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I must confess that I was a little put off by the request. Did the editors see me as some sort of technological court jester? Am I funny like a clown? Is that what they're saying?
The invitation suggested to me that my strategy to position myself as a serious, ultra-competent technological guru needs a little work.
But this isn't about me. It's about how a major area of our cultural life -- computers and such -- fits into our view of the world.
When I think of computer humor, I instinctively think of magazine cartoons from the 1960s, in which a white-coated technician gets a funny printout from a mainframe. The joke is that the computer never seems to accept its role as servant. It wants to rule, or worse, be loved.
Sad to say, I think I only know one funny computer joke. Ahem:
Q. What is the difference between a used car salesperson and a computer salesperson?
A. The car salesperson knows he's lying.
Why is this the only one? What topic better illustrates the profound shift we are experiencing in our society? It was obviously a topic better minds than mine have already considered. I decided to research the topic.
I TELNETed area public libraries and looked up "computer humor," "computer jokes," and "technology rib-ticklers" in their keyword databases. And got nothing.
I tried the Library of Congress, and was luckier. There is a book called Computer Humor, by Donald D. Spencer, Camelot Publishing, 1994 -- 96 pages, with 26 illustrations. Sounds like an update of my old mainframe cartoons. And this intriguing entry: A Gep Is Ember (The Computer Is Human), a compendium of winning entries in the Hungarian-based International Competition for Cartoons, published in Budapest by Neumann Jan Szamitogeptudomanyi Tarsasag, 1988.
I tried another tack, pulling a score of regular joke books from the shelves and looking up computers, technology, etc. in the indexes. I was indignant to find only about eleven jokes in over 5,000 pages. And the level of humor in these eleven was -- well, read and weep:
The company I work for is so stressful even the computer has an ulcer.
Our computer is down so often it has canvas burns.
This would never do. Another possibility was the "Abort, Retry, Fail?" feature on the last page of every issue of PC Magazine. But this isn't really humor. It's mostly a collection of ads and headlines that show that the paste-up artist didn't know how a mouse is used or a copywriter didn't understand terminology. Basically, the section laughs at stupid users.
When all else fails, where must one look? The Internet, of course. I hopped onto my hodad and skimmed the World Wide Web. Sure enough, there were tons of humorous home pages, funny quotations, spoofs, puns and vignettes.
Problem was, it was all techie humor -- you have to be an adept to get the jokes. Hundreds of Pentium jokes, hackers' daffynitions, "Bill-Gates-Goes-to-Hell" fables, hilarious error messages ("The nanobites are in full-scale rebellion!") and even more hilarious acronyms (MACINTOSH: Machine Always Crashes; If Not, The Operating System Hangs).
This stuff has its moments, but it is mostly only funny to the initiated few. If you stop and ask yourself, "Would Dickie Flatts or any average person laugh at this material?" The answer is a very sober, very emphatic no.
Which gets us to the very heart of the computer humor predicament. Technology, unlike other topics, is not a universally shared thing. If a big fat banker slips on a banana peel, everyone, except a small but robust handful in the financial community, will bust out laughing. You've got a banker, a banana, and a behind -- it can't miss.
But in the world of technology, it's never certain who the bad guy is (after Bill Gates, that is), or whether the banana peel is his nemesis or ours.
Techies making fun of dumb innocent users is funny in a bitter sort of way to the techies. It draws on all their pain and unappreciated expertise. But it leaves the rest of us cold.
Making fun of some doc-writing devil in Rangoon experimenting with the English language lets us express our frustration with bad documentation. It's cathartic. But it isn't especially funny, and an unattractive chauvinism seeps through.
It seems to me that good humor engages pain, and the best humor reflects back on oneself. The people of the Soviet Union had a great genius for expressing their frustrations with their system in humor -- they even had to stand in line to shoot Gorbachev, remember?
Wouldn't it be great if we could transmute our frustrations and resentments with our machines into that kind of earthy, robust belly-laughing humor?
Or is that an impossibility in a society too split between winners and losers, and too hemmed in by political correctness to thumb our noses at a blinking box?
OK, try this one. A rabbi, an elephant, and a UNIX programmer walk into a bar ...