Becoming computational? (2018) | Ales Nesetril / Unsplash
When confronted with change we don’t understand, there is only one thing to do: laugh. Or so says MIT literature professor Benjamin Mangrum. In his new book, The Comedy of Computation: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence (Stanford University Press, 2025), Mangrum peers into the archives of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American comedy about the specter of computing, from Her (2013) and You’ve Got Mail (1998) to the literary stylings of Ishmael Reed and Kurt Vonnegut. In an interview with Rayna Salam, Mangrum discusses how he historicized this fear of falling behind and where he places AI in this genre.
Rayna Salam: You’ve written a book about humor in computers, arguing that comedy emerges to manage conflicting human emotions in response to constant technological change. What inspired this project?
Benjamin Mangrum: Unintended discovery. I came across a play by the playwright William Marchant called The Desk Set. It turns out that the first appearance of the computer on Broadway was in a romantic comedy. This was really weird and curious to me, in part because so much of our relationship to technology in our present moment—but also throughout the computer’s history—is one of anxiety. For instance, we’re worried that various forms of computational technology will displace or de-skill our labor, or make us more alienated from one another. There are all these versions of angst about the computer. I began to think about that dynamic and found that it was actually a common one. The computer and comedy have been coming together since the origins of the technology. The book is an effort to make sense of that dynamic. It’s not to say that comedy is wonderful or computers are bad, it’s more of an attempt to assess, think critically, about that dynamic.
Salam: Becoming computational, in your telling, is society assimilating to technology’s intimate reach.
Mangrum: Yes. It’s not my phrase. It’s a phrase that sociologists and digital humanists and others have created and used. The sense is that computational technology has transformed the economy: how we use credit cards at the grocery store and how we order groceries online and all this. But there are also these macro-level transformations at the social and economic level, and those are captured by the phrase “becoming computational.” It encapsulates the way we schedule our lives, how we find friends or find a date or how we wind down in the evening. These very intimate activities have become computational.
Salam: And monetized.
Mangrum: Yes, exactly. Becoming computational is not a unitary phenomenon. It’s complicated, it’s plural, and it captures these various scales of abstraction and intimacy. There are plot structures in which you can guess what’s going to happen at the end—like a wedding in a sort of Shakespearean comedy, for example. But at the same time, there are also forms of intimacy that develop within comedy. You bond with a person when you laugh with them. Comedy is a register that moves across those scales.
Salam: How did you approach a project like this? Did you have to narrow your search by time and place?
Mangrum: So I began the project thinking globally. I had a lot of French comedy that I was interested in, but my first book [Land of Tomorrow: Postwar Fiction and the Crisis of American Liberalism, 2019] is an Americanist book. Because of my area of expertise and my ability to make a coherent argument that was attentive to social dynamics, I felt I needed to place certain limitations on the argument. The different French comedies I had in mind would’ve just led in different directions. The book could only be so long!
Salam: Once you decided to stick with the United States, how did you go about finding works that paired comedy and computers?
Mangrum: I was lucky enough to just have lots and lots of conversations with colleagues who write on computers or who write on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the United States, and my initial inquiries tended to lead me down rabbit holes. A lot of the time they brought me to new discoveries that were a perfect fit. The most archivally focused aspect of the book is the first chapter, “The One about Race and Robots.” I read a lot of histories of automatons and other kinds of automated technology, and that led me to a series of newspapers that I saw cited in the footnotes or endnotes of these other books. Then I chased them down and found really creepy or interesting images of racialized robots, which is one of the themes of that first chapter.
Salam: Is there anything that you unearthed in this process that you couldn’t include?
Mangrum: There’s this great book called The Idiot by Elif Batuman, which is a comic novel about the early days of email. The protagonist of the novel goes to college where she gets an email account for the first time ever. And, of course, given that the book was published in 2016, this sets up all this nostalgia for readers: nostalgia for the early days of the internet, or the early days of email. It’s one of the novel’s central themes. The novel tries to get at what it’s like to age with technology. I, on the other hand, don’t talk about nostalgia at all in my book.
