Don’t miss this can’t-possibly-be-real-except-it-is footage of a Cornell professor losing his shit in the middle of a lecture after a rude student interruption—by which I mean, umm, a yawn. Some details, via friends at IvyGate:
A month ago today, Mark Talbert, a senior lecturer in Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration, wigged out at a phantom yawner in his 11:40 am HADM 1174: Business Computing lecture. Someone yawned. He was all like “RAWR WHO YAWNED BLAAHGHGGHGHGHHGHG!” and everyone was a little taken aback and confused. And that should have been that.
Unfortunately for Talbert, the Hotel school was recording the lecture for posterity and posted it online. It was only a short step from the Cornell Web site to YouTube.
Really, though, it’s hard to do justice to the professor’s scathing, impassioned tirade against yawning:
“If I hear one more of these overly loud yawns . . . Get up and walk the hell out! Yawn outside!” says an irate Talbert. “Stay outta class, whatever it is you need to do to get over it, I wanna know why 220 other people don’t find the need to do that. And you should be asking yourself, why am I the one loser who has to do that?”
Here’s the video, but click past the jump for Talbert’s follow-up, and a classy autotune rendition of the freak-out, courtesy of a Cornell frosh.
After video footage of the incident spread around Cornell’s campus and beyond, Talbert spoke to Cornell’s school paper and held his ground:
It wasn’t a yawn, it was a loud yawning sound, you know, like when somebody wants to put out the message to the auditorium that he’s bored. Everybody’s yawning, including me; it wasn’t a “yawn,” it was somebody making an intentional loud bored noise week after week after week. It’s like, look, you don’t have to come if it bothers you. . . . It was someone systematically interrupting my class for six weeks, and finally pushed my buttons.
But really, if the classic Bed Intruder Song has taught us anything, it’s that it’s not a proper meme until someone with way too much free time sets it to autotune. Thanks, anonymous Cornell hotelie. We needed this:
As the author of the autotune remix I would like to say that I made it in 15 minutes, with no expectation that it would spread beyond the 3 friends that I sent it to…so I don’t have too much free time on my hands haha.
A KILOBYTE!
of Verbal Air
A KILOBYTE!
*yawn*.
Did he really solicit an anonymous denunciation? Has he heard of Stalin?
while the tirade might have been unprofessional, i agree that pronouncedly yawning in that manner on a weekly basis is quite rude. the prof should have addressed it in a more collected manner, though