“Sometimes you scare me, Shapiro.”
“You mean because I’ve been working lately?”
“No, because you draw robots meditating.”
He found it in a pad on my desk. I must’ve drawn it in lab meeting.
“Of course they om. It’s the Universal Sixty Cycle Hum. Omnipresent, immanent, un-noticed.”
I remember these. Or I kind of remember them. I was drawing meditating robots and rectangular mechanical-looking yin-yang signs. I remember that I thought they were hilarious. But I have no idea why. So tell me: Why did I think this was hilarious?
Tags: meditating robots
Um, because you’re scary?
Can a robot meditate without a mind?
Angela, you say the sweetest things.
Did you program him?
Well, it all depending on your perspective. Figure-ground as they say. I assumed he was a chemist calculating a concentration and it turned out to be zero molar, or O M.
I think that trying to explain funny is possibly one of the hardest thing in the world to do. We can explain irony and slapstick and absurdity, but it’s more difficult to explain why those things are funny.
I would say that a meditating robot falls under the catagory of absurdity. Wasn’t there a Sci-Fi author who wrote about machines with souls? Or several dozen? Heck, you probably couldn’t swing a cat without hitting one.
something that square is meditating? Ha Ha Ha!
That’s funny!
You know how “WE” and “LIFE” just “ARE”…..there is no explanation for these things. And so it is, of course, true of “why some things are hilarious”…. (Chuck’s Zen-ness shining thru).
(P.S. I once laughed for hours and hours with a wonderful man (we BOTH laughed for hours and hours) over a totally absurd concept that we took out to the um-teenth degree….noone else would ever begin to think it was even the slightest bit funny….we couldn’t stop laughing…we were laughing so hard that the “snorting” thing was happening. It was absolutely GREAT! We became ONE WITH THE LAUGHTER (??!!?*#!)
Gee, I wonder who that was…