Nerding Day: Not Tonight Dear, I Have a Computer

A forensic scientist walks into a publisher's office and says, "I want to try writing a comedy book." That sounds like the setup to a punchline, but it's not. It's a thing that really happened when forensic scientist Steve Scarborough walked into CCC Publications in 1998. And speaking of having no punchlines, Steve Scarborough's HUMOR book was called Not Tonight Dear, I Have a Computer.

If you're asking, "Computers? Why didn't the forensic scientist write a joke book about forensic science?" He fucking did! Not Tonight Dear, I Have a Computer was his second joke book! His first one was called The Hired Defense Witness Joke Book, and I'm sure that sounds like another bit, but no. During Steve's day job of examining corpses and explaining murders to juries he thought, "This is hilarious, everyone can relate to this. Right, unidentified white male torso with 17 bullet wounds? Knock knock, who's gastrointestinal failure from possible arsenic poisoning?"

If you're asking, "Did you say forensic science expert witness joke book!? Why aren't we reading that?" No, it's a good question. It's because Steve hadn't quite found his writing legs yet. The Hired Defense Witness Joke Book is more of a mudslide of ancient lawyer jokes than a thing humans can look at and discuss. Here's how the author himself described it:

See? That's how you translate a 30 minute Turkish scream into English. It's something a set designer would scribble on a wall for a movie called Stabs, Esquire starring Tracy Scoggins and LA Law's Corbin Bernsen (aka Hung Jury in Canada aka Bikini Investigadora in Spain). Steve also wrote a novel about an American forensic expert coming out of retirement to do forensics in Costa Rica and four nonfiction books about forensics. This is his only computer joke book, and I'm sure you'll soon agree he nailed it on the first try.

When Steve started listing traits shared by all computer enthusiasts, it took him zero examples before he made it weird. Lots of people like computers, but this man is panting and salivating. And not about anything fun. He's not listing all the exciting games and titties you can cyber-find on the world wide web; he's like, "If your heart palpitates when ya see an ON switch? Uh, you might just be a computer guy. And fellas, your wife every nag you about this? When you have little Tyrannosaurus arms because of keyboard muscle memory? This guy gets it, this one with the dinosaur arms! He wishes he was compute-searching for golf scores right now, am I right? Okay, round of applause, just the ladies, who here e-mails? Alright, a lot dot com of you! Ow, who shot me? You know I can analyze this at the lab and find out whose bullet this is!"

This is the book's opening line. It's got only sad truth, and no trace of joke. I think Steve is just writing what he knows, and I don't mean he's neglecting his kids. I mean, maybe, but what I'm saying is this sounds like a note he found at work on a suicide victim. We are one joke in, and we have found the book's exact vibe: the regrets of a man dying alone, transcribed by a forensic scientist.

Ha ha I didn't say all them were bad. Ha ha I know you're not supposed to explain jokes, but it's funny because instead of his children, he prefers the 1998 information super highway.

Oh shit, I've made some kind of terrible mistake.

"I don't remember what my kids look like, but I can describe nine anime girls" is exactly what I thought went through someone's head while they were taking a dental impression of bite marks in a human face.

Steve's jokes all basically say the same thing in different ways. For instance, when he said, "Your kids only recognize you by the back of your head," it was like a medical illustration– artless and descriptive. This tells the same story, but "You have more computer games than your kids have toys," is more of an Impressionistic painting. It evokes so much more tragedy because now the children can't escape the truth of their father's choices. They can see he has chosen Civilization II over them. The older children can scan his game boxes and calculate in dollar amounts how much more he loves his computer than them. They can feel the river of time carving a canyon between them. But otherwise, pretty good joke!

This is a bad effort, but it is effort, which means we can see the scaffolding Steve assembled to construct this joke. He wants to draw comparisons between the love of computers and drug addiction, and that's a great start. Ask anyone and they'll tell you the best jokes are when something is like crack. It works in reverse too! Like if you see a destitute addict, you could say, "That guy looks like me when I want the Web!"

