Writing is such stuff that memes are made on | MARK HUGHES COBB
Responses to TV/movie lines no one ever says in real life, part 1,437:
1. "Give us the room."
a. Get your own.
b. What, were you planning to detach it and fly away?
c. The room belongs to itself, if you think about it.
2. "You can't blame yourself."
a. Yes, you certainly can.
b. Take responsibility, you narcissistic weasel.
c. Everyone else on the planet knows you screwed the pooch, so no worries.
3. "Don't you leave me."
a. If you have to ask, I'm already gone.
b. Yeah, that'll take the place of medicine.
c. Look! Over there! A distraction!
4. "Gimme a beer."
a. Gimme a money.
b. We have literally 47 flavors on tap, and unless you are a recently evolved monkey, you know at least that much about beer.
c. We don't serve monkeys.
5. "If it bleeds, it leads."
a. You have never met anyone who actually worked at a newspaper who's said that, except in mockery of TV/film characters saying that.
b. Maybe at a TV station. They can sometimes seem fond of hyperbole.
c. If it moans, I groans. If we lies, we cries. If knees break, we ache. If words mean anything, stop cheapening them in a blandwich attempt to squash complex thoughts into flat cliches.
6. "Can we talk?"
a. Unless I'm gravely mistaken, we just did.
b. And it really wasn't worth my effort or time.
c. So to sum up: No.
7. "We're not so different."
a. In that we're both carbon-based, bilaterally symmetrical life forms, perhaps.
b. I don't like you that way. Sorry. And it's not me. It's definitely you.
c. In that you're a homicidal maniac, killing largely innocent people, and I'm trying to stop you, the homicidal maniac, from killing mostly innocent people, we must needs remain rather at odds.
8. "If you do that, you're no better than him!"
a. See No. 7 above
b. Yes, you are. Unless you're not. Point is, this shouldn't be the sort of moral evaluation that's up for discussion in the heat of a moment.
c. A lotta folks deserve to die.
9. "It's just a flesh wound."
a. Balloon: It's just a pin prick.
b. Giraffe: It's just a sore throat.
c. There's 22 square feet of skin standing between you and the outside world. Wounding is bad.
10. "It is what it is."
a., b. and c.: OK, real-life folks say this all the time. I just sincerely wish they would stop.
Problem with looking too intently at anything is that you start to focus on the pores, the grains, the flaws. It's like saying any single word out loud a number of times, until it begins to seem like nonsense. You could start doubting your sanity if you say, for example, "sanity" too many times.
Sanity. Sanity. Sanity. You can't fool me. There ain't no Sanity Clause.
Maybe folks do say "Give us the room" in real life, but you've never heard it because you don't trade currency on Wall Street, aren't a grizzled detective for a major metropolitan police force about to throw down your badge and gun in disgust, and are not possessed by drama queens running rampant through your family.
For much the same reason I implore car dealers to hire actors, or at least hire an actor/voice coach to teach them how not to tawk laaahk thiiyis on public airwaves, I believe everyone should hire actual writers, not cliche spouters.
Specifically, writers who bore easily. Hand waving, in case you can't see it through the screen. Me me me.
And now "me" is no longer a word. Not me-aningful.
Yes, it's potentially more self-serving than every gas station in the world except Mobiles' Society Shell, but writers can help kick redundancies into a corner, where they can be thrashed, trashed, and disposed of at leisure.
A fellow professional typist and I were discussing why we got into this business, a reflection that's not closer than it appears, being as I daydreamed about this job way back, working manual labor post-high-school. One thing I averred was that AI cannot replace us, at least not well.
Several years back a gaggle of kids and I started up a musical unit, so I did my thing, tossing out random sounds until words appeared. That group eventually became The Simpletones — Sadly, the obloquy "simpleton" seems to have fallen from usage, as my much-younger compatriots needed the pun explained — but only after Vonnegutcheck, Frankenbacher, The Mach Turtles, Disney Orlando and Dawn, MC and the Shoeshine Band, The Spork Edition, Matthew Mark Luke and Duck, The Tuscaloosa Sympathy Orchestra, Maintain Low Moans, Wham! Was Taken, Heatherrific, Liver Let Die, The Moose and Squirrel Experience, Le Cheese-Eatin' Surrender Monkeys, Strum and Drum, Booger, Fleetwood Crackpipe, and Gettin Iggy Widdit fell by the wayside.
One name I held onto post-Simpletones, as the assemblage for any band larger than three, and louder than 11: The Infinite Monkey Typing Pool.
At the risk of mansplaining, but because I've had to repeat the full IMTP more than once, it's from the mathematical thought problem about an infinite number of monkeys typing for an infinite amount of time eventually producing the works of William Shakespeare.
Some folks have gotten the wrong end of that particular counting stick, misunderstanding, as many do Schrodinger's Cat, that it's not meant to be taken literally, but to help wrap our finite brains around a gobsmacker of a principle.
Programs have been written, randomly generating letters in hopes that an AI could recreate this brave old world, such stuff as dreams are made on.
But again: Thought experiment.
In order to "write" Shakespeare, you have to already have Shakespeare. A random letter-generating computer could indeed, eventually, given non-stop time, produce words in order, but to complete the thought, they'd merely be copies. The programmers have to match the random letter-generator to a template, that of the plays and sonnets and epic poems. So in effect, trying to replicate this will, ironically, reduce notions of infinity.
A couple of years ago, social media lit up with the works of comic writer Keaton Patti, who's worked for Jimmy Kimmel, The New Yorker, Marvel, Comedy Central, The Onion, Netflix, Funny or Die, CollegeHumor and McSweeney's, so there's your bona fides. He's not a programmer, however, so when he writes "I forced a bot to watch over 1,000 hours of (TED talks, QAnon theories, Judge Judy, etc.), and then asked it to write its own," he's doing something a tad more complicated, delving into tropes and cliches, and ladleing them on heavily enough they not only sound mildly plausible, but risible.
For example, here's his lawyer commercial:
INT. FIRM LAW ROOM
A LAWYER stands next to a shelf with books. The books are very wide. They have eaten too many words.
LAWYER
"Have you been hurt in an accidental car? Has the government sold your lungs without asking nicely? Are you mesothelioma? Answer me!"
The lawyer opens a briefcase. It's full of lemons, the justice fruit only lawyers may touch.
LAWYER (Cont'd)
"If so, you can act entitled for money. I'll help. I graduated from lawn school and all my teachers were bitten by dogs."
Words scroll across the bottom of the screen. These are the cases the lawyer takes: UNFAIR STABBING, ILLEGAL SHOES, MUSIC TOO CANADIAN, SUE THE RAIN, DIVORCE YOUR TOILET, FAKE SONS.
Patti has a collection titled "I Forced a Bot to Write This Book: A.I. Meets B.S." Enjoy.
Elements of laugh-generation include, but are not limited to exaggeration, inversion, repetition (for effect) and incongruity. Any machine attempting to replicate thought will inevitably seek patterns and meaning from within often meaningless life-stuff.
The recently deceased actor William Hurt had thoughts in his noggin regarding his craft: "The enemies of acting are mood, and attitude, and other general homogenized disruptive entities. Whereas acting is about action — doing — and unless you can figure out a way to craft in an imaginative reality to which you don't submit, you're going to be out of control. You'll flip out. The job is to be surprised."
The job of the writer? Surprise.
Reach Tusk Editor Mark Hughes Cobb at mark.cobb@tuscaloosanews.com, or call 205-722-0201.
This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Writing is such stuff that memes are made on| MARK HUGHES COBB
