Reverse-Engineering a joke
When I was a kid in kindergarten, my dad had a few friends he would regularly hang out and drink beers (and do shots) with. Most of these excursions were distinctly not for kids, and I would be dropped off at my grandparents’ house for the night. On these occasions, I would hope that, at the very least, my dad would wait to drop me off until after the guys started arriving. I always liked hanging around them. I think I probably idolized them a little. Occasionally, however, he’d go to dinner with a few of them, and, assuming the restaurant wasn’t a Hooters or something (note: as far as I know, they never went to Hooters), there was a chance that I would be invited.
While all of my dads’ friends were, in my mind, infinitely cool in various ways (there was Rich, the one who knew everything there was to know about sports, esp. the San Francisco 49ers; Paul, the guy who was always cracking jokes and laughing boisterously and telling stories about his ridiculous misadventures; and Mike). However, there was one of my dad’s friends who, I felt, was on a whole different level of coolness than the others, and that was Mike. Mike had thick black hair and a dark black beard, and invariably arrived in a leather jacket. He had a deep, intimidating voice and, as far as I could tell, he hated me.
He wasn’t outright mean to me…okay, that’s not entirely true: one thing I remember him saying to me was “children should be seen and not heard.” And yet, I always looked forward to seeing him more than the others. Maybe it was the sheer, masculine bad-assedness that drew me to him even though I knew he had no idea how to behave around the under-legal-age-and-male crowd (based on his track record, I have no doubt he’d have few problems talking to high school jailbait).
So, one night, I get to go with my dad and his friends to a restaurant. Presumably it was a Mexican restaurant by the SFO airport, overlooking the bay – the Bayshore district was a frequent spot for such gatherings. And on this occasion, Mike shared a joke with the group:
“A guy walks into a bar. He’s huge, like Arnold Schwarzenegger huge, built like a football player. But he has a tiny head, it’s probably about the size of this.” He cups his hands around a small, glass, teardrop-shaped candle holder about the size and shape of a small water balloon. “So he sits at the bar and says [switching to a falsetto voice] ‘Pour me a shot of bourbon.’ The bartender eyes him nervously, and pours the drink. He asks for another, and the bartender pours another. Finally, the bartender says, ‘okay, I’ve got to ask, what’s up with your head?’ The guy looks at him, sighs, and says:
“’I didn’t use to look like this. I used to be a geek, working in an office making photocopies. I was on a plane when it crashed in the middle of the ocean and I drifted onto this deserted island. The only thing there was this strange bottle. I dusted it off to get a better look when this gorgeous, naked woman appeared. She says ‘I will give you three wishes.’ So, I’m like ‘holy shit!’ My first wish is to get off this island and into a lush mansion in the Hollywood hills with millions of dollars. Suddenly, I’m in this palace with butlers and maids and more money than I can throw. My second wish is to be built like a bodybuilder, the envy of all men and the desire of all women, and she gives me most of what you see here. So then, I look at her standing there, and I say…”
That’s it. That’s all I got. Because the rest was whispered and I was instructed to cover my ears. And later, I figured that I had actually even heard the punchline, but it didn’t make sense to me. Nevertheless, my dad and his friends burst into uproarious laughter.
I was never the cool kid in school. I was pretty much always the geeky kid. So, when my dad’s super-cool friend Mike tells a joke and I’m allowed to listen to 9/10 of it, and the joke is apparently the funniest thing anyone has heard in a long time, I’m going to try to figure out what the joke is.
I spent the next couple years telling and retelling the joke, trying to insert a punchline that made sense and fit with the rest of the story. But me retelling the joke to my friends never had anything near the result that the joke had that night. I kept revising and retelling and finally I gave up telling it, deciding that the one element that was always missing was the one thing I didn’t have, and, for whatever reason, couldn’t conjure: the punchline.
Maybe ten or so years later, my mind appropriately dirtied by adolescence and porn and television, I figured out the punchline: “can you give me a little head?”
Looking back at Twitter Rocket and my experiment in trying to reverse-engineer it, I wonder if my reverse-engineering attempts weren’t similar to trying to reverse-engineer a joke without knowing the punchline. I knew the result, I knew the components, I had some ideas about what should and should not go into it, based on other things Ashley Morgan wrote on Upstart Blogger. And, in retrospect, my reverse-engineering attempts largely succeeded with one major caveat: I underestimated how much Twitter Rocket actually borrowed from the things that Upstart Blogger had previously exposed as scams – I assumed that Twitter Rocket must be different from those, and therefore as superior as he (and everyone else writing about it) said it was. And, in that, I was very mistaken; Twitter Rocket was no different from its predecessors – it just wanted you to think that it was.
The basic theory, and the theory I put into my version, was that if you follow a bunch of people, you will get followed back. I chose a method to do that and get followers related to things I was interested in that, on the whole, wasn’t all that different from what Twitter Rocket suggested. The automation, the various websites – sure, those were things that were ultimately the most valuable to me, having not found those things on my own, but those were things that I had already started discovering on my own and could have been found with a Google search. The real secret to getting thousands of followers was the part that wasn’t a secret: follow hundreds of people every day, and get hundreds of follows a day. How to do that and not be a spammer was the part I was overthinking. Because Twitter Rocket never made that distinction. What it did was convince you that what you were doing was not equivalent to becoming a spammer.
Which, of course, was exactly what you were if you used it
