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Zedaph looked around excitedly at the students gathered in the lecture hall he'd been invited to speak on. Some were spaced out to hell and back. Some were at least trying their best to pay attention. Someone in the back was eating crisps, by the smell of it. The perfect lineup!
As a guest speaker at the Hermit College of Fine Arts (colloquially known as the Craft), which had reportedly gotten its name from a disgraced founder who had fucked off to god knows where, Professor K. Zedaph was honored to have been invited to give a lecture on physics.
The Craft was famous for its physics and mechanics department, in which students had made some truly fantastical devices that could be used for a variety of purposes, most of them incredibly complex and specific as a rule. Zedaph (who usually went by Professor Zed in academic settings) had even tried a few himself. Prestigious!
Today, he was speaking for a small selection of first and second-year students, who had been unfortunate enough to get a 10am class. Writing his name on the whiteboard, Zed turned around and clapped his hands together. "Right! Nice to meet you all! I'm Professor Zedaph, but you can also call me Professor Zed."
One of the students lounging in the front row squinted at the whiteboard and made a valiant effort to sit up straighter. "It says Professor Zee?"
"Oh," said Zed, turning around and adding a quick "ed" to the end of his name. "It's uh, British pronunciation. Sorry about that."
"S'all good," said the student, melting back into the chair. There were only a handful of students in the room, all scattered to the nine winds when it came to seating arrangements. Zedaph smiled brightly at all of them and made sure his glasses were properly adjusted, then put the whiteboard marker back in its place.
"So, I take it you're all physics students," he said. The room collectively muttered noncommital assent, and he nodded. "Good! Now, as it is the end of the semester, what I'm going to be talking about today will be relevant for your classes later in your education." Someone nodded, and he went on. "So try and pay attention for me, won't you?" he asked with a wink. "I know it's 10 in the morning and most of you are dreadfully hungover, I know that look. Don't worry, I won't tell, and I'll try and make this entertaining."
"Now," he said, taking one of those finger-pointed-end-stick thingies from the smartboard behind him and holding it horizontally as he paced, "my major is in physics and my minor is in comedic arts. Over the years, I've worked closely with my coworkers and associates to prove that the two can, in fact, be related."
He could see some of the students sit up straighter, sleepily intrigued. The kid in the front row was looking on with interest, if not giving him their full attention yet.
Someone in the back raised their hand. Zed pointed at them with the pointer thing. "Professor Zee? Are those sheep ears?"
Zed paused a moment, then nodded. "Yes, they are. Yes, they're organic. But that is not relevant, and not why we are here today!" Turning back to the whiteboard, he wrote more words on it and turned back to the students, gesturing backwards with the marker. "Now, is anyone familiar with this term?"
"Rube Goldberg?" asked someone from the middle left of the room. "Isn't that the guy that made a lot of those machines?"
"Correct!" said Zedaph. "I have studied many of his works in my time, and trust me, all of them are as glorious as they are functionally useless." Grabbing the pointer again, he sighed. "Ah, Rube Goldberg devices are beautiful, beautiful things. Some of them- or, the idea of them at least- have even been featured in a very famous cartoon. Any guesses?"
"Uhhh," said another kid, sitting up straighter. (Art major, physics minor? Oh, poor thing.) "Diiiiiiiiisn- no, they wouldn't do that. Uh, no idea."
"Ah, Disney," Zed said, wrinkling his nose. "Ah. Well, you got somewhat close here! The general answer here is Looney Tunes, produced of course by the Warner Brothers. I hope you're all at least somewhat familiar with them, or else this entire lecture will have been for nothing and I'll go home very sad."
"Is that the one with the rabbit?" asked someone else from the back.
"Bingo!" said Zed. "Bugs Bunny! Now, if you wanted a more specific example and one that is more relevant to this lecture, let us take a look at the Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote."
Clicking a button on the remote in his pocket and unfreezing the projector, he unpaused a small clip compilation of the weird and wacky physics in Looney Tunes, 322,083 views, uploaded 8 years ago.
The entire lecture hall, most of them wide awake now, watched the clips intently. Zed, also watching as he sat, pointed his remote to pause the video directly after a character had been squashed flat with a comically oversized hammer and slowly stretched up back to size. "There," he said. "That's what I wanted to get at."
