Review of Ben Mangrum’s The Comedy of Computation, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence

This spring, I tuned in to an episode of the New York Times podcast Hard Fork to hear an interview with Karen Hao, the author of Empire of AI (2025). Hao explains her choice of “Empire” for the title—asserting that, like world-historical empires, the AI industry was characterized by “resource extraction [and] labor exploitation” carried out “under a justification of a civilizing mission.” The hosts of the podcast, from an AI-enthusiast position, “push back” at Hao’s points with strained objections and hypotheticals, such as granting free ChatGPT to certain parts of the world adversely affected by the companies. The hosts seem reluctant to accept Hao’s critiques.

As the hosts thank Hao, they set up the next segment in the same breath: “When we come back, turn your brain off. It’s time to talk about Italian brainrot.” They launch into an extended straight man bit, where one gauges the other’s reactions to words like “Tralalero tralala,” (“I’d think you were having a stroke”), “Bambardino crocodilo,” and “Ballerina cappuccina.” The hosts spend the segment in mock bewilderment at what is “really an AI phenomenon” of GenAI chimerical images with pseudo-Italian voiceovers. If the serious discussion had proceeded a bit awkwardly, the straight man bit—a put-on, older-generation resistance to the bewildering world of slop—finds an easier, predictable resolution in laughter and acceptance.

Ben Mangrum‘s The Comedy of Computation: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence (Stanford, 2025) helped me to make sense of this jarring transition, and much more contemporary AI discourse besides. The book offers a history of the uses of humor in American cultural negotiations with new computational technologies, which Mangrum anchors through theories of genre and comedy. For the vitalist philosopher Henri Bergson, the main function of comedy is to point out our failures to adapt to change as living beings should: Charlie Chaplin’s arms keep turning bolts even after the conveyor belt stops. While mechanical behaviors drive a wide variety of screwball antics, Mangrum shows how comedy also takes aim at our responses to bigger changes in the history of science and technology.

The Comedy of Computation takes on Bergson as well as Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism in order to consider the functions of comedy as a genre. Mangrum compellingly describes genres as “phenomenological models,” which “provide structures for thought and feeling” and “set up interpretive expectations not only for narratives and media but also for being in the world” (16).

Consider dystopic media about computers and technology, which tend to be a little leaden, a little dour and predictable. A totalizing change or novum reshapes the social lives, personalities, or governments of the people within them. The plot of a Black Mirror (Netflix, 2011-14) episode, say, offers an instructively horrifying worst-case scenario for a technology. This kind of cautionary tale in the science-fictional extrapolation mold exemplifies what is by now a very familiar style of thinking about technology: Skynet is coming.

Mangrum’s focus on comedy, then, is counterintuitive but compelling: in most cases the genre’s orientation toward technology is fundamentally different from the dystopia, the cyberpunk noir, or the tech thriller. While they end on notes of adaptation and accommodation, technological comedies showcase the awkwardness of collisions between new technologies and human values, priorities, and communities. Mangrum observes one serious common thread at the outset: across many of the comedies of computation, we see echoes of a persistent anxiety, the professional-managerial class’s “fear of falling,” Barbara Ehrenreich’s term for anxieties about downward mobility in the age when their particular forms of knowledge work might become obsolete.¹ Unlike the dystopia, comedy recognizes life will have to continue as before, however diminished.

The category of computational comedy that Mangrum draws our attention to winds up being a broad one, and it includes racialized robots, email romcoms, computer matchmaking, Silicon Valley parodies, absurd comparisons between human and machine thinking power, and more besides. Rather than focusing  on a discrete set of particular computational developments, Mangrum uses these comedic subgenres to observe a wide variety of cultural negotiations with new computational technologies. The archive, though varied, holds together as a genealogy of the kinds of humor we see about the range of computational technologies today, such as AI, social media, VR, and robotics. Each chapter in The Comedy of Computation takes on a subgenre of computational comedy, paired with a principal theme: machine-age robot comedy and the American tradition of racist jokes; romcoms about email and personal computers and the idea of being generic; satires of Silicon Valley and authenticity; fiction about sublime computation and absurdity. Each chapter’s theme develops a reading strategy and rich questions for the texts, and Mangrum also helpfully points out the moments when these themes overlap across the chapters.

