New Yorker: Print or Web, Still a Slam

This week's New Yorker has a Shouts & Murmurs piece by Larry Doyle, a former writer for The Simpsons, called Share Our Joy. Read the print version and you see a number of words and phrases underlined. At the end of the piece is a suggestion to go to www.newyorker.com to further follow the story. Go to the site and you see the story along with links - those underlined sections.

This seems like an entirely silly way to bring print and the web together. The true extent of the satire of a young and pretentious couple, obviously with too much available money for any good to come of it, doesn't become apparent until you start following some of the links. Next, the reader basically has to reread the piece to put the links into context, and many readers of the print version aren't going to take the trouble.

Separately, some of the humor felt stereotyped. For example, there's mention of a pilot who takes people from an airport to an island on their way to a wedding ceremony who has to be checked to be sure he's sober. Can you imagine that sort of image being used in relation to Ireland? Canada? Germany? Of course not. Obviously in such "civilized" places one wouldn't need to check if the pilot was drunk. And a remark about "the whole child-slavery thing" as a reason to leave the kids at home? There actually is a link to www.antislavery.org and the reports on Latin America, but then the US has certainly had a number of cases recently hitting the courts of illegal immigrants being kept as slave labor. A reference to a slightly alcoholic drink called chicha has a link to an explanation of how this was made from a site called AncientWorlds. Heaven forbid that the author use a link to a more modern view, just as the methods of producing food and drink changed in Europe over the period of, oh, a thousand years or more.

Humor requires an appreciation of its intellectual milieu. If you have to depend on people doing background reading to see why what you write is funny, it's the hypertext equivalent of explaining a joke. The laugh won't be coming, and left is a colonial attitude of watching the amusing savages. Compound that with the assumption that what is properly designed for the web should work in print, and I think the piece is an interesting experiment that thoroughly failed.