He walked in front of the board, talking much more vigorously now. "You see, the primary force driving the physics in this universe is comedy. Would it be funny if the coyote stayed flat or died? No. That'd just be horribly sad, actually. These short animations are designed to entertain the viewer and make them laugh.
"The other way this sort of thing can be achieved is by purposefully drawn-out machines, or machines that always fail or backfire in one specific way. Take the coyote again, for example: he always falls for his own traps, or they always fail at the exactly wrong time. These shows have one purpose narratively, one point they center around, and that is that the coyote never catches the roadrunner. Ever." Zed took a deep breath, eyes scanning the lecture hall.
"You understand so far?" he asked. Nods from the audience. "Great. Now the second thing I wanted to touch on was Rube Goldberg machines." He walked over to his laptop and switched to another tab, this one a soundless video of a Rube Goldberg machine.
"These things," he said as the video played, "are mainly interesting because they're so enrapturing to watch. Their whole comedic thing is that they take forever to achieve their goal. You don't take the time out of your day to make one of these because they're efficient. You make one because it's funny.
"And that's basically how physics works here," he said, standing up again. "It's very meta and self-aware humor. It KNOWS it's subverting expectations, so it always does that except when it would be funnier to do what would be expected in other places."
A janitor walked into the room, headphones on, mopping quite silently. Zedaph nodded a hello at them and paused a moment in his lecture to take a sip from his water bottle, taking the time to sweep his eyes across the room and across the ceiling.
The ceiling was dark and easily ignored, but Zedaph had set up a small device that reached it to demonstrate for his purposes. Next to him on a small rolling table was a machine covered with a small cloth.
"Now, I've brought with me today a machine to demonstrate my point," he said, pulling the table to him and whipping the cloth off of it with a flourish. On the table sat a strange device in iron and black, as complex as it was utterly incomprehensible to literally anyone who wasn't Zed and the other guy who'd helped built it. "This machine was partially built and designed by my coworker who goes by Tango! He's very talented, and if I'm completely honest, I don't quite understand it myself."
"That doesn't look OSHA-approved," said the kid in the front row, getting a chuckle from the rest of the room.
Zedaph frowned. "Well, that's not an issue," he said quickly, leaning on it. "Now, essentially, what this thing does is it's attached to a string on the ceiling. Through a series of events, a large object gets dropped into the center of the room."
The student leaned back, and the janitor exited the room on the other side.
"Don't worry," said Zed cheerfully. "I know how this works."
Adjusting his stance as he looked at the machine next to him, he continued leaning on the table. "Now, the main point of this lecture-"
Zed seemed to have momentarily forgotten that this was a rolling table, because he suddenly lost his balance and the table rolled quickly in the other direction.
"Oh, shit," someone in the room said. Zed scrambled to the machine on the rolling table and sucessfully grabbed it, but losing his balance in the process and accidentially hitting an extremely conspicuous red button on the side. He looked up slowly in horror at the pistons slowly started cranking and a marble was dropped down the side.
The entire room was silent as the machine rumbled on silently, smoothly. The kid in the front row got out of their seat silently and walked forwards a bit, hesitating, watching from afar.
The marble got to the end of the machine, pulling a string that spun a wooden plank affixed to a nail. It hit an alarm clock, which rang shrilly as it jostled loose from its precarious position on the top of the chute it was attached to and slid down it. Hitting a domino at the end, the line continued uphill.
A cardboard box filled with something heavy fell to the floor, shooting a paperweight upwards. In a perfect arc, it landed in a small bag attached by a horizontal pulley to a length of rope slanting downwards. Nobody in the room, Zedaph included, moved. They were all watching in transfixed horror as the machine continued its machinations.
The paperweight tumbled out of the bag and landed on a button that turned on a bright string of lights hung from the ceiling, revealing a large padlocked safe hanging precariously from a rope.
"Dog," started someone else from the stands.
"No, you're thinking of my OTHER coworker, who has a Master's in theatre production," said Zedaph, who was back on his feet and staring at the machine above. A soda-pop rocket with a razor blade taped to the end zoomed down a Kinex™️ track and severed the rope, dropping the safe down onto the student who had been previously sitting in the front row and now realized too late that they were right under the firing line.
Zedaph covered his face with his hands as it made a loud crash and peeked through his fingers. He hadn't heard the noise of any bones getting crushed or whatever, which was good. The safe was empty, so theoretically...
