than the poll in comparison.     

This is not an altogether different phenomenon from when an NFL fan makes fun of a draft expert with claims that they–-the NFL fan trying to rub off hot wing sauce stains from their shirt–-could develop a more accurate mock draft than the expert.  That may be possible AFTER CONSULTING EXPERT MOCK DRAFTS and then tweaking them a bit.  But if the guy or gal at the bar were just making an NFL mock draft without consulting draft experts, if they were just listing college players in order of how good they thought they were, they would be highly inaccurate–-and might get an employment offer from the Detroit Lions.

In other fields, this practice of taking the work of others and then tweaking it ever so slightly before calling it your own would be known as plagiarism.  Let’s say we took a scientific paper on physics and augmented it by scattering a few Sweet Livin’s throughout.  While it would undoubtedly improve the paper, we could not claim to know more about physics than the authors of the actual paper.  We couldn’t claim to be the sole author.  

Accuracy of polls, like the Sweet Livin’ Theory of Relativity (SLP; Einstein), is all relative–-and not actually funny because there is no humorous aspect in poll accuracy; it simply lacks the extreme attractivity inherent in the Sweet Livin’ Theory of Relativity, a concept quite hard to fully understand and get to know on a deeper level because of its superficial stunning physical aspect.

But back to the boring aspect, the blemish, of this otherwise generally scintillating Statement: polls. They are boring until people react to them. Yes, the humorous aspect of polls is people’s reactions.

In other words, polls don’t make people laugh; people make people laugh.  

Yes, it is finally settled, the previous controversial statement is true.   

But how do people take something so seemingly dry and unfunny as a poll and make it humorous?  

It’s rather simple.  They apply one of the world’s richest, non-GMO ingredients: ridiculousness.  

In this case, the most active ingredient of ridiculousness centers around the idea of “movement” in an ongoing “race.”  Let us say Politician A were “beating” Politician B 48 to 41 percent in a poll and then the next week, in the very same poll, the politicians were even.  Rather than such discrepancy be viewed as a potential mistake in one (or both) of the polls, it is usually reported upon as there being “movement” in the race.  That is, Politician B “caught up” to Politician A because something “happened.”  Pundits then invariably race to figure out what “happened” through “expert analysis” that hopefully gets low ratings because people are doing more important and interesting things with their lives (such as taking a Sweet Livin’ Poll).  

Yes, something may have actually happened in the real world to cause the change in the polls, and so the pundits could be right.  But political pundits, people with boring lives who get their kicks exclusively from politics in instead of sweetlivinproductions.com Rabbit Holes, find it more enjoyable when elections are ongoing super-duper, multi-day ultramarathon “races” (which elections may indeed have some elements of) rather than a singular event, like any normal popular sporting match where the contest occurs on one specific day and the preamble is the days, weeks, or months of practice and preparation (which elections may also have some elements of). 

Both metaphors are imperfect and not great, but because pundits are fixated on the ultramarathon/race metaphor, drooling with lust at every thought of it, they will almost never concede the possibility that the change in polling numbers was due to poll inaccuracy or their simply natural volatility that may lack any direct correlation to a particular event.  Polls, in pundits’ minds, are the scoreboard of the ongoing event with the election results simply being the final score.  

So when a politician exceeds late poll expectations on Election Day with an unexpected victory, does it reflect actual late, last-minute “movement” in a “race” or simply illuminate a more precise actuality of a situation polls could somewhat proximate but never precisely locate?  Has the politician orchestrated a “game-winning drive” in the political version of Tom Brady or Joe Montana running the two-minute drill?  Is such a “comeback” real or an illusion?  

The world will likely never know (unless we’re talking about LL Cool J, then we know it’s not a comeback; he’s been here for years). 

