The Comedy of Computation: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence
By Benjamin Mangrum. Stanford University Press, 2025.
In The Comedy of Computation, a cultural history of the computer, Benjamin Mangrum shows that comedy has been central to how we’ve made sense of the technology’s sweeping effects on public life and private experience. From the first Broadway play to include a computer in the 1950s to popular films like You’ve Got Mail and joke-telling digital assistants, Mangrum assembles an extensive archive of work by writers, filmmakers, programmers, engineers, and other technologists who have coupled comedy ...