HogansHero said: "hork said: "Usually you're a voice of reason on here, but that analogy is so nonsensical I don't even know how to argue against it. But mostly I'm baffled that you call this thread stupid because not enough people have seen enough musicals that are worse than horrible. What's worse than horrible? And how many is enough? Enough for what? I'm so confused.
I don't agree that you need to see a lot of dreck to understand a discipline. You don't need to watch Uwe Boll movies to understand film, and I have a pretty solid understanding of literature without having read 50 Shades of Gray. Are you really taking people to task for having missed Carrie, or whatever?"
You are connecting some dots that I wasn't connecting (or at least not intending to). I called the thread stupid because it has no purpose other than as another invitation for people to remind us what they don't like. (E.g., After Eight) The comment about not having seen enough bad theatre was intended to highlight the silliness of the thread, by mocking it. If you make a list of shows people have called "the worst," most of them are shows that a lot of people liked. So what meaning are we to attach to their dislike of them that warrants bandwidth on the internet? My comment was focused on how ridiculous the lists are because they suggest the writer's sample size renders their opinion meaningless. (If you grow up in Paris, your idea of what bad food is will likely be skewed. If you grew up rich, your notion of what's hard up is likely wrong. etc etc) People are free to dislike (to pick the example that probably caused the most reaction) Fun Home, but when you pretend to have something meaningful to say and then say that, you come off as ignorant (i.e., you must not know what bad is in any meaningful sense-which was my point). Finally, without regard to whether you can understand a discipline based only on the good stuff, I think you will agree that the subject here is evaluating what's "worst" within a discipline, and that should assume that you have a certain breadth of knowledge of the dreck. But when all you can come up with as bad are things that won a bunch of awards, it tells me your frame of reference is flawed. The bottom line is: this is a dumb thread rendered even dumber by the responses.
But no one is claiming that these are the worst musicals ever written, or even necessarily bad musicals. The title of the thread is "worst musicals you've ever seen." Which people are naming. The "meaning" is exactly that, and it has exactly as much value as one's interest in the answers. Maybe some people are fortunate enough to have never seen a truly bad musical. No one is evaluating anything, they're just answering a simple survey question.