Speaking of the ability to create something that simultaneously impresses me with its craftsmanship and with its appearance of spontaneity, take a peek at Monday’s Jon Carroll. Yes, it’s yet another dopey note where a middle-aged computer-illiterate discovers that Microsoft really does produce lousy software. Yes, it’s full of jokes on the topic that must make any Gentle Reader tired, the befuddled middle-aged computer illiterate facing technology he doesn’t understand. And Your Humble Blogger can’t really make the argument that Mr. Carroll makes the whole thing fresh. He doesn’t. It’s a tired idea, and the fact that we’ve read it all before a hundred times can’t help making this time through seem totally unnecessary. But still.
Most computer problems are solved by unplugging the machine and plugging it back in. That makes a computer a lot different from, say, a toaster, which does not respond to unplugging and replugging.
And I do not even really understand toasters.
Now, do we really need another joke about the Magic Reboot? No. But since he’s making it, check out the rhythm here. The paragraph break is essential; try reading it this way:
Most computer problems are solved by unplugging the machine and plugging it back in. That makes a computer a lot different from, say, a toaster, which does not respond to unplugging and replugging, and I do not even really understand toasters.
Does it work? No, it sounds querulous. It sounds like every other befuddled Luddite joke you heard in 2001. It sounds whiny. But by breaking the paragraph there, it’s a joke. It’s a sudden reassessment of his place in the world. His lack of fundamental understanding of toaster technology is changed from a chronic complaint to a sudden paradigm shift. The paragraph break says that he kind of thought he understood toasters, or at least that he had never spent much time thinking he didn’t understand them, and perhaps neither have you, Gentle Reader. I don't mean, by the way, that I would have written it the funny way; I'm only good at seeing those things after they've happened. Usually, it's because somebody's written it the wrong way, and it would have been funnier the other way. One reason I like reading Jon Carroll so much is how rarely that happens.
And another thing: the running gag about condoms. Is it a new idea? No. Does it work here? Yes. Why? I have no idea. Perhaps it’s because the image of “half a condom” is funny, and kind of tragic, too, and Your Humble Blogger hadn’t heard it before. But mostly, I think it works because he gets the rhythm right.
His observations about the Apple stores, also, are not new (by the way, if you have never been in one, you should really seek one out; they are a paradigm shift in themselves) but they manage somehow to combine the sense of the familiar with the sense of the absurd. Perhaps, now that I write that, that’s how I should describe Jon Carroll’s brilliance: he combines the sense of the familiar with the sense of the absurd. Now, that sounds very deep and serious and 1965—“Carroll makes us look at the banal details of everyday life as if we hadn’t seen them before,” he said—but really what I’m getting at is not that he inspires us to reexamine our daily lives, but that he is funny. It’s not that toasters, or Microsoft, or Apple stores are any funnier now than they were before I read the column, it’s that he’s gotten past my weariness with them to make me laugh at them again. That’s all.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.