Geek Wisdom

by Stephen H. Segal

  Here’s some really obscure geek trivia: Allan Sherman, the 1960s song-parodist precursor to Weird Al Yankovic who wrote “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah,” also recorded a little ditty titled “Oh, Boy.” Sadly, Sam Beckett never met him onscreen.

  “NOBODY EXPECTS THE

  SPANISH INQUISITION!”

  —MONTY PYTHON’S FLYING CIRCUS

  “WHAT IS THE AIR-SPEED

  VELOCITY OF AN

  UNLADEN SWALLOW?”

  —MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL

  WE SEEK SOLACE IN SILLINESS. This was the simple formula the madcap sketch-comedy geniuses of Monty Python stumbled upon as they shone their uniquely British (well, five Brits and a Yank) spotlight on all manner of absurdist tableaus—whether the aforementioned Spanish Inquisitors busting anachronistically into a scene far removed in time and space from their own, or a pet-shop owner insisting that a stiff and motionless parrot is most certainly not dead, or an armless and legless Black Knight defiantly proclaiming that it’s “just a flesh wound.” Indeed, so influential were these funnymen in reshaping the landscape of millennial humor that the very term Pythonesque has garnered inclusion in dictionaries as a signifier of the loopy, punch-drunk surrealism that their routines encourage each of us to free inside ourselves. You might not think it on those days when you’re up at six, stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic, and headed to a job you despise working for a boss you detest, but sometimes the only way to empower yourself and push back against the various vicissitudes life throws at you is to take a step back, see yourself as part of an awesomely ridiculous joke that’s as big as the whole damn universe, and just let yourself laugh out loud at it, whether or not anyone else thinks it makes a lick of sense. It doesn’t. That’s why it’s funny.

  Monty Python’s Flying Circus originally aired on the BBC from late 1969 through 1974. For geek context: That’s the Jon Pertwee era of Doctor Who.

  “I SAY WE TAKE OFF AND NUKE

  THE SITE FROM ORBIT.”

  —RIPLEY, ALIENS

  MOVIE LOGIC FRUSTRATES most geeks. It just doesn’t make sense for the people in a horror film to go one by one to investigate that strange noise in the dark—that didn’t work out so well for the last five people, did it? It’s stupid for the evil overlord to capture the intrepid hero and then leave him alone in a room full of convenient tools; any overlord with a brain would just kill the guy right off. All too often, Hollywood characters choose the more dramatic path through hardship rather than the smart one. This was why the Alien films were such a breath of fresh air. Ripley, faced with a planetary colony full to overflowing with unstoppably murderous alien beasts, actually understood what she was up against. Never mind trying to safely capture an alien—it wasn’t going to happen. Ripley pushed instead for the Occam’s Razor method of problem-solving: simple, overwhelming, effective. Thus “take off and nuke the site from orbit” has become geek shorthand for putting a decisive end to any dangerously messy problem. Overkill? Maybe. But sometimes you just have to be sure.

  In our personal version of the Alien universe, Newt and Ripley and the cat are all off somewhere living happily ever after. They deserve it.

  “IT’S DANGEROUS TO GO ALONE!

  TAKE THIS.”

  —CAPTION FROM THE LEGEND OF ZELDA, TURNED INTO A LOLCAT MEME

  SMART PEOPLE ARE OFTEN self-sufficient and confident, particularly when it comes to our particular area(s) of expertise. The average geek is often the only person in the group who’s capable of solving some arcane and specialized problem. Which presents a whole ’nother problem: Even though geeky confidence and competence can sometimes lead to obnoxious and undeserved arrogance, the plain fact of the matter is that, frequently, when it comes to a particular topic, the geek really is the most knowledgeable person in the room. That doesn’t stop other people from trying to help, though—often with contributions that seem absurd or useless. The foolish geek rolls his or her eyes at these offers of help, but the wise geek takes them as they’re meant: a sincere desire to share in the geeky joy of problem-solving. And hey, you never know—that doofus might just have a point.

  Please feel free to consider this book as a “this” that just might possibly be helpful.

  “NOW WE KNOW. AND KNOWING

  IS HALF THE BATTLE!”

