ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, October 21, 1996 TAG: 9610230001
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOHN M. MORAN THE HARTFORD COURANT
Did you hear about the new computer virus called the ``congressional virus''? If you've got it, your computer locks up, the screen splits in half and each side starts blaming the other for the problem.
There are plenty of jokes floating around the Internet these days. And lots of them have to do with computers and the people who use them.
It's only natural that people who spend a lot of time around computers develop a kind of love-hate relationship with the machines. Computers can do marvelous things. But they never seem to do everything you want, or do it fast enough. And there have always a few bugs in the software just to keep things interesting.
Nothing is safe from being the butt of a computer-related joke, but there are some favorite targets.
A whole category of jokes has been created to poke fun at Microsoft and its operating system, Windows 95. Many were written by fans of the rival Apple Macintosh computer. (Why do they call it Windows 95? Because that's how many calls to technical support it takes to get it to run.)
For a while after a flaw was discovered in the Pentium processor, chip-maker Intel came up. (At Intel, quality is job 0.999998!)
The Internet and the legendary unreliability of computers are also high on the hit parade. (How can you tell you're spending too much time on the Internet? When filling out your driver's license, you put down your e-mail address. Buy a Pentium so you can re-boot faster.)
But perhaps the biggest objects of computer humor are the people who use them. It doesn't matter whether you know a lot about computers, or a little, there's a joke for you.
For computer novices, there's a pile of jokes about weird calls to technical support. (The cup holder on my computer is broken. What cup holder? That's the CD-ROM drive! This foot-pedal for my computer doesn't work. What foot-pedal? That's the mouse!)
Then there are the jokes for computer programmers, on-line addicts and all-around computer geeks. (How many programmers does it take to screw in a light bulb? None; that's a hardware problem.)
For Rich Tennant, author of the computer-comic ``The Fifth Wave,'' humor is the result of people coming to grips with computers and the increasingly powerful role they play in our lives.
``The reason you're seeing more computer humor within the last five years is that the technology is finally filtering to the masses,'' he said. ``It's coming down from the elite, and it's filtering into the general population. It's so in-our-face that you have to address it.''
And for centuries, man has cut the bewildering and the threatening down to size by laughing at it.
``Sometimes you have to step back and look at it all and say, `This stuff is nuts,''' said Tennant from his studio in Rockport, Mass. ``I think the humor acts as a sort of a release value that lets us laugh at this incredibly complex and ever-evolving technology. I think you have to have humor in this kind of industry because there's so much tension around.''
Don Willmott, who writes a humor column for the back page of PC Magazine, agrees.
``Computer humor is no different than any other kind of humor based on new, confusing technology,'' he said. ``People are expressing frustration with how the new technology is supposed to make things easier and it just makes things more frustrating.''
But in an odd way, we're really laughing at ourselves, Tennant said. ``There really isn't anything inherently funny about computers. The humor really relies on how we use the computer, and so it's people humor we're talking about, not really computer humor,'' he said.
Either way, there's no reason not to have a few laughs along the way to the future. If you'd like more examples, just type the words ``computer jokes'' into any Internet search engine and you'll get a million.
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