But political pundits “know.”  Likely having never listened to LL Cool J, but evidently having committed intellectual thievery of Tom Smykowski’s  “Jump to the Conclusions” Mat and bastardized it to where pundits only have the calf strength to reach the “comeback” conclusion (the nearest spot on the mat to where contestants start their jump), they rush to assume and label “comebacks” that have may have never been such in reality.  

But never let reality get in the way of good polling analysis story (Twain-ish, Mark-ish).

Because even in the rare moments polls are bothered by reality in the form of election results, they dismiss such reality checks (if it differs from their own self-image) by promoting ageism (so keep poll analysts a safe distance away from Granny & Gramps): “the latest polls were old and left room for sudden ‘movement’ just before Election Day.”  

“But the poll was published two days before the election!” One could protest, probably while wearing a Sweet Livin’ t-shirt they wisely purchased along with some other sweet Sweet Livin’ Merch.

“But the ‘movement’ occurred the eve of the election, we believe.”  

“Ah, but what about this poll,” another might object, likely between sips of delicious coffee kept warm by a Sweet Livin’ mug and pointing to some other poll. “That came out the eve of the election?” 

“Interesting—and I should probably write another poll analysis story about that. Yes, indeed—the ‘movement’ must have occurred on Election Day morning.,” responds the poll analyst, shifting their own position to re-align their idolatry with their idols: the polls.

Yes, sometimes those shifty polls and their backers are mostly just telling us about themselves.  

Of course it is the pundits or pollsters–-envisioning themselves as some sort of noble polling Lorax with less impressive mustaches–-doing the talking rather than the polls themselves.  But because the pundits, pollsters, and polls are so intertwined across the political spectrum, they themselves do not know where one starts and the other stops (citation: polls are inanimate objects and so lack self-awareness; they aren’t even physical objects, actually, and so they really lack self-awareness).  

Yes, where Eisenhower warned of the military industrial complex and academics later cautioned against the prison industrial complex, we are making the public aware of the Polling Industrial Complex, more commonly known as PIC or PICs, like the common complaint about dating profiles after the first meeting in person–-”you look nothing like the PIC”--because the person looked nothing like the Polling Industrial Complex. 

That’s why people say dating is hard nowadays. 

But they should be glad their date looks nothing like the PIC.  As we have outlined, the Polling Industrial Complex is ugly, immoral, and boring.  Pay less attention to PICs and more attention to what the person is like on the inside: their thoughts, ambitions, dreams, vulnerabilities, fears, hopes, perspectives, etc.  PICs can be deceiving because of the “movement,” “comeback,” and other strange filters often used on them.     

But if that is not a real thing in reality, if the Polling Industrial Complex is only something we made up right here in this very moment for the fun of it to fit the needs of this very SLP Polling Statement, that is okay and should not be frowned upon, for we simply want what the political polls have.  

Very little accountability.     

We are not suggesting more accountability here.  This is not a preview of a new Rage Against the Machine (RATM) album drop featuring a potential hit song railing against the horrors of establishment polling.  All raging is different and requires different names and associated acronyms.  Our Raging Against the Polls has turned into a very popular artform you may have heard of called RAP.  Rage Against the Machine is not RAP.  Let’s not confuse the two.   

This is more of a Robin Hood moment.  Stealing from the rich and giving to the poor.  

To be clear, we are not robbing the wealthy of actual coinage: the world has changed dramatically since the times of Friar Tuck and so have its currencies.  But neither are we messing around with the more modern archaic hard currencies like the U.S. dollar, British pound, etc., for everyone seems to like trading new cryptocurrencies.  But these technologically-rooted, CGIish bandwagons are very confusing to jump on.  They require passwords and such.

Conversely, the bandwagons of the 1800s apparently had no security to deter jumpers-on as the band was too busy playing beautiful notes on their bugles.  Such delicious melodies only attracted jumpers-on, bountiful in numbers and diverse in athletic ability because the bandwagons of old were built low to the ground, allowing easy access even to those political pundits of weak calf muscles discussed above who can only reach the “comeback” spot on the Jump to the Conclusions Mat they stole from poor Tom Smykowski.  

