Raymond Brigleb

Not Calling Mine a Phone Anymore

There are certain metrics by which the progress in the computer industry is inevitably measured. For example, those hard drives, they just keep getting smaller and smaller! And those computers, always faster than last year! It’s a predictable cycle for the most part, but it only extends to a few areas.

Past that, it gets a little weirder.

About a decade ago, I worked at a now-defunct computer game company in Santa Cruz. They were working on pretty typical games, but at this time, the Internet was all the cool thing. This was in 1999, and the big news that year seemed to be Microsoft finally conquering Netscape, and it seemed as if the whole of the internet would fall to them before too long.

Around that time, I had an idea for a game. It would depend on everyone having some kind of device that knew your location, and the point of the game would be to do something in the physical world that would be tied to that game. If you went into a certain coffee house that you liked, you would see something that you left there last time. If you went into your favorite book store, perhaps you could see messages left there by others who had visited there in the past.

Back then, it seemed like a completely science fiction concept, like something that would take decades to happen. And even if it did, I couldn’t imagine many more people playing with it than were into games like Dungeons and Dragons. It just didn’t seem like something that was really feasible.

The thing is, that exists now. When I came into this coffee shop tonight, I “checked in” on Foursquare. If I log into Gowalla, I very well might see some items left here by someone who came by before me. And people engage in Geocaching all the time, finding objects in the physical world based on information given to them by a device that fits into the palm of their hand.

I read some crazy statistic the other day about how much time people spend on Facebook from their mobile devices. For certain classes of people, they spend more time on Facebook using their phone than they spend actually making calls!

My experience bears this out. I almost never make calls on my phone. I don’t need to. I’m more likely to email someone, or increasingly, to send them a message directly on Facebook or Twitter. And when someone writes me a message there, it appears on my iPhone just as surely as a text message would.

Calling them “phones” is becoming irrelevant.

Comedy’s Return to Nonsense

For the longest time, it seemed as though American comedy was stuck in a bit of a rut.

There is a certain machismo, or something like that, that perhaps comes from the whole Saturday Night Live phenomenon. The Seventies were an era in comedy that celebrated a sort of revival of the whole idea of live performance as comedy.

In the Sixties, it seemed as though comedy was still trying to break out of the linear, stage-based format. For the longest time, that had been the dominant form of comic entertainment. With the advent of television, comedy could slowly but surely explore the limits of a new format, which meant a lot of comedy that relied on nonlinear logic.

But as the Seventies came about, that became something that was a “given,” and not valued as much. And so, comedy returned to its roots, as live performances in comedy clubs spilled onto the television in the form of Saturday Night Live, SCTV, and so on.

Sitcoms continued this tradition, tipping the hat to the value of a “live studio audience,” and even comedy shows that seemed to push the limits, such as Mr. Show, still relied on an actual audience. It helps, and it probably makes for a more enjoyable experience than just standing in front of a few guys with cameras.

The first time I noticed a change in that type of comedy was with the Tim and Eric Awesome Show, but I have noticed some cracks starting to show in sitcoms. For instance, a popular comedic technique of the last decade was adding “flashbacks,” wherein characters wouldn’t just reminisce about some odd past event, but actually show the event. This breaks down the narrative a bit, but doesn’t go far enough.

With Tim and Eric’s show, not only does the concept of time and live performance go out the window, but even the linear sequence of television frames itself. A common gag is to repeat a loop of someone saying something that just seems odd or gross. They will literally just loop that bit over and over for twenty seconds at a time. They will also freeze the frame for no apparent reason and simply draw on the screen or bend shapes with a Photoshop smear tool.

The show Portlandia is in that tradition. A lot of the comedy is in the editing, which carries the joke further than the skit itself. This is essential to the comedy of several of the bits, although the bits themselves often end in disappointing punchlines, what you find yourself laughing at is the odd speed of the frames.