  —G.I. JOE (CARTOON)

  G.I. JOE, like many cartoons of the 1980s, taught us the meaning of irony. Every week, after watching a privately funded mercenary squad fire thousands of lasers, missiles, and BFGs at its enemies, we then endured a brief lecture on morality, including the need to resolve problems without violence. But we saw no real contradiction in this, since compartmentalization is a necessary and welcome part of the geek mindset. How else are we to keep separate our many realms—not just our fictional realms of fantasy and science fiction and roleplaying games, but our real-world realms of entertainment, work, and social life? So ingrained is our ability to suspend disbelief at will, and to separate fantasy from reality, that we are often stunned when non-geeks don’t do this, or don’t believe us when we say we can. Could this be why we embrace the fantastic, while non-geeks frequently fear or disdain it?

  One of the great triumphs in the field of Internet snark is the viral-hit G.I. Joe–themed pie chart in which we are informed that “The Battle” is made up of 50 percent knowing, 25 percent red lasers, and 25 percent blue lasers.

  “FLY CASUAL!”

  —HAN SOLO, RETURN OF THE JEDI

  OR: “NEVER LET ’EM SEE YOU SWEAT.” Or: “There is nothing to fear but fear itself.” Attempting to sneak past an imperial blockade in which Darth Vader’s cruiser is close enough to scratch the paint, smuggler-turned-rebel-general Han Solo uses humor and a little bit of swagger to assure his crew that all is well, even as most of us would quiver and crumble under similarly dire circumstances. That is why we love Han. Not because he doesn’t feel the same panic we all do, but because he doesn’t allow it to cripple him; instead he finds a way to power through it. Granted, the line between swagger and stupidity can be thin, and only the passage of time will determine which side we end up on. Regardless of the aphorism you wrap it in, the sentiment expressed by Solo—casual confidence in the face of insurmountable odds—is not only what we hope to see in our leaders, it’s what we hope to find inside ourselves.

  There are geeks who opine that Return of the Jedi (1983) was where the Star Wars saga began to stink. There are a handful of still geekier geeks itching to one-up them and claim Empire is where it went wrong. Those geeks? Even we want to give them wedgies.

  “AS AN ONLINE DISCUSSION

  GROWS LONGER,

  THE PROBABILITY OF

  A COMPARISON INVOLVING

  NAZIS OR HITLER

  APPROACHES 1.”

  —MIKE GODWIN, GODWIN’S LAW

  GEEKS LOVE TO FIGHT, and those fights are often epic in their awesomeness. The advent of the Internet merely updated a longstanding geek tradition of launching interpersonal battles over minutiae—which, prior to the Internet, expressed itself in the form of months-long arguments in the “Letters to the Editor” columns of comic books, dueling Cthulhu Mythos tales in fanzines, and so on. But the Internet also made it clear that geek arguments follow a predictable pattern—and any dispute that goes on long enough will always, inevitably, reach the “scorched earth” stage, past which any discussion becomes irrelevant. (Oh, so preferring Batman’s black-armored movie costume to his classic grey tights is the opinion of, not just another guy, but a jackbooted fascist? Really, boywonder953? Really?) This has become such a truism that weary blog commenters, smelling a nasty fight in the making, will often preemptively mention Nazis just to cut things short. And it’s alarming to see that the non-geek portions of the media have taken the same path; heck, the Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert rally of 2010 was mostly an attempt to ask, “Can we please stop calling each other Hitler?” It would seem the answer is no.

  At least some geeks are fighting to take back the Hitler epithet in the nam
e of good-spirited silliness. Thousands of YouTube videos have mashed up a scene in the Hitler bio-film Downfall with topics ranging from Xbox to Twilight.

  “I LOVE IT WHEN A PLAN

  COMES TOGETHER!”

  —JOHN “HANNIBAL” SMITH, THE A-TEAM

  HAN SOLO MAY HAVE SHOWN us the seat-of-your-pants thrill of improvising, but Hannibal Smith taught us there’s something to be said for taking the long view. And one thing you can’t accuse the jocular leader of the A-Team of is not taking the long view, with his daisy-chain schemas of elaborate disguises, car crashes, and lots of pyrotechnics making it all the sweeter when he deployed his trademark catchphrase as the payoff to a job well done. As Smith and his Team-mates showed week in and week out between 1983 and 1987 (and once in 2010), sometimes planning isn’t about anticipating every exigency down to the last detail; it’s about knowing how to react when the unexpected occurs. He may never have led an army across the Alps atop elephants, like the Carthiginian general from whom he took his name, Hannibal nonetheless exemplified the same lesson: The bigger the risk, the greater the need for planning—and the bigger the thrill when it falls into place.

