@marick With not a very good prompt (by the way, your essay prompt was quite good), this didn't strike me as funny, but sort of see it.

Write a 2-3 paragraph prose that demonstrates the use of internal allusion, as is done with comedy. Please include something about a 3 legged stool.

The argument had three legs, he always said — logic, evidence, and the charity to assume your opponent isn't an idiot — and without any one of them the whole thing tips over and lands you face-first in the mud of your own certainty. He'd learned this the hard way, mid-debate, sophomore year, when he dismantled a classmate's position so thoroughly that the room went quiet in the particular way rooms go quiet when something living has just been killed. He won. He also ate lunch alone for a month.

The stool metaphor came from his grandfather, who'd used it to describe marriages, businesses, and once, memorably, a soufflé. The old man had a gift for the kind of wisdom that sounded like a fortune cookie until you were forty and suddenly understood that he'd been describing your entire life to you in advance, and you'd just been nodding and passing the potatoes. The grandfather was gone now. The soufflé had fallen. The marriage, remarkably, had held — though it leaned, the way a three-legged stool leans when one leg is shorter, which is to say: it holds, but you always know it holds.

How does the callback work and why is it comedic?

The callback is the soufflé. It's introduced mid-paragraph as a throwaway item in a list — marriages, businesses, soufflé — the third element placed there specifically because it doesn't belong. That incongruity is the first joke, but it's minor, almost ambient.

The payoff comes in the final paragraph when "the soufflé had fallen" is delivered with the same grammatical weight and emotional register as "the grandfather was gone." A death and a collapsed egg dish receive identical syntactic treatment. The comedy lives entirely in that equivalence — the sentence refuses to acknowledge any difference in scale between the two losses, which forces the reader to confront the absurdity themselves. The humor is generated by omission: no wink, no qualification, no signal that the writer noticed what they did.

The callback also compresses time. The grandfather is eulogized in one clause and immediately followed by his soufflé's fate, as though the narrative is settling an estate and listing assets. This mirrors how grief and memory actually function — the trivial detail survives alongside the profound one, often with equal vividness — so the joke has a secondary layer that isn't purely comedic. It's funny because it's structurally absurd. It lands because it's emotionally true. That overlap is where internal allusion does its specific work, distinct from a standalone joke: the earlier planting makes the return feel inevitable rather than inserted.

@marick My mental model of how LLMs work, specifically chat LLMs, is imagine that they are really good at diagramming sentences. And they have a training corpus of state_(n-1) and state_n pairs of diagrammed sentences, then they can make correlations between parts of the diagrammed sentences in each state, and those are the LLM weights. In other words, LLMs are weighted pattern matching (the sentence diagramming part) and use correlation to predict the next pattern. With large attention windows, this correlation takes on a bit of a conditional probability chain dynamic that captures some sequencing, some priors, etc to make the final prediction. In other words, when one is using LLM chat, the entire conversation is resubmitted as a prompt to a dumb machine for the next response. There is no intermediate/dynamic memory that is being nudged or anything resident for the "session".

With that framing in mind, then I think if the prompt specifies a specific pattern (callback method/style), there is a reasonable chance that it will be applied. But if there is no specific request for a pattern, it will be based on whatever latent patterns that existed in the corpus. People are hell bent on adding more "smarts" to LLMs, they will change/improve over time, and that will be a different machine than the one we have today.

My personal opinion is that LLMs are another tool and one should really understand their current utility and that means that one has to spend some time with it, much like any other tool/compiler/language/etc.

I've found I use LLMs primarily as search, eg give me code to do a binary search or something...but the other way I use them is "I'm struggling with X, what are 5 questions I should be asking that I'm not thinking of?" And then use that to build off. Any often, starting a new session with where I've gotten too, rather than all the baggage to clutter up the attention window, can make the results much more applicable.