RAMBLE ON: "Code Monkey" by Jonathan Coulton

One of Weird Al Yankovic’s late-career masterpieces is “Skipper Dan,” a power-pop portrait of a once-promising acting prodigy reduced to telling bad jokes as a guide for a chintzy theme park attraction. Since most of Al’s originals are homages to other artists, people immediately started guessing which act it was based off of; Weezer and Fountains of Wayne were the most common guesses. Both made sense; the riff is very similar to Weezer’s “Pork and Beans,” the lyrics remind of Fountains of Wayne’s many character portraits like “Bright Future in Sales.” But for me, the inspiration was obvious: It was Jonathan Coulton. “Skipper Dan” is an extremely atypical song for Al, funny but not funny-haha, honestly pretty sad, very much like Coulton’s many songs about people in comedically depressing situations. Al said he actually hadn’t intended it to sound like Coulton but he hears the similarities; Coulton joked on Twitter that no, he was the one who sounded like Al all these years. 

That’s nice of him to say but Coulton doesn’t sound a thing like Weird Al to me. Weird Al is a product of MTV: He’s loud and colorful, and his humor is broad and corny in a way that has kind of rendered him impervious to aging; he’ll always speak directly to your inner 12-year-old. Coulton, meanwhile, is a product of the Internet; he quit his job to pursue music because he was inspired by the power of the Web 1.0 to directly communicate with his fans. Coulton’s most popular songs were written in the mid-‘00s and reflect the Internet’s obsessions at the time: monkeys, zombies, robots. He’s irrevocably tied to that moment in time in geek culture, and boy has geek culture taken on a different light since then.

I remember Coulton saying that he’s expressing his own issues and emotions through strange avenues: the lonely giant squid of “I Crush Everything,” the mad scientist haplessly trying to woo his terrified captive in “Skullcrusher Mountain.” “Code Monkey,” his most popular song after “Still Alive” (on Spotify, at least) is like those, but its story is much more mundane. No scifi apocalypses in this one; just one unhappy white-collar drone in a dead-end job. A “code monkey,” Wikipedia helpfully explains to me, is a coder who’s not involved with any actual design work. His job is purely functional, the menial labor of programming. The only actual joke in the song is that Code Monkey speaks in broken Tarzan-style syntax (he might literally be a monkey). On Genius.com, someone smartly pointed out that the lyrics also resemble programming code - >Code Monkey goto: job. So a code monkey twice over – it’s clever! 

But “Code Monkey” isn’t really the fun or funny kind of clever; it’s too sincere and sad for that. Certainly Coulton’s nerd audience ate it up and related to it, but the titular Code Monkey is more than a nerd; he’s a loser. We gather he’s probably still youngish, in his twenties, but also old enough where he seems to be worrying that loserdom isn’t a phase he'll grow out of. His shitty boring low-respect job is sucking away his soul. It’s pretty nakedly personal for Coulton, who himself was a programmer before pursuing music. But the most revealing verse is the second one, where Code Monkey clumsily milady’s at the receptionist and gets lightly but firmly brushed off. It’s brutal cringe comedy sketched out with impressive economy. His flirting technique is giving awkward compliments and offering to do minor errands for her; it’s just the most humiliating beta shit, and in one line we can tell that the secretary sees right through it and is uncomfortable and is trying to shut it down as quickly as she can. It raises uncomfortable questions about what kind of person Code Monkey is exactly.

I don’t know if “Nice Guy” had entered the Internet lexicon yet in 2005 but Code Monkey seems like a textbook example. If you don’t know the term, “nice guy” in quotes generally means a guy who thinks of himself as a good person but is not actually all that impressive and is secretly driven by resentment that niceness hasn’t gotten him all the things he wants (especially in the romance department). When Code Monkey says he has “warm fuzzy secret heart,” it’s hard to take it at face value; the Code Monkey we meet is not warm and fuzzy, he’s bitter and frustrated and lonely and sad. Even the fan animation above has Code Monkey not as a cute chimp but as an angry feces-throwing animal. The character we hear about doesn’t seem to have any interesting traits (“Code Monkey like Fritos”), he has desires but no goals or ambitions, he doesn’t seem particularly fun to be around, from what we hear he’s not even a very good code monkey. I did not discover JoCo until relatively recently, and to me “Code Monkey” sounds like an artifact of a much different time in geekdom, when Joss Whedon and Kevin Smith were unironically revered and when nerd culture could still think of itself as the champion of the underdog. The archetype of the sexually frustrated computer nerd is a lot less sympathetic these days, to put it mildly. In fairness, there’s nothing concrete in the song to show that Code Monkey is an incel-in-training; it was just easy to assume the best about this character in 2005, and now in 2020 it’s easy to assume the worst. 

This is not to say that I think “Code Monkey” has become a bad song; I think it’s his best song. “High Fidelity” is also still one of my favorite movies; I had someone tell me that that movie is bad actually because John Cusack’s character is a selfish unlikable douche. My response to that is also my response to my own criticisms of Code Monkey: No shit. I know Code Monkey is unpleasantly self-pitying and basic; the song’s appeal depends on it. It also helps that on a musical level, “Code Monkey” fuckin’ rips, and when that chorus kicks in it’s hard not to relate to the monkey’s wounded pride. I’m pretty sure the song is self-aware; the maiin character is depicted as a dumb animal for a reason. Code Monkey’s frustrated with himself and his own limitations; I know he wishes he had something more to say for himself than liking Mountain Dew and naps. But that’s what he’s got and he can’t pretend to be what he isn’t.  

It’s probably not cool, for many reasons, to say that I still relate to “Code Monkey” but I do. I’ve had dull office jobs with no future that I wasn’t very good at. I’m well past that now, my job actually is “fulfilling in creative way” and I have no “boring manager Rob” to report to, just myself. But this job can feel just as pointless and dead-end as any other; when I sit down at the old content mill to write my episodes, I still wind up singing this to myself. (Review monkey like Fritos.) There’s a sad little code monkey in all of us, after all; “Code Monkey” may have aged strangely but my heart breaks for him and his stupid doomed crush. Tell Code Monkey he has many advantages and privileges and that he needs to examine his own decisions in life and that his story has been told too often, sure. But if he’s not as sympathetic to the world anymore, doesn’t that make his life all the sadder?