Google today’s topic—what makes science fiction funny?—and you might get a series of Captain Kirk jokes (don’t recommend: they have punchlines like “the final front-Ear”) or stumble on this limerick:

There was a young lady named Bright

Whose speed was far faster than light;

She set out one day,

In a relative way

And returned on the previous night.

What a relief to turn instead to Benjamin Mangrum, who joined Recall This Book to discuss his charming and witty second book, The Comedy of Computation: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence. Mangrum is an MIT Professor of literature, whose first book in 2018 was Land of Tomorrow: Post-War Fiction and the Crisis of American Liberalism. A longer version of this conversation was broadcast on the podcast Recall This Book, a Public Books partner. You can listen here or subscribe to Recall This Book on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

---

John Plotz (JP): The role that comedy and satire play in science fiction is one we both find fascinating, so I have a million questions about your terrific new book. Can you start from the beginning: How did you come to write The Comedy of Computation?

Benjamin Mangrum (BM): The book is a cultural history of the computer. I had studied technical and business histories of the computer for some other research. But those histories were unfamiliar with or unaware of the many cultural manifestations of computing technology, and the way culture interacts with computing.

As I was thinking about the cultural history of the computer, I came across a 1955 Broadway play that I had not previously encountered: The Desk Set by William Marchant. It was surprising to me that the computer’s first appearance on Broadway was in a romantic comedy, a genre that is in some ways at odds with some of our anxieties about computing.

This set me toward the pervasive and also understudied intersection between comedy and computing in the computer’s cultural history. The book is an attempt to think about how comedy has shaped public attitudes and private perceptions about computing and how comedy has been a genre for our experience of the technology.

JP: Your book begins in the 20th century and brings us through this mid-20th century set of concerns. But you’re also clearly interested in contemporary human knowledge work.

You write about the intriguing idea that human knowledge work is our definitive feature, and yet the machines we ourselves made are going to replace us at it. Today, we have AI as a locus for that angst. But your point is that there’s a deeper set of concerns here. If the robot is the replacement of the human as maker or worker, then the computer is the replacement of the human as knowledge worker, which is its own sociological category.

BM: My key subtitle term, obsolescence, pertains to a specific class of worker, the knowledge worker. In the computer’s social and cultural history, knowledge workers have been anxious about the ways their expertise, their professional judgment, and their knowledge is threatened by automated computing.

That’s an ongoing story from the mid-1940s to the present moment. There are different kinds of technological threats to knowledge work. Comedy has provided a kind of toolbox for managing those anxieties or responding to those anxieties about the obsolescence of the knowledge worker.

I have a pragmatic approach to comedy or the comic. I analyze its usages, not a set structure. I don’t always distinguish between bleak satire and an upbeat, happy ending.

JP: I like your point about comedy being a generic affordance that allows us to cope with that anxiety. We live in an era with TV shows like Black Mirror in which the horror is manifested as satire, sure, but satirical in a not-funny-at-all way. How do you think about the category of comedy in relationship to that? Are you for instance thinking about Shakespearean comedy, the sort of aesthetic space that provides couplings—a heteronormative resolution, an All’s Well that Ends Well—along with a happy, upbeat feeling at the end?

BM: I have a pragmatic approach to comedy or the comic. I analyze its usages, not a set structure. I don’t always distinguish between bleak satire and an upbeat, happy ending, if there are similarities in function, or similarities in form and structure between those two things. I anticipate criticism of that approach!

JP: I appreciate your point that the buckets overflow; I think you’re right to see bleakness and happiness as making use of the same cultural repertoires. Can I pick up on a crucial word you used? Coupling. That’s a romantic comedy word in ways that we all recognize from Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s the pachinko machine of comedy, that you can put heterogenous units together to form heterosexual pairs.

And I hear you saying that the coupling impulse, when the plot mixes together the machine and the human, is actually subtler and more interesting than that. I think you’re arguing for queering it, because we can think about a different kind of hetero, which is the coupling of human and machine. That’s pretty different from the coupling of man and woman. Can you say more about the way that coupling is deconstructed, or maybe reconstituted, in these machine-human dyads that you’re writing about?

BM: I briefly cite Caroline Levine’s argument about happy endings, that there’s a way in which happy endings have been misunderstood and oversimplified. I agree with this point, and I try to think about the ways that there are tensions or contradictions or conflicts contained within happy endings. There is a complexity there that our knee-jerk reaction to a generic trope might not allow.