But something happens when you stare at an idea too long. You might think something like, "Do computer junkies go into withdrawals if they're not near a microchip? And if so, what would they do to get one?" And then suddenly you're trying to find a zany answer to a question no one would ever ask or understand. And if, after all that, you land on "your kid's MegaPet," you've fucked it up as badly as possible.

My point is, the premise is busted and there's no turn because the punchline is a desperate solution to madness. The only hope this punchline had would have been if you stole something really wild and surprising from your kids. Maybe their pet's tracking chip or the baby's toilet? I don't know, I'll come back to it.

I was wrong! I was wrong about the toilet, it's weird!

This is worse than the MegaPet thing, and maybe as bad as a joke can get. It's less funny than a doctor telling you, "Your grandparents are both dead," right after saying, "Your grandparents are both dead, hold on let me try that again, I think the joke will land better if I don't put emphasis on any of the words. Okay, okay, take two."

It might seem unfair of me to take all of the jokes this author made about abandoning his children out of context and place them one after the other, but that's all this book is! The audio version of this would sound like a senile cyber-father waking up in the wrong house. "Where are my kids? What do they look like? Please, I just need one microchip, I'll suck your dick!"

"Cookies can mean two things… there's got to be a joke there," thought forensic scientist Steve Scarborough. He was wrong, right before forgetting his son's name.

There comes a point in every humor author's writing process when they think, "Maybe my child neglect is getting a little Gentile-heavy."

"That's great, can I use that in my book?" Steve asks in the middle of divorce court.

This is such a pathetic try, I worry it's real. If Steve was really trying to make us laugh with fictional kids he'd have named them Trash Folder or Police Quest II: The Vengeance. Which means there's definitely a Eudora Scorborough out there who goes by her middle name, Encarta-96-Entry-For-Breastfeeding.

"You took out the fucking baby monitor!? Is this why I didn't hear Dotcom choking?" cries Steve's wife.

Steve slams his hand on the table and shouts, "Who the hell is Dotcom? Oh, ha ha, I forgot we did that. Before I go, real quick, the famous AOL notification is 'You have mail!', right?"

His wife nods. "You got it! Like the major motion picture named after it, You Have Mail."

We all see how Steve doesn't get comedy, but it's becoming more clear Steve also doesn't get why anyone would like computers. This book is such an unthinkable artifact. It's jokes for computer lovers written by a forensic scientist who understands neither. Which sounds like a critic panning Garfield: Compute This!, but it's real. Wait, hold on, I didn't get what was funny about it at first, but he moved his family near Intel's corporate headquarters because part of loving a computer is, ha ha ha, proximity to its chip manufacturer! Like Garfield showing his butt to a computer under the words "Compute This!", it's one of those gags that sneaks up on you.

I can't imagine the series of nightmares that could lead to a person thinking this and considering it comedy. One baby penguin seizes and dies whenever these words are read, its last moments a full understanding of how they fail as a joke.

I like this one because "Popsicle money" is such a strange way to describe money, and then it just faceplants into the comedy killing concept of missing children. And I love that in order for the joke to have a prayer, we need to go along with the premise that kids report a missing father to the ice cream man! That seems to be a bad system for reasons too many to list. Plus, I love how insane it is that an ice cream man would charge money for this service, and it's the same amount of money as three 1998 Popsicles. Like, why bother? Would the milk emergency hotline say to the ice cream man, "Tell those kids to either find $1.47 or find their goddamn father by themselves."? What Steve has proven here is that if you abandon your kids enough, you'll eventually do it in a funny way.

The broken sentence structure of this one implies it came from a chapter called something like "8. You might be fuckin' your computer too much…", but I promise it didn't. There are no chapters in Not Tonight Dear, I Have a Computer, and there's nothing in the intro to set this up. And I know you remember the intro because of the killer line about computer lovers holding their arms out like a Tyrannosaurus Rex. I'm not bringing that up for any particular reason.

I agree this joke loses some of its impact the second time, but as someone with normal-sized arms I relate more to a kangaroo permanently typing on a phantom keyboard than a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Which is nuts, because "DuRr I MiSs mY KeYbOaRd I NeeD to PrEtenD to TyPE" should have already been the maximum amount of unrelatable before he made a slightly better arm guess about the reader, and yes I can hear myself. I realize this book's failure is beyond my ability to describe.