Salam: How did you decide on the chapter groups, such as being authentic, becoming generic, the racist origins of comedy about automation and robotics? Wouldn’t a chronological arrangement be more natural?
Mangrum: There wasn’t a story that I could figure out in a linear sense, so I began to think about these kinds of idioms and concentrations of ideas and problems. They began to cluster around these key terms. It felt like a kind of creative structure that I could play with in a way. I think that that’s also sort of consistent with how I use genre in the book, that in a sense genre is not a formalized structure that’s static—it’s very pliable.
Salam: You write about the promise of shows like Silicon Valley and the protean days of home computing, when these machines were seen as anarchic tools for personal liberation. Lately that’s a bit of a bygone punch line. Is there anything in your research that you sense we’ve moved beyond?
Mangrum: One of my conclusions about the computer’s cultural history is that in some ways the technology invites phenomenological obsolescence—which is to say our experiences, structures, and terms are constantly becoming obsolete. A very basic example of this is that jokes about dial-up internet don’t make sense anymore. That is illustrative of the more general social situation we’re in, where the way you talk about technology three years ago just doesn’t fit with our current moment. There’s so much about the book that orbits around obsolescence, not just in the sense of, “Is our work as knowledge workers, as thinkers and writers, becoming obsolete?” But also, the stuff from the 1960s or the broken promises of the homebrew computing age of the early 1980s. That’s obviously definitely obsolete too. There’s a constant and recurring sense of displacement that we experience.
Salam: One part of the book that I wanted to hear more about was the class anxiety baked into conversation about automation. I’m thinking about the white-collar office worker setting in comedy.
Mangrum: I think both as a person whose job is often being described as under the threat of obsolescence, and who works with ideas and words, that sort of threat certainly hangs over my profession—but it is class-based. One of the threads in the introduction touches on that anxiety. While on the one hand, it’s legitimate, it also makes a mistake by conflating class-based anxiety (or labor-specific kind of anxiety) with anxiety about human traits in general. So, although my particular set of skills or interests or whatever are being devalued or displaced, it’s a mistake to say that that itself stands in for the devaluation of human labor more broadly. It’s a complicated dynamic.
It’s a precarious business working in the knowledge industry. So on the one hand, I want to criticize the sort of technological developments that make an already precarious form of labor more precarious. On the other hand, I don’t want to universalize that form of labor as though it stands in for all kinds of labor.
Salam: The elephant in the room is generative AI. I saw that last month that you gave a talk on AI and the social contract, and I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about that.
Mangrum: I’m trying to think about how a lot of our discussions both in literary circles by novelists and by critics, but also by certain tech executives, really borrows language from social contract theory—this almost 300-year-old tradition of thinking about what it means to be a social body. In this work in progress, I’m interested in how a human or a worker’s relationship to AI is figured out, and how that image of the contract is actually really sneaky because it encodes or occludes dynamics that are worth investigating—the fact that there’s actually a kind of obligation in some instances to use AI, for example. In what sense is this a real contract or kind of willful choice? I’m specifically interested in the novel as a medium and what that tells us about the contradictions of our moment and of AI use.
Salam: Can you say more about your interest in the novel as a medium?
Mangrum: So far, I’ve been writing about some novelists that actually used different AI models to write their novels. For instance, there’s a book by Sean Michaels called Do You Remember Being Born? And the novel was partially written in collaboration with—that’s the language that the novel uses—two AI models. Michaels uses these models to generate text, and he differentiates the bot-generated text from his own prose using gray shading. I’m interested in the significance of that phenomenon, and hopefully as this becomes more common, I’m hoping to provide a framework for making sense of it. That’s the goal.
Salam: Is your research about computers and comedy still ongoing?
Mangrum: I am working on an article that’s about contingent labor in the tech industry. It deals with a few novels focused on workers who receive visas to come to the United States to work in precarious, low-paid jobs in the tech industry [IT support, software development] and that portray their experiences through comedic genres.
Click here to read an excerpt from The Comedy of Computation: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence in which Benjamin Mangrum discusses the 2008 film Control Alt Delete.
