Colour blindness

[clarnibass]

A question about a new screen brought up the subject of colourblindness so thought I'd post this old story...
I'm wondering if there are any others here who are colour blind? It's weird, supposedly about 8% of males and 4% of the entire world is colourblind... but I barely know of anyone else...

A few decades ago some friends and I went to see the movie Ed Wood when it first came out (not recommended... if I remember).
In one scene, his girlfriend brings two dresses and asks him which should she wear, the blue one or the red one (or two other colours... who can remember).

He thinks for a while and then says... the dark grey one.

The entire audience laughed. I laughed too, but during that this chain of events happened...
I thought, wow, that's a really smart and complicated joke. He is colour blind so didn't know what colours the dresses were. However, he probably wouldn't think either is grey if he was a "regular" colour blind, so they either (option 1) exaggerated his colour blindness for the sake of the joke, or (options 2) they actually meant that he had one of those extreme cases of colour blindness where you don't see colours at all. I have a "regular"colour blindness, I see colours, just can't tell between them many times (depends on the colour).

Not only that, but the even more impressive part was that the entire audience got the joke, even though it wasn't mentioned or even implied before that scene that he was colour blind. Somehow everyone figured it out during the joke. That is very surprising based on my experience and pretty amazing really.

A few days later I found, by complete coincidence, that the entire movie was black and white...

[rjlittlefield]

and then says... the dark grey one.

The entire audience laughed.
...
A few days later I found, by complete coincidence, that the entire movie was black and white...

I read this story late last night. It was the highlight of my day.

I often face questions that have some element of "What does the other person think, and why do they think it?"

So I was primed to follow your line of thinking, right through to the delightful twist at the end.

Thank you!

--Rik

[Troels]

[MarkSturtevant]

That was nicely done! A joke within a joke.