This is two unfinished ideas crashing into each other. A truly talentless shrug at the idea of comedy. Clean up on aisle blinking "12," someone got sick after eating airplane food, but tell it to my virus software! My kids Dotcom, Gates, and something else do when they need to get hold of me! Seriously, this is fucking contemptible. It shouldn't be possible to be this unfunny. This is something Rob Schneider would say to his manager to signal there's a gun to his head.

This is Steve's third try at a computer virus joke, and he's not quite there yet. In fact, it looks like he forgot to make this one about computers. But he knows he's close. He's going to crack the comedy link between the viruses in computers and the viruses in humans.

There it is. Nailed it, Steve.

You shriek into the night. Gone, gone the reason of man, you claw through the scattered papers in search of what you once were. Three thousand printed graphic files later you realize your life is a joke, written by a confused fool, for people who love computers so much they up and moved their family to be near Intel HQ. It's too much to bear. Your mind shatters to spare you the burden of this knowledge. You shriek into the night. You look around you and see three thousand printed graphic files. You know they must mean something…

All sarcasm aside, I thought it was only fair to include a good one.

In a book of only troubling lunacy and misery, this is the most haunting one. Saving images of cows and duck decoys to your hard drive without any setup or reason implies such a disassociation from the human race. To call them "the latest JPEG's" as if there's some kind of cow and duck decoy jpeg news you need to stay on top of is the penis-biting insanity of a madman. Anyone you tell this to will finish it with the same punchline: Take off that human skin, you mucus-squirting star imposter.

"There was never anything waiting for you other than the dim glow of loneliness. Choke on your reward, filthy pig. You know, this one came out pretty good! I deserve a little treat," says humor author Steve Scarborough, taking a little treat break.

"And so I said to her 'at the what dot com,' mami?! No, but seriously, she's right. I'm in a real rough spot. I shouldn't be writing computer jokes. Not sure what that mami thing was, either."

I don't know if this means anything, but this comedy writer included more than one entry about treating his crippling depression without trying for a joke.

I don't know if this means anything either, but this comedy writer has a better chance at dissolving all hope and joy in your life than getting a laugh.

"Tell me if this one makes sense," Steve says to his son, Dotcom, who hasn't lived with him for 25 years, and hasn't spoken to him in over 30.

"Change cat meat to eye wash," whispers a voice.

This one makes sense when you realize Steve Scarborough's writing process is squeezing the brains of people who burned to death and typing the sounds they make.

Again, this is not a payoff to a chapter called something like "17. You know your dick is caught in a floppy drive if…". This is a sudden, unsolicited confession. To anyone expecting jokes, Not Tonight Dear, I Have a Computer is 123 straight pages of jump scares.

I was suspicious Steve fucks his computer, but this one only makes sense if you're physically having sex with your computer. And not only fully inside it, but living in a universe where it's fundamentally understood people fuck their computers, so anyone who particularly likes their computer would be, like, dressing up the scene and sport fucking it. It's at least one step too far from our shared reality. It's like opening a book of cake recipes and one of them says "Cakes inseminated on a sex swing from Wet Murray's Adult Kitchen PO Box 8124 Man Fondant, NJ are best hunted with a shotgun from Beatrix Cakeslayer's Rifle & Ammo PO Box 12763 Frostingbane, WA."

Jesus Christ, Steve.

Steve nods at his beloved, alluring computer. As a seasoned comedy writer, he knows he's got a good one, but it wouldn't hurt to get a second opinion. "Dotcom, I'm not sure about the tone of this: You can eat my keyboard crumbs, you subhuman bitch of a worm."

"Don't change a thing," whispers a voice.

"Your freezer is packed solid with fingers," types Steve, proudly locking in another classic computer joke.

"Someone's coming!" hisses a voice.

"food and quick-snacks!" adds Steve quickly.

The homicide detective pulls his sidearm and points it at Steve. "D-did you fucking just say, 'You are actually excited AOL is busy just so you can keep clicking the sign on button a hundred times' to that Jane Doe?" he asks.

