Fake Steve Jobs & Letters from BILL GMatt Sephton talks about comedy blogs/columns impersonating famous people from the ‘00s and ‘90s, respectively.
It’s striking how much language affects comedy.
Here’s a Bill G column hand-translated from Japanese to English. Matt says it is funny in Japanese, and I have no doubt that it is. In English, you feel that this is familiar style of humor, but something is clearly lost.
Dear Japanese readers with no brains. I'm the well-known zillionaire, Bill G. Have you already bought the masterpiece called "The Lord Ahead" in which my future vision is written? In this book, mainly I tell with my persistence how I've been dominating the kingdom of personnel computers, and also how I'll be dominating it from now on.
Once being a king, the enemies increasing. Day after day, I'm more terrified with those who menace my life. In this issue, let me bring up the subject of terrorism.
Fake Steve Jobs is a blog which is used to read when it was active. Now I notice that he, in addition to the Steve Jobsisms, uses words like “shizzle,” “tard,” and “hottie.” Those words aren’t used today, even in jest, and are a marker of the ‘00s. (“Hottie” was always awkward. Not just because of the objectifying but also because of the pronunciation ergonomics. It always sounds like “hadi”.)
What I used to think was weird about the ‘00s was that it did not have its own feel like the ‘80s and ‘90s did. It just seemed “blank white backdrop” unflavored. In hindsight, it did.
When I read those posts, the language takes the foreground, along with the history and my knowledge of what happened to the technologies and companies mentioned in the posts. So, it’s not as funny as when it was fresh, but that’s OK because writing for the future is futile.
Personality-based jokes like
Jobs bullying Wozniak is still as funny, though.