Henry Alford - Out There: One Mans Search for the Funniest Person on the Internet

HENRY ALFORD

OUT THERE

One Mans Search for the Funniest Person on theInternet

NEW YORK

Contents

FOR JONATHAN YARDLEY

PART I

NONCONFRONTATIONAL BITCH ON THE BUS

Chapter 1

It is commonly saidbut I believe itanywaythat the Internet is glutted with individuals whoproduce an unceasing and meaningless din: crackpots who aremadly typ-typ-typing into the night, keyboard commanders runamok.

This is true. The Internet is thick with people whoregularly blur the line between writing and spamming.

But buried diamondlike within this whorl of wire are therare exceptions: a handful of people who distinguish themselvesby the originality of their vision and by the zeal with whichthey hurl it into cyberspace.

Im talking about people like the Frenchman, nowliving in southern California, who captions the eroticphotoplays on his website in a misspelled and mangled English,producing gems of dialogue such as

A little enthousiasm could do marvel around here!

Im talking about people like the Michiganbed-and-breakfast owner whose ad assures us,

Everything is garnished.

Im talking about people like the movie reviewer ona Christian site whose review of the South Park moviecatalogues various examples of ignominy in thiscelluloid developed in the fiery pits of hell, includingthe scene in which an all-male chorus line wore pinkbikini briefs, and the fact that the Lords namewas taken in vain seventeen times, and, perhaps most upsetting,that

Angels were portrayed as nudeverynudefemales.

Chapter 2

If you want to avail yourself of a strange vantage pointon American culture, you could do worse than to turn to thesite Anger Central [www.angry.net]. Anger Central is acollection of shortish screeds and diatribes sent in by randomplaintiffs and organized alphabetically by topic.

Here is invective, regularly spaced. Here are troubledminds unburdened by tact or grammar (these troubled minds arenudevery nude).

Sometimes, when I am having a kind of slow dayone ofthose days when I find myself devoting a loosely measuredamount of time to determining my body weight on Mars (60.3pounds)I will scroll through Anger Central and see whatpeople are angry about. Ill while away an hour or so,intrigued by the fact that people get just as worked up oververy tiny sources of outrage (e.g., potted meats) as they doover large ones (e.g., the Catholic Church). Under the categoryThings, for instance, Ill find rants withtitles such as

Being black

Being laid off

Cable company, Tucson

ducks

Hiroshima bomb

irony

MORALS

Nuts and Raisins

Vomiting

Yard sales

Zippers

And then Ill buzz through some of the listingsunder the heading People, intrigued by what Ifind there:

BITCH

Two faced Back Stabbing Bitch

Non-confrontational bitch on the bus

Bitch sister in law

Happy Bubbly Bitch

KB the thieving bitch

lying sons of bitches

Marla the BITCH

Paranoid bitch

PREDATORY BITCHES

Sasquatch Bitch

Rehab Bitch

Jeremy Bentham

Ayn Rand

Iowa Septuplets

You

While reading the rants themselves can soon enough gostalea lot of these people wish they could geton afternoon televisionimagining what kind of personwrote each one is reliably involving.

Also, I find I have questions. Did the person who wrote therant entitled my cousin the navel flaunter alsowrite needy masseuse? And in the self-interested,nonutilitarian stance taken by the person who postedJeremy Bentham, do I detect the literary stylingsof Happy Bubbly Bitch herself?

As it turns out, my questions will never be answered: allthe posts on Anger Central are unsigned.

Indeed, the Internet often poses the question ofauthorship. Sometimes the item in question is unsigned; othertimes it has more than one authorsuch as the unnamedgraduate students who write Plotbytes dumbed-down answerto Cliffs Notes [www.schoolbytes.com], like this one forWuthering Heights:

Nobody knows how Emily Bronte wrote all this because shewas really reclusive and never really dated or had any friends.This book is so confusing because everyone is somehow relatedto everyone else. It is like a backwoods trailer community. Youknow, where everybody is cousins.

But usually the reason why we dont know the identityof the person were reading on the Web is, of course, afunction of the medium itself: the anonymity of being onlineprecludes our knowing. On the Internet, most of us use ahandle that is not our own name.

Moreover, some people, under the guise of their handle, arepretending to be someone theyre not. One of the firstlessons we learn when we go online is this: the presence in achat room of more than one person identifying himself as ateenage lesbian is a strong if not certainindication that, in fact, there are no teenagelesbians currently chatting there.

But this tradition of dissembling points up an essentialaspect of online culture: anyone who has ever worn a Halloweenmask or made a prank phone call knows that, with your actualidentity masked, you canand sometimes willdothings that you otherwise might not. Youre more daring,more likely to utter Cowabunga!, more likely tolead a fully-clothed conga line into the swimming pool of theunknown.

Granted, people operating under false identities occupy asmall portion of Web traffic. But I submit that the oftentimesraw quality of what we encounter online owes something to thislowering of accountability. Left alone in his parentshouse while they are away, man cooks up a slightly exaggeratedversion of himself.

The Internet has opened a floodgate. About a year ago Inoticed that whenever the people in my life needed to convey amessage forged in passiona rebuke to a slight I haddealt them, the recounting of something that had made themlaugh, the unveiling of amorous feelingsthey tended toe-mail me rather than write a letter or call me or tell me inperson.

Increasingly, I pursue this line of action, too. If I hadto, say, chastise youand let me simply state right here,Reader, that as of page 8, I am already feeling a lotof hostility toward youI would be tempted to convey thiscriticism electronically.

Why?

For several reasons.

First, of course, I hate it when you yell in my ear.

Second, when I communicate with you electronically, I amnot Henry Alford, an actual breathing freelance writer wholives in New York City, where he tries to reconcile the gapbetween precipitously steep mortgage payments and the writingof humorous volumes yielding less-than-Grishamsales. No, I am Hankalf, an abstraction. No, I amHankalfcarefree, frisky, unmortgaged: a scamp!

Third, the medium itself is the ultimate in McLuhanesquecool; if face-to-face communications are the most direct routeat my disposal, then screen-to-screen ones are the most remote.From the stronghold of this remoteness, I will rocket at you mypoisoned arrow.

If a lowering of accountability removes the filters fromour e-mails by allowing us to present ourselves to the worldwith fewer restrictions, then the concept that media criticscall disintermediation opens the valve ofwebsites and Web commerce. Disintermediation is the removal ofmiddle managementeditors, publishers, agents, brokers,copy editorswho have historically acted asintermediaries between writers/producers and theirreaders/consumers. (The economic ramifications of thismovement, of course, are huge. I pity the travel agents andsmall-bookstore owners and merchants who grow less relevant inthe face of the techno-behemoth; in the future, only the very,very rich or the very, very poor will ever lay eyes on a humanmember of the service industry.)