Public Seminar is a journal of ideas and debate published by the Public Seminar Publishing Initiative at The New School. This past week, Public Seminar writer Rayna Salam and Prof Ben Mangrum discussed the assembly process of Ben’s latest book, The Comedy of Computation; Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence. Literature, technology, and the history of “computational intimacy” commingle in this conversation about comedy, AI, and culture.
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.