  Geek thrills that follow much the same principle: dominos, Rube Goldberg machines, and Odyssey of the Mind tournaments.

  “DON’T CROSS THE STREAMS.

  IT WOULD BE BAD.”

  —EGON SPENGLER, GHOSTBUSTERS

  EGON’S WARNING TO his fellow Ghostbusters was perhaps the most casually deadpan mention of possibly accidentally blowing oneself to bits ever committed to voice. It’s typical, though. In the eyes of mainstream society, most geeks tend to get excited by all the “wrong” things. From raging battles over which is the best X-Man to the abject joy that ripples through nerddom whenever a new Hubble image is released, there’s no doubt that geeks are passionate people. Yet, all this passion for offbeat, unique things sometimes leaves little room in our cerebral cortex for getting excited about relatively ordinary things … like, say, the possibility of a violent horrific death. Death, after all, happens to everyone; there’s nothing especially unique about it. But a Goldilocks-zone exoplanet? Now that’s worth an exclamation point or two. Of course, this means that whenever a geek laconically suggests that taking a particular course of action “would be bad,” those passionate about their own continued well-being should probably pay really, really close attention.

  Hey, what’s a Goldilocks-zone exoplanet, anyway? We’re gonna let you look that one up. Consider it an exercise in geekiness.

  “JOIN THE ARMY,

  MEET INTERESTING PEOPLE,

  AND KILL THEM.”

  —STEVEN WRIGHT

  “ITS FIVE-YEAR MISSION:

  TO EXPLORE STRANGE

  NEW WORLDS.”

  —OPENING NARRATION, STAR TREK

  “I WILL GOUGE OUT

  YOUR EYES AND

  SKULLF— YOU!”

  —GUNNERY SERGEANT HARTMAN, FULL METAL JACKET

  THE MILITARY REPRESENTS a jumble of mixed feelings for young geeks, and Steven Wright’s classic one-line gag pretty much sums it up. Growing up on a diet of epic adventure stories tends to cultivate a sense of romanticism, which means we get excited at the prospect of sharing a quest with a band of comrades, of taking part in a grand struggle that’s greater than ourselves. Also, we love tech—and who has better gadgets than the military. On the other hand, our natural inclination to always question authority, to push back against dogma, means that we chafe against any sort of hierarchical command structure that might require us to take direction from anyone whose view of the universe is smaller and meaner than our own. It’s no coincidence that Gene Roddenberry changed the broad face of science fiction by creating a tale that managed to have it both ways: Starfleet is a military-structured organization whose first mission is peaceful exploration; the Enterprise carries a crew who are willing to buck the rules whenever they think it’s necessary, and, miraculously, they almost always turn out to be right. There’s no screaming drill sergeant threatening to rip out a trainee’s eyes in Star Trek, and there’s rarely an Abu Ghraib, either. (That’s why the rougher, rawer Battlestar Galactica, not Trek, was the science-fiction success story of the 2000s.) Could there ever be a real Starfleet—a force using military organization to effectively promote individual accomplishment throughout its sphere of action? Countless disillusioned Peace Corps vets suggest no—and yet our geeky hearts still want to say yes.

  Colonel Tigh, the drill-sergeant archetype in Galactica, was the one who got his eye gouged out. We’re pretty sure that’s irony.

  “TO LEARN WHICH QUESTIONS ARE

  UNANSWERABLE, AND NOT ANSWER THEM:

  THIS SKILL IS MOST NEEDFUL IN TIMES OF

  STRESS AND DARKNESS.”

  —URSULA LE GUIN, THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS

  SOMETIMES, SCI-FI CHARACTERS offering advice veer into the realm of the overcooked. But sometimes a piece of wisdom hits you right between the eyes. Geeks in particular have a tendency to overthink—to insist on making sense of everything from every angle so we might come at an answer from a place of omnipotence. As nice a situation as that might be, reality generally precludes it; we live in a quick-and-dirty world that functions largely on snap decision and compromise. That can often take some adjustment for geeks, who prefer their world-building logical and their decisions foolproof. And it’s disheartening to realize that the world is also far more stress and darkness than sweetness and light. The good news is that if anyone can separate the components of a situation and solve only for the bug-free variables, it’s geeks. The trick is to recognize the unsolvable when it appears; there, you’re on your own.

  A counterpart to Le Guin’s point has been expressed in the realm of pure mathematics: Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem (1931) says that any mathematical system will include facts about the natural numbers that are true, yet cannot be proved.

