DON'T READ THE COMMENTS Pt 2

Twitter's Analog Antecedent & the Ancestral Roots of Reddit Humor

Continued from part 1…

As I developed a mental callus for the letters to the editor and began practicing the discipline of recognizing when to stop reading something before it could fully enrage me, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution changed the stakes. Like a late-70s coke dealer introducing his best customers to freebase, the AJC worked out a new delivery system for the bad juju of the letters section, concentrating its worst effects in a way that could bypass even the heartiest tolerance. They called this The Vent.

The Vent was a column on the outer edge of page 2 of the local news section, where you’d usually expect to see an events calendar or On This Date In History-type material. The idea was that readers could call a number to complain about something into an answering machine and the paper would transcribe their complaint and print it with a bunch of others. Its logo was a furious cartoon telephone screaming profanities into its own receiver.

The Vent was concocted and run by the AJC‘s traffic columnist, The Lane Ranger, which is obviously a classic example of job-that-once-was, writing print advice for the following day’s commute. I suspect, but can’t be bothered to confirm, that it began life as a sort of traffic-tips hotline which devolved into characteristic Atlanta bitching, but by the time it caught on its purview had been widened to anything you want to gripe—or “vent”—about.

Traffic remained a mainstay (Atlanta), but people in The Vent groused about a wide variety of subjects: local government, sports, their boss, restaurant behavior, shit on television, interpersonal drama with unnamed neighbors or coworkers, the weather, pager etiquette, their employees, The Wife. There was effectively a character limit to “vents,” although I think they measured it by either word count or length-of-answering-machine-message. Basically a sentence or two, no attribution. So what you got every day was a four-inch stream of anonymous invective, just bitch after bitch after bitch after bitch down the whole length of the page.

A style congealed. Broad, epigrammatic declarations of universal wrath in application to extremely specific petty grievances. Rhetorical questions wailed unto heaven from the I-75/85 Downtown Connector. Completely hypothetical scenarios that were just a seedbed for some new pun—puns so obtuse they had to be offset with hyphens or quote marks. Hyperbolic rage and flat, back-of-the-throat sarcasm were the trademark modes of the early Vent, whether in tandem or welded awkwardly together. Pithiness, when it occurred, which wasn’t very often, was of the sort you’d accept on a contemporaneous t-shirt or bumper sticker.

You would not believe the kind of shit that passed for humor in The Vent. Here, I have an example:

And that’s at least an honest attempt at a joke—once a week you’d see a straight-up rip from that week’s episode of Seinfeld or an old Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey. Imagine doing that, calling your fucking newspaper and regurgitating lines from a TV show as if you’d come up with them. These were, again to reiterate, unattributed.

What we generally refer to these days as “Reddit humor” has a lineage which traces back through fark.com in the late 90s to what we-before-the-internet would call “office jokes.” “You want it when?!” with the cartoon guy rolling on the floor in screaming laughter; variants of the xeroxed sign “You don’t have to be crazy to work here...” where they’ll either train you or just note that “it helps”; facetious vocational prayers and pseudo-eponymous “laws.” These totems marked out the workspace of an office figure every bit as archetypal to the 90s as the classic senior manager with his framed Successories poster and executive-gift-laden desk—the office cut-up.

Like many a traditional clown or jester, the office joker usually gave off the impression of being a deeply and intrinsically miserable person who was loitering on either side of a full-scale emotional crack up. Engineers and other technical professions seemed especially susceptible to this role—that’s the whole deal with Dilbert, another 90s rosetta stone—to the point where I still have a hard time reading a cliché reddit post without picturing the requisite cell-phone holster and thinning pate furrowed down over narrow rectanguloid glasses. These guys took to The Vent like the tone-deaf to an open mic.

Because of their length, though, or lack thereof, it was practically impossible to get a real, visceral sense of each writer, or venter, and the result of this was a sort of schizophrenic feeling of getting yelled at by a chorus of essentially the same guy over and over for completely different things in the same smarmy, know-better voice. You’d get women in The Vent sometimes, but they were damn-near indistinguishable from the men without context clues like mentioning high heels or their husband.

