What Ipad Tells Us About Writing in the Instant Age

WITHIN FIVE SECONDS of Jobs' announcement Wednesday, the jokes started flying on Twitter & the other Social Networks.


Yes. Ipad. We get it. Like with Menstruation. 


After ten minutes, just about every piece of low-hanging fruit had been picked -- multiple times -- from quips about wings and flow to musings about how clearly no women worked at Apple, etc, etc, etc.


Aside from the icky quaintness of it all (one female friend of mine sniffed, "are these people straight out of Mad Men? I've seen a pad like, twice,") I found two things monumentally numbing and depressing:  1) how quickly it all went down, and 2) how many people reached for the same, unfunny, instantly stale observations -- and how proud everybody was to make them.


The democratization of punditry sure aint pretty.


By mid-afternoon, the only joke I'd laughed at, even a bit, had grown stale -- the one about how people from Boston were going to have trouble telling the difference between the "Ipad" and the "Ipod."


Not a great line, to be sure...but at least it went a different way.


And that's where we reach our teachable moment. 


See, even in the age where everyone's potentially a publisher & a content creator, the relationship between wheat & chaff exists.  Digging up a two-year old MadTV sketch that anticipated the Ipad -- and played out every single possible funny permutation of the joke -- before it was news -- just drove the point home.


Just because we all use pens & computers, and can tweet our thoughts, doesn't make us wits ... or, for that matter, writers.


Even in abundance, there is scarcity. For the scarcity comes from those who can make truly original observations about things -- be they events, or trends, or even just the reality of life.  In the dark days of the 1980's, when comedy clubs with red brick walls sprung up like kudzu all across North America, the very embodiment of the lame, hack comedian was doing jokes about airplane food. 


Flash ahead to 2010, and you don't need to have your tray table locked and upright to see that true wit, or an original take -- isn't really any more common than it used to be.


Lame Ipad jokes will always die beside fresher comic takes, like this one from The Onion on Apple Mania.


The comics I worshipped in my youth -- George Carlin, Richard Pryor -- got to where they were because they made the connections no one else made.  Someone once described George Carlin as the guy who pointed out stuff you already knew, but forgot to laugh at the first time.


Now, comedy burns out fast sometimes.  Anyone watching an archived Lenny Bruce set might have trouble getting their head around why he was so groundbreaking. He doesn't even seem funny.  Steve Allen is another one.  I can appreciate contextually why he was so important, but time has not been kind to his routines.


Then you look at a guy like, say, Michael O'Donaghue or Bill Hicks, and you think, "wow, I'm not sure society's ready for those guys even now."


I found sitting on my ON DEMAND channel a couple of days ago, a 2006 special from Louis C.K.  And he has routines about his four year old kid, where he calls her an asshole for being so selfish. And it's terrible and it's wonderful, and it's laugh out loud funny because it's just so original and fresh a take.


And as a writer, that's what your "brand" is. That's what you get paid for.  Your "take."


Now, from Dane Cook on down, there's any number of examples that prove that there's plenty that get somewhere without that original a take; but the writers were the ones looking at the low-hanging fruit in those immediate post-Ipad announcement moments and thinking, "uh...no. Not funny...lame."


(What's more, one of the more interesting conversations I had on Wednesday afternoon was actually quite meta, about how Twitter's 140 character limitation actually encourages the hacky-joke rhythms of an earlier time.  Thanks to @julie_bush and @weinmanj for that. Although there are still some writer friends who consistently make me laugh on Twitter. And no, I'm not saying who.)

Civilians will often get quite shirty when you point out that the idea they just expressed is lame, or not very original. (Which of course you don't do unless they make a deal of it. Psychic self-preservation demands they be the asshole, not you.)  Writers do so in a much lower percentage, because there's always a gut-check going on, an internal voice asking, "is this lame?"


One of the best pieces of advice I ever received about identifying and eliminating cliché was this: "Do you find yourself asking, "Is this a cliché?" Then strip it out. It's a cliché."


The second guesser's version of this, of course, is plugging a line you've just written into the Google.  Less than three hits?  Congratulations -- your line may not be funny, but it's at least fairly original.  Ten thousand hits?  Wow? Really?  Did I just say that out loud?  Wow, that went well. I guess you better talk to the hand, then.


So for the thousands of people who are funny at parties, to the cab drivers who have great ideas for movies, to so and so who causes you to smile tightly at a party when they joke, "you gotta watch this one, they're writing everything we say down," thanks for the reminder that the struggle to mine from a different place, to offer something new and different and not a retread of what everybody's already thinking, is not a vain pursuit.  Well that's not exactly true. It's pretty vain.  One of the raps that writers get is that we can be elitist.  To which the only possible answer is, "OF COURSE we are elitist. We actually think you should listen to what we say! We make money off our thoughts."


In an age of ubiquity, I guess it's just kind of nice to remember that it's not so easy to join that club. 


Especially since, for most of the writers I know, it was back to self-loathing by Five P.M. Wednesday, anyway.


Now where's my Ipad?