But the other point—and this picks up on the point you were trying to make about the queering of coupling as a trope—is central to my argument that the computer often occupies a queer role in 20th-century cultural history. It appears initially as a challenge to a couple’s union, for example. It’s the antithesis of the happy couple.

This is really prominent for most of The Desk Set, both the film and the play. The computer is a threat to the happy couple. But at the end, the computer becomes assimilated within the couple, and that assimilation, that joining with the happy couple, actually changes the nature of the couple. What seems at first glance to be a kind of heteronormative or traditional plot structure is actually much more complicated.

I talk a good bit in the book about the so-called antisocial thesis in queer theory, and how the computer is often perceived as antisocial. It challenges social norms, it unravels social bonds: This is the threat of computational technology, social media, et cetera. The computer’s cultural history is presented as antisocial. And yet in some comedies, by no means all, there’s an assimilation of the computer, as a kind of third term in the couple.

JP: I think the comic sci-fi genealogy contains pathways that incorporate or those that reject that kind of machine interaction with the human. For example, in all those Stanislaw Lem stories in The Cyberiad, people are always disguising themselves as computers because they think they’re surrounded by computers—only to discover that the other computers are also, in fact, human beings. Lem is maybe on one side of that. But by contrast the comic example I really landed on was The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which is built on the premise that the earth itself is a computer. Everything we are and what we do is designed to produce the answer. Programmed by hyper-intelligent mice and incarnated in whales. And at one point somebody says, well, I think the actual question is, “What is eight times seven?” And the answer is 42.

It’s funny, yes. But also sort of deep about that fear voiced by N. Katherine Hayles: that maybe we are posthuman. In other words, the things we think of as distinct from the computational are maybe not. Maybe we’re actually like engulfed in that without accepting it or realizing it.

BM: I’ve only read the first book of the Hitchhiker series. I loved that novel when I read it. It’s hilarious and is a great example of the phenomenon generally that I’m talking about. And a limitation of my book is that it is an Americanist book.

This idea of coupling is so central to the book for the very reason you’re identifying, which is that there’s a false binary between the human and the computer. The image of coupling is actually one form for the coming together of those two supposed opposites or those two supposed sides of the binary. It’s a way of making intelligible this thing that we all know, which is that our lives are so closely bound up with or entangled with computing technology and other forms of technology, too. How do we make sense of that, or can we even make sense of that? Comedy is one way of doing that.

JP: Maybe I could push on this idea that the dyad represents a comforting oversimplification that allows us to have our pure humanness over here and then the machine age over there. Could we talk about The Steam Man of the Prairies, a dime novel written in the 1860s by Edward S. Ellis? I am interested in its vision: that being a good settler colonial American means having machines at your beck and call.

BM: I’m really interested in early robots, really pre-robots or proto-robots. One of my interests in that is exactly as you’re saying, that it provides a pre-history that computing technology, when it’s developed in the ’40s and ’50s, inherits as the norms and conventions around the robot.

The robot in The Steam Man of the Prairies is a use-object for settling the West. But one of my claims in the chapter that discusses proto-robot figures is that these early robots often become comic through their proximity to racial discourse. In other words, the minstrel stage is an analog that feeds into early depictions of this use-object (the robot) and makes it comic. The Steam Man of the Prairies not only has blackened skin, but also kind of exaggerated minstrel facial figures, for example.

---

JP: You say that this genre of comedic computation provides forms for making a computationally mediated social world seem more habitable, even as it also provides for criticizing and objecting to that world. I get that as a double claim. But can you unpack it a little bit more? Because it seems to me that habitability goes toward norming, toward establishing an agreed-upon status quo. But criticizing and objecting goes toward estranging.

BM: I’m making an argument that has been made about irony. The idea is that irony is trans-ideological. And I’m making a similar argument about this genre of experience, the intersection between comedy and computation. I am arguing that those intersections often set up types of critique.

One common phenomenon that I analyze in a chapter on authenticity is what I call the great tech industrial joke. It’s this idea that there’s a gap between the kind of overinflated big utopian claims that tech companies often make about their products and the actual realities of what those products achieve. Whether technical or social, there’s a gap between those two, and there’s a setup that makes that gap absurd and sometimes quite funny.

And that’s also a setup for a critique. Dave Eggers takes a certain joke structure as central to the ways he depicts technology in The Every and The Circle.