  “THIS IS MY BOOMSTICK.”

  —ASH, ARMY OF DARKNESS

  WE LOVED ASH in Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2, but it was in Army of Darkness, when he played a modern-day Yankee in King—er, Lord—Arthur’s court, that he really shone. And we loved it, because Ash was a geek and a badass. He knew more than everyone around him. He was unversed in the social graces of the era, but that was okay; he made his own rules. We also loved the subtle critique of geekiness that the film displayed. Ash’s cockiness made him his own worst enemy, and his love life might have turned out a lot better if he hadn’t been such an ass. But he didn’t care about those things, either. In the end, it was his confidence, deserved or not, that made him powerful and admirable. Even if some of us never did forgive him for screwing up klaatu barada nikto. He lost some geek points for that one.

  Geek Hall of Fame alert: Bruce Campbell’s portrayal of Ash kicked off a career that spanned such cult classics as Bubba Ho-tep, Escape from L.A., Xena: Warrior Princess, and The Adventures of Brisco County Jr.

  “THE FIRST RULE OF FIGHT CLUB IS:

  YOU DO NOT TALK ABOUT FIGHT CLUB.”

  —TYLER DURDEN, FIGHT CLUB

  THERE’S SOMETHING to be said for exclusivity. After all, haven’t you ever had a favorite band that you lived and breathed until it committed the cardinal sin of becoming too popular? Haven’t you had a favorite movie you began to hate once everyone else started quoting it? Didn’t Facebook lose some of its luster when you got that friend request from your great-aunt Polly? The “fight club” at the center of Chuck Palahniuk’s book and David Fincher’s film isn’t so much a social movement as it is that hardcore indie band you just don’t want to see sell out. But that’s the inherent problem with anything that impacts society enough to bring about lasting change: Its success carries within it the seeds of its eventual dissolution. If history teaches us anything, it’s that the rebels of today are inevitably the establishmentarians of tomorrow—whether Fidel Castro, Kurt Cobain, or Mark Zuckerberg. And so, can you really blame Tyler Durden for wanting to keep a lid on his new favorite thing for just a little while lon
ger?

  The novel Fight Club (1996) established Chuck Palahniuk as a major author of disturbing fiction. His short story “Guts,” about unfortunate masturbation accidents, established him as an author who could cause people to faint while listening to him read out loud.

  “TO CRUSH YOUR ENEMIES, SEE THEM

  DRIVEN BEFORE YOU, AND TO HEAR THE

  LAMENTATION OF THEIR WOMEN.”

  —CONAN, CONAN THE BARBARIAN

  THE HEARTLESSNESS OF THE CONQUEROR is something most people are incapable of understanding. We are empathetic beings; the roots of our greatest civilizations, and thus our greatest accomplishments, lie in our inherently social nature. Even we geeks—solitary creatures of the modern world—feel the same pull. The great conquerors did not. For Alexander of Macedon, life was the campaign. For Genghis Khan, a day dawning without plumes of smoke rising from the cities behind him was not a day worth living. Napoleon Bonaparte’s conquests were not an expansion of the French Revolution and the ’emperor’s ideals, but a result of his irrepressible need to run roughshod over others. These were great men in their own way, men whose deeds help continue history’s inexorable march toward the modern world. But they were also troubled in a way most of us cannot grasp. Considering the broken families and endless gravestones left in their wake, maybe we ought to be glad that such greatness is rare.

  Conan’s most famous quote from Conan the Barbarian (1982) comes not from the classic stories by author Robert E. Howard but is adapted from an anecdote related in the 1927 Genghis Khan biography, Emperor of All Men.

  “SOME DAYS, YOU JUST CAN’T GET RID

  OF A BOMB.”

  —BATMAN, BATMAN (1966)

  TRUER WORDS have never been spoken, you know? Of course, you’d never expect Batman to have a problem disposing of a bomb—the man has a handmade tool belt that navigates a submarine, for crying out loud—but this is the Adam West version we’re talking about. Of all the Batman incarnations, this deliberately cartoonish take on the savior of Gotham ruined Batman’s street cred with the other superheroes for decades afterward. It’s comforting in its own way to think that, even if we can’t have sound-effect bubbles when we head out for capers, we can at least relate to Batman every time we have an explosive situation that can’t be easily dismissed. (Figuratively … we hope.) It’s understandable that sometimes a situation is more than you can clean up. The world is a tricky place, and, superhero or not, sometimes you just can’t make a problem go away.