Mangrum’s archive spans from the mid-twentieth century to the present: Isaac Asimov’s 1940s robot stories, Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano (1952), William Marchant’s play The Desk Set (1955), Ishmael Reed’s Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969), short fiction by Olof Johannesson, George Saunders, and Elizabeth Mann Borgese; and films such as Electric Dreams (1984), Weird Science (1985), You’ve Got Mail (1998), and her (2013). Jarrett Kobek, Dave Eggers, Bo Burnham, and others also make appearances. There’s also a broad and well-researched archive of essays, advertisements and other media that register the history and range of computational novelty. Comedy’s historical roots often anchor compelling close readings here. For instance, Mangrum finds “submerged racial templates,” such as echoes of Uncle Remus, in Asimov’s stories about robots. We see that, while most of the 1990s jokes about email have gone stale, comedic plot structures and devices are relatively shelf-stable between the eras of matchmaking computers, email, social media, and dating apps.

As Mangrum explains Frye’s theory of comedic genres, “many forms of comedy follow an ‘argument’ in which a ‘new world’ appears on the stage and transforms the society entrenched at the beginning. The movement away from established society hinges on a ‘principle of conversion’ that ’include[s] as many people as possible in its final society” (134-5). Shakespeare is a frequent touchstone for Mangrum, and the emphasis is structural, with more attention to plot structure than to the mechanics of particular gags. Mangrum uses the intriguing metaphor of coupling, suggesting both the romantic and the mechanical, to describe the kinds of order that emerge in the happy endings of comedy. In the chapter on romantic couples, especially, this endpoint of comedy shines through: “sexuality and romantic coupling serve as images for envisioning harmony between the moral imperatives of authenticity and a professional-managerial world,” Mangrum writes (165). When in comedies like The Honeymoon Machine (1961), Electric Dreams (1984), or Weird Science (1985), computers are instrumental to the goals of the couple, then “the couple provides a form for the incorporation of computing into the ordinariness of our lives” (166). These comedies strive to demonstrate that “flourishing is still possible despite the alienating conditions that arise from a society structured around professional routines, conformist pressures, and bureaucratic authorities” (166).

Mangrum embraces some of the pleasures of these texts without subscribing wholesale to comedy’s picture of the world or its “compensating structures of recognition” (196). The marriage plot from which computational comedy borrows, significantly “encloses the sexuality, social lives, and political power of women within domestic space . . . [presents] a property relation disguised as a private agreement” (76). The happy ending, moreover, “presents a fantasy of stasis” and it “tempers (regulates, binds together) personalities that are otherwise dissident or disruptive” (76). Sometimes the robot or computer is the disruptive or maladaptive butt of the joke, but it can just as easily be the over-eager early adopter or the resistant Luddite. Comedy’s happy endings, then, work to establish a truce, however uneasy, one that allows them to sweep messiness and discomfort under the rug. Tralalero tralala.

Mangrum’s final chapter introduces a turn that takes inspiration from Lauren Berlant’s work, where he reminds us that the desires we project onto computational technologies are often misplaced or even delusional. Mangrum writes,

While such disappointment is of a piece with Berlant’s “cruel optimism” (desires that interfere with our flourishing), Mangrum suggests a role for comedy in fleshing out and better understanding our own desires.² With this emphasis on self-knowledge, comedy reads less like propaganda for shaping harmony, and more like a salve, comforting us through both disappointment and downward mobility.

The conclusion to The Comedy of Computation briefly considers our current moment of genAI humor. Mangrum shows through a reading of Keaton Patti’s series of Written Entirely by Bots films (written by Patti) on Netflix, among other contemporary examples, that the templates hold up. As a whole, The Comedy of Computation offers a toolkit for understanding a significant, load-bearing portion of the ever-shifting discourse about new technologies.

: :

1. Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (New York: Perennial, 1990), 15, qtd. in Mangrum, Comedy of Computation, 10.
2. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).

• 

  Scott Selisker

  Scott Selisker is associate professor of English at the University of Arizona. He is the author of Human Programming: Brainwashing, Automatons, and American Unfreedom (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), and of a forthcoming monograph tentatively titled Networked Character in Contemporary U.S. Fiction.