JP: I was just looking to see if you talked about Gary Larson’s The Far Side, because it seems to me you just described every Far Side joke ever.

BM: That’s a great example too. Even as that comic strip is a phenomenon that borrows a joke structure for setting up critique, there are also other ways in which jokes are really central to making corporate interests palatable.

I’m trying to, first of all, describe phenomena as I understand them. And in some instances, I move into critique. When I’m talking about, for example, Eggers’s novels: Sometimes they’re using a joke structure to articulate a critique of big tech. But I’m describing that critique, right? On the other hand, at other moments, I’m describing the ways that Apple uses humor to make its technology palatable. My approach is first description and only sometimes critique. But within the phenomena I’m describing, there’s lots of critique.

JP: Do you think that what we’re looking at in reactions to computational technology today are best understood as a perennial response to novelty, which always provokes a particular sort of cultural reaction? How much does the novelty of the 1950s get reiterated in the novelty of the 2020s, provoking structurally comparable reactions? Versus how much seems really different, genuinely novel?

BM: I think the answer is messy. At the end of the book, I look at the Netflix by Bots series, which is really great, really funny. But now it just seems outmoded because the AI that’s available to us is so much better. For those who haven’t seen it, AI supposedly wrote a script for, produced the animations for, and also voiced the characters in a romantic comedy. The series also includes a horror film, there are Christmas specials, there are several, and they’re atrocious. They’re so bad. But they’re so bad that they’re funny. And it turns out that a comedian is actually the creator, not an AI.

JP: I’m a real person because I’m a fake fake (robot). That’s Lem’s entire idea with The Cyberiad.

BM: Which touches on this idea of authenticity too. But the reason I’m talking about this example is that, in some ways, the reference of these comedies becomes outmoded really quickly. There are jokes in You’ve Got Mail about sex and dial-up internet. I think my undergraduates wouldn’t get the joke. For some forms of the phenomena that are bubbling up in the computer’s cultural history, that bubble pops.

But there are also strands or ideas that are abiding or really constant. So again, we’ve used the word authenticity. That’s a really prominent feature of my argument: that what philosophers call an ethics of authenticity is central to our attitudes about computing, and to our critiques of it. It’s a both-and answer. On the one hand, there are forms of comedy that become obsolete really quickly. And on the other hand, there’s a “structure of feeling,” to use Raymond Williams’s term, that stays with us from the ’50s to the present. Because there are certain kinds of structures of feeling that are themselves continuous between those moments, and an ethics of authenticity is one of those abiding structures.

---

JP: In The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay uses the notion of “the science fictionalization of everyday life.” And the point he makes is that people have turned to science fiction for comfort because there’s so much cultural lag in most of our cultural products that only science fiction allows us to see the present that we’re truly inhabiting.

In other words, the science fictionalization of everyday life tells us that given how AI actually operates and given how the affordances of things like Google Glass actually operate, we’re living inside what to our past self would seem like science fiction. Therefore, we need science fiction to give us the vocabulary just to describe the real.

BM: That’s a really interesting claim. There’s this kind of striving or groping after language for making intelligible this structure of experience that we have. Each new crop of undergraduates has a different vernacular for talking about their technological experience. There’s this dynamic in which we’re constantly grasping for language to make sense of the experience together. I love that point: think of how archaic email seems to them.

JP: Undergrads email with us because they know it’s their job, but they think of it as the equivalent of sending us telegrams. It’s totally fascinating. Going back to the question of “the new newness,” can I ask if that is just what all generations are like or are we actually at some kind of cusp where the genres are faster, are struggling to adapt more quickly, precisely because the jumps are just much larger and much quicker than they used to be?

BM: One of my claims about obsolescence is that, in some ways, computing technology has created phenomenological obsolescence as a structure of experience. Which is just to say the ways we make sense of our everyday life become obsolete increasingly faster as a result of the speed and rapidity of change in the technological moment that we inhabit. In other words, computing technology, AI, these kinds of technologies are just accelerating the obsolescence of our phenomenological categories, the ways we make sense of our experience.

At the same time, while I do think that the pace of change is faster, and that genres and cultural tools we have for making sense of that change become obsolete quicker, I also think that there’s a kind of continuity between that fact and just modernity itself. In some ways, modernity is also this process of, on the one hand, creating new forms of relating to one another, new forms of community, and at the same time, also constantly creating new forms of alienation from one another.