So recognizing the accessibility inherent in the antique bandwagon model, the success of political pundits’ intellectual filcher of the “Jump to Conclusions” Mat, and looking to duplicate such exploits (but for the good of humankind), we are intellectually plundering the political pundits’ and their beloved polling by taking the highly fluctuating soft currency of lack of accountability (which our lawyers feel is well within our right to grab, legally, because it is in the public domain) and spreading it, so generously, to the hoi polloi of internet users in efforts to build the biggest, most accessible bandwagon ever that even a great leader like Robin Hood himself would jump on, for he never wanted to held accountable for breaking the law.   

Yes, political polls are a beautiful model (albeit not exactly in the same way an international supermodel is—-and definitely nowhere near up to Sweet Livin’ Supermodel standards) for lack of accountability.   

Afterall, that is the beauty of political polls. 

But there is something much more beautiful in life than political polls.  

Pretty much everything. 

But even in the polling world, there is something much more beautiful than political polls.  

Non-political polls.  

Almost everything is more beautiful outside of politics.  

But that is not the main reason non-political polls are more beautiful than political polls.  

It is the lack of elections.   

For, as mentioned above, elections are the one time political polls must at least sidestep or maneuver around reality because of reality’s inconvenient short Election Day cameo into their world.  Most non-political polls never experience the inconvenience of elections, never really get checked by anything: they are completely immune to reality.  They are Superman without the existence of Kryptonite.  

While political polls have very little accountability, non-political polls usually have no accountability.  

And that is perhaps the sweetest science (definitely more so than boxing with its low fructose levels) of them all: the science that completely lacks oversight and accountability.  

Isn’t that what we all want in life?  

We polled some people, and the answer is yes: that is what we all want in life (any new polling on this question that yields different results will naturally do so because of a shift–-or rather, movement–-in societal values; no need to question our polling methods).  

So, considering all of this, Sweet Livin’ Productions decided to produce what all people want in life: non-political, non-scientific polls.  

So far, according to our polls, people love it.   

With so much division in our world (according to political polls), why not join in on some fun that literally everyone agrees upon (according to our polls)?  You pretty much have to.

And that is why everyone who is not dumb also agrees that Sweet Livin’ Production Polling’s incredible brave action of stealing lack of accountability from the polling elite and distributing lack of accountability generously and indiscriminately among the masses of any class, any walk of life, and any background, is the 21st century version of Robin Hood, allowing each and every one of you to be one of his merry men, women, or children.     

But you don’t have to live in a forest–-and shouldn’t, unless it has reliable internet access so you can vote, repeatedly, in the latest SLP Polls.  

NOTE ABOUT OUR POLLING STATEMENTS

We do not want our statements to encourage people to punch in the face (or any other part of their body) political pollsters if you see them in the street.  If you encounter a political pollster, just ignore them and pretend they don’t exist, like other problems in your life, such as non-Sweet Livin’ bottle openers; only use Sweet Livin’ bottle openers). 

We are a small company with zero-to-modest revenue (depending on the time you are reading these words and if anyone ever makes a purchase from us) and we cannot (yet) afford to have our 2Pac or Eminem moment where we are blamed for inspiring violent acts of others. because we can’t afford defense attorneys. However, we recognize the powerful nature of our words can undoubtedly have extraordinary influence on the youth; we hope to only inspire the next generation in sweetness and promote positive actions, such as constantly voting in our polls, rather than negative actions, like punching.

NO ONE’S PERFECT

If you happen to slip up and actually slip near a political pollster, rather than make contact with their face to break your fall, it is probably better for your elbow to land in their stomach (their fault if they haven’t been doing core work, #personalresposibility) or just have them trip along with you. This leaves less evidence and makes it less likely you will be incriminating yourself; we don’t want you to get in trouble when you are just trying to do the right thing.