There was also a lot more Bubba in The Vent than in the letters to the editor, which could’ve been because of the comparative ease of leaving an answering machine message but also might’ve just been due to the nascent popularity of Jeff Foxworthy. This would be around 1993, the year his You Might Be A Redneck If... convinced millions of middle-class, white-collar suburban dads that they’d actually been brought up in rural poverty and were as such members of a protected class of natural geniuses. Such to say that sometimes a couple of the barking voices would have a legible Southern accent, or proffer rustic folk wisdom on the finer points of truck repair or the University of Georgia Athletics program. That at least mixed things up, I guess.

Anyways, it was a hit. For months after its debut every damn adult you’d be forced to meet would ask “Have you ever read this thing The Vent?” and then if you said something crotchety or mildly clever they’d say “You should send that in to The Vent!” The paper published multiple books of collected vents in that little index-card-looking gift-book format with the spine on the short side so the pages are all wider than they are tall, like for Christmas stockings. People would fucking clip it in the morning and take the goddamn column with them to work to show their coworkers ones they thought were good. Coworkers or their fucking students.

It was unavoidable. Even when you weren’t being subject to a completely nonconsensual recitation of what some munch thinks police oughta do to unruly teens at Perimeter Mall, it was just there. You couldn’t not read it. I mentioned the skill up top of being able to stop reading something when you realize it’s going to piss you off for no demonstrable gain. (A hard-won skill, requiring lifelong vigilance and practice.) There was no chance of that with The Vent. They’re too short. If you start reading one then you’ve read the thing. It’s through the callus. And there’s the next one right below it, ready to slip through the puncture. And there’s your day gone—torpoedo’d by yesterday’s ire, courtesy of Who Knows. Courtesy of Some Guy On A Phone.

I’m old enough to remember how mystified the general public was by Twitter when it launched. (And equally old enough to remember that Facebook’s first marketing push was a word-of-mouth campaign that it was “like Myspace without black people” (because, you see, they initially required a college email to register—cool guys, right?)) Part of this was that the idea of Twitter, or not even the idea, just the fact that there was a thing called Twitter, outpaced anyone’s actual use of the site. My ex-wife was emailing back and forth with an older coworker in the office around this time, and they were responding to each other really quickly and the older coworker leaned around her monitor and breathlessly asked “Is this it? Are we twittering?”

Twitter’s early users made grandiose and legitimately insufferable claims about the website, how it was supposed to be some revolutionary new framework of expression, its own new medium. I’m serious, people talked about it, in earnest—Twitter—like they’d just watched Horse In Motion at Eadward Muybridge’s house. “I think we’re seeing the birth of a brand new artistic medium,” I’m paraphrasing but I swear some tool wrote basically that on Metafilter or boingboing.net, royal we and everything. Another couple of schmucks made a bunch of accounts to reenact the early days of Nazi Germany through tweets in order to demonstrate that Twitter would’ve stopped the Holocaust. That experiment (they called it “an experiment”) has only grown funnier in the last decade.

My own first impression of Twitter was “Oh, so it’s The Vent, but it just keeps going.” The length of the posts was the same, I guess you could see people’s names but back then everyone was like @blonky or @sasparillllllla so it might as well’ve been anonymous. The general tone was a little different, but not much. Similar pomposity, everybody always declaiming something as though from on high. (I remember, back when I ran the Vice Twitter account, I got in an argument with some dude over like a band or something, and his next post was “30-degrees in Raleigh tonight, I feel for all the poor souls without homes.” Just, great job there, buddy.) Less overt anger maybe. At first. Although once people figured out you could get free shit from airlines, that style of bitching was identical. And usually directed open-letter-style at “you,” the reader, presumed to at some point include whoever it was they were actually mad at. As if you yourself were American Air.

This is where it really paralleled its analog antecedent, in its effect, the sensation of being spoken to, and sometimes yelled at, by about five people at the same time. The insistent, needling din of randos’ careless thoughts. Some ogre’s bad mood fired whole hog straight into your corneas. The Vent, at least, was a single page. At its worst, it was the functional equivalent stopping in a Waffle House during off-peak hours and letting everyone present insult you. Twitter’s like when Japanese wrestling legend Antonio Inoki slapped everyone in the stadium, but in reverse, and forever.

None of this is to suggest that I think Twitter’s worthless, or beneath me or anything. I still have fond memories of that account pretending to be Soon-Yi Previn, with the one-two punch of “Help! Dad-husband is missing in Fairway!” and, five minutes later, “It’s ok, he was in vitamin aisle.” But let’s call it what it was: an RSS feed you could blog on.

Or, to cue up what I’m actually on about here, a comment section detached from its content.

Part 3 eventually…