Everything Happens So
Much (or: But is it Comedy?)
I hadn’t heard of Horse_ebooks until reading a NewYorker article about it, which tells you something about my own internet
browsing habits.[i] For the uninitiated, Horse_ebooks [ii]
is a Twitter account which posted a series of apparently unconnected messages,
usually grammatically half-formed and reading like they had been taken at
random from advertising copy (‘I have personally used this technique to break
many memory’; ‘and more! Start raising your self-esteem today!’), but with
occasional undertones of pathos or even humanity. It had the feel of a bot gone
slightly wrong, or perhaps doctored in a bid to disguise its spamming.
Originally, this is exactly what it was – an automated
programme pasting text culled more or less at random from books on
e-library.net, the site for which it was advertising. But for the last two
years of its life (the account became dormant last September), it had actually been
run by Jacob Bakkila, who chose the text from publications across the internet.
The feed created its own ecological niche, inspiring comics, merchandise and excited commentary on its significance.
In the New Yorker article, Susan Orlean places Horse e_books
in the context of ‘net art’, artworks made specifically for (and often about)
the internet. Whatever about art, is it
comedy? There’s a sly humour on passing the feed off as a benignly malfunctioning
bot has a sly humour, nicely inverting our traditional preoccupations with
machines passing as humans or possessing subjective qualities. And some of the individual
tweets are undoubtedly funny. My favourite, and the most retweeted, is the
title of this article; it has some of the gnomic quality of a Steven Wright
one-liner.
That said, I’m not sure I’d call it comedy. Bakkila’s own
description, ‘performance mischief’, seems more accurate: it’s playful, teasing
expectations rather than subverting them, drawing attention to its own form.
But its principle aim isn’t humour, and the tweets themselves are more often bizarre
than amusing. The randomness of the tweets and the almost total lack of context
for what they say gives them their somewhat unworldly charm, but also means
that they rarely have anything recognisable as a set-up-reveal structure. And while
the conceit of a fake bot is lovely, the result wasn’t a humorous narrative or
an elaborate practical joke, but a constant is-it-or-isn’t-it, an uncertainty
as to whether the author was human or not. One contributor to Orlean’s article
was quoted describing Horse_ebooks as a ‘long con’, but this suggests a sustained
attempt to fool people, which isn’t really what the feed was trying to do. It
was playing with what they believed rather than firmly pointing them in a
particular direction. This sort of deliberately ambiguity is much more
characteristic of contemporary art than anything I would call comedy. The
contrast with an earlier project of Bakkila’s is illuminating:
‘This Is My Milwaukee’ is more straightforwardly comic. It’s
also less a lot less interesting (and rather dated – six years is an eternity
on the internet).
Despite my luddite tendencies, I have a passing familiarity with the
different forms of comedy which have blossomed on Twitter: stand-ups and
writers dashing off one-liners, fake Twitter accounts for
celebrities, or just riffs on the practice of tweeting itself. There’s scope for something a little stranger there, more oblique and not
afraid to risk being unfunny on occasion Even if Horse_ebooks isn’t itself
comedy, it may yet prove of great importance for the genre.
[i] As
does this blog, which I started around five years after the vogue for them had
peaked. I anticipate launching a Twitter account sometime in 2018.
