Fiction can only be so strange because, as fiction, it quickly loses credibility if it gets too strange. The audience loses the willingness to suspend disbelief. When truth is strange it is truly strange.
Of course truth is strange only by accident. So truth will be less strange on average than fiction because fiction is intentionally strange. But measured by their peaks, truth will be stranger than fiction.
Cheap Talk 
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October 25, 2010 at 12:24 am
Ryan
Do you mean “suspend” disbelief?
October 25, 2010 at 8:47 am
jeff
Yes. Fixed thanks. (late night)
October 25, 2010 at 12:37 am
twicker
I think it may be more about how we perceive the expected strangeness of truth v. the expected strangeness of fiction.
For examples of fiction being stranger than truth, see:
+ Charles Lutwidge Dodgson’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (both the book and the movie — for example, what part of truth would be much stranger than a frumious bandersnatch — or the Jabberwocky itself?)
+ Terry Gilliam’s movie Brazil (truly, wonderfully bizarre)
+ Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (well, Tim Burton’s anything, really)
+ The movie “Big Fish”, based on the novel by Daniel Wallace (and with more Tim Burton)
+ Anything written by Hunter S. Thompson
We can expect fiction to be strange — so, when it lives up to our expectations of strangeness (e.g., floating mountains in Avatar), well — that’s just a part of suspension of disbelief. We don’t expect that we may have to suspend disbelief for reality — so, when we *do* have to suspend it, it strikes us as very, VERY strange. Thus (at least IMHO), it’s the difference between the peaks and the expectations that suggest that truth is stranger than fiction.
October 25, 2010 at 7:38 am
Andy
At what percentile do they meet?