He crept over to it and tried to pull it upright. Someone else walked over and helped, and together they very clunkily rolled (well, as much as you can roll a square) the safe off of the victim.
Underneath, instead of being a horrible mess of bones and blood and whatever squished people looked like (Zedaph didn't want to quite think about it), they were instead spread perfectly flat on the floor faceup in a spread-eagle pose. Their eyes blinked twice, and Zedaph breathed a sigh of relief.
"Dude," said the kid who had helped, kneeling down. "What kind of Looney Tunes shit is this?"
"They'll be fine," said Zedaph. "See, this is a common animation trope. Someone gets squashed flat by a heavy object and then they're fine. In fact, I'd be more worried if they weren't pancake-shaped right now."
"Right," said the student slowly. "Uh- Professor, shouldn't someone be calling 911 right now?"
Someone took out their phone, and Zed gestured hurriedly at them. "No, no need," he said hurriedly. "See, I've got it." Gently taken one of the flattened student's hands and peeling it off of the floor, he was relieved to find it pop back to shape. "Someone help them sit up."
As they sat up, they coughed twice and rubbed their eyes.
"You alright there?" asked Zedaph.
The kid looked at him, then the ceiling, then scooted away from the safe on the floor. "I mean, I FEEL fine, but- did that thing fucking fall on me?? Dude. I don't think my insurance is gonna cover that."
"Well, thankfully, it shouldn't have to," said Zedaph, standing up quickly. "Someone go get them a water, please."
"Where are you going?" someone asked.
"I, uh, just remembered that I left my lunch in the car," said Zedaph, who had actually just realized that squishing someone flat into a pancake with a safe probably went against campus code, even if they WERE fine. And also the law. "Good luck! Thank you! Sorry! Bye!"
Zedaph shut the door behind him and broke into a half-sprint down the hallway, taking two extremely wrong left turns before backtracking and finding his way into the reception area. The person at the front desk looked up as he ran in.
"Oh, Professor Zed," they said in surprise. "Ended your lecture early?"
"Yeah," said Zedaph awkwardly, adjusting his tie with a strained grin. "They uh, picked up the content way faster than I'd intended so I figured I'd just leave it there since I'm uh, really hungry. Yeah. I'm hungry and forgot my lunch at home and need to go pick it up."
"Oh, no," said the person sympathetically. "Well, hope you get your food soon!"
"Thanks," said Zed. "You don't need to check on them, by the way. Super well-behaved class. They're taking notes."
"Alright," said the person at the front desk, sounding slightly concerned and even more slightly suspicious, but at that point Zedaph was already out the door and sprinting as fast as his sheepy legs would take him. He practically crashed into the front seat, booted the ignition, and backed out of the parking spot as fast as he could.
Plugging his phone in, he quickly called Tango, drumming his fingers on the wheel anxiously as he waited for his friend to pick up. He had just gotten out of the parking lot when Tango finally responded.
"Hey, buddy," he said cheerfully. "Caught me on the tail end of my rough break. What's up? How did it go?"
"Tango, I squashed a 22-year-old with a safe," said Zedaph, entirely dead fucking seriously.
There was a pause on the other end of the line. "What." It wasn't a question.
"I accidentally turned the thing on," said Zedaph, his voice cartwheeling into hysterics. "We all just stood there and watched it go- it was really hypnotizing- you did a great job on it, by the way."
"Oh, thank you," said Tango. His voice dropped as he hissed into the phone. "Dude, you're gonna be on the run from the police! You KNOW I'm keeping my guard low after last month! I can't bail you out!"
"It's not like I killed them," said Zedaph. "I mean, come on. They were just flat for a bit. Then they were fine."
"Dude, you're fucked."
"I know," said Zed, putting his head down on his wheel as he waited for a light to turn green. "Oh my god. Well, at least it proved my seminar correct."
"They're gonna have an awesome story to tell at parties," said Tango with a wistful sigh.
"Yeah," said Zed. "Oh well. I'll go home and eat lunch and then cry for an hour and never show my face there again. You know how it is. I'll be fine."
"Zed, buddy, you are not going to be fine."
"Shh. I'm going through the five stages of grief. You can't interrupt me."
The light turned green, and Zedaph cheerfully hung up. He'd be fine! Everything would be fine.