"Are you this? I don't really know," says Steve Scarborough to sex and comedy at the same time.

"Maybe now?" asks Steve Scarborough after rearranging some words.

"Nope," says sex. A single 70-minute fart is comedy's only reply.

"I'm sure he doesn't mean it like that," thought Steve's wife before she saw the rest of this book.

Ha, you primitive idiots. Making love to a 9600 baud modem would be like making love to a chimpanzee.

I don't want to step on a perfect joke, but "To you, faxes are obsolete" is something Steve Scarborough tells a chimpanzee after he introduces it to cutting-edge human lovemaking.

You know, it's possible there's been some kind of misunderstanding and this was never meant to be a humor book. There could have been a mixup at the printers and somewhere out there is a book called Deathbed Confessions of A Man Killed By Despair filled with rowdy computer zingers.

I'm going to flip through and see if I can find more entries to support this new theory.

I'd say this counts.

Absolutely count it. If this is the work of a man trying to be funny, I will eat an entire used natural shaped keyboard.

Hmmm… inconclusive.

Okay, I think I've found the pattern. When he's writing a joke about most computer things, Steve panics in every direction before finally deciding to put his dick in it. I don't know why he's so bad at this, because those are pretty good comedy writing instincts. But when he's writing a joke about e-mail, Steve just makes a very blunt statement about his loneliness and leaves its carcass out to rot. Here, it would be my pleasure to show you what I mean:

Look at this. Trying to find the fun in this is like watching cockroaches scatter from a flashlight. Counting your emails is a depressing exercise in pointlessness even before you remember he named one of his kids after a program that does that automatically. It's like writing a joke book and one of them is "I didn't have time to finish this one because of my chroni"

From: mikeparty69x@geocities.com

To: w_scarborough@arpa.net

Re: your deal

"Hey, I got your email from the arm of a real sad guy. You like to party?"

Okay, I'll indulge your premise, lunatic. Let's say your car is registered in a state with 8 letters on its license plates. No state lets you do @ or ., so you'd have to spell out the "at" and the "dot" and the "com." Which puts us at "__AT__DOTCOM," and by my count, if any part of your e-mail address has more than zero characters in it, we can't do it. I opened your book expecting jokes, and you've given me confusion, misery, and now this bullshit puzzle.

We didn't check our e-mail as often back in 1998, but I'd tell Steve two hours isn't a short enough time to be outrageous. Actually, I'd tell him, "There's no unit of time short enough for this to be funny. Consider adding a classic comedy element to the concept of e-mail. Like, do you maybe hate your wife?"

I'll take that as a yes. Keep going with this.

Hmm… still more sad than funny.

Even sadder. Let's try keeping that divorce energy but lose the e-mail entirely?

What? No. Steve, you're supposed to be writing cute zingers. This is a four-year-old's understanding of the situation when you find pictures of your brother's dick on your wife's computer, and you both work at Jiffy Lube. Maybe let's try a wife one without the divorce.

I notice you used the word "once" here, Steve. Let's try to get this number down to "never."

"Round of applause, who here is married? Alright, some of you. Marriage is crazy, right? Like, you know when your wife lures you out of the house with lies so she can hose down your grotesque leavings? Hey, I was going to eat that dandruff, lady! It's like I'm sayin', guys, women always turn into their mothers."

"I write humor books!!! Sure, I can tell you a joke, here's one! The thought of a computer virus scares me more than AIDS! Sorry, it's so loud in here! Yeah, I said AIDS! No, I don't have it! My last nine sex partners were my wife and eight CD-ROM drives, so I'm very sad and I check my e-mail often! Yeah, often! Ha ha I thought you'd like that one better!"

This is Steve's closer which means he begins and ends his joke book by choosing his computer over his kids without a punchline. It's kind of amazing. Not many authors can keep surprising you with the same bit for 123 pages. But as sad as it is, it doesn't feel like the right choice. Not Tonight Dear, I Have a Computer is the story of a man of corpse science crushed by the impossible task of writing a single competent computer joke. Let me see if I can find one that better represents the tragic hell he built for himself.

There it is.

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