Geek yuks, page 2
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The title is a little misleading, since most of "Dave Barry in Cyberspace" is about computers rather than the online world. Barry takes an Every-sensible-man's approach to the subject. A typical joke: "You should get a 'full-featured' word-processor, defined as 'a word processor that has thousands of functions that you will never have any conceivable use for.'" Or: "Contrary to what you may have heard, the Internet does not operate at the speed of light; it operates at the speed of the Department of Motor Vehicles."
Barry can be a hoot in small amounts — roughly the quantities featured on the CyberDave Web site, where you'll find repackagings of some of the book's funnier ideas, including Barry's spoof of a typical software installation routine. But the cumulative effect of a concentrated, book-length dose of his humor is to diminish its effectiveness. He's got the comic rhythms of a newspaper columnist, not a book author.
His list of bizarre-but-real Web sites (from "Cursing in Swedish" to the Flaming Pop-Tart Experiment) proves funnier than his attempt at a more ambitious short story about an online romance. And though his jabs at DOS and Windows reveal an intimate familiarity with their historical peculiarities, he doesn't end up providing any real comic catharsis for readers' frustrations with bad technology. "Dave Barry in Cyberspace" is amusing but hardly satisfying; it skims the surface of technology's absurdities without engaging any deeper emotions.
That's doubtless because most people, understandably, aren't terribly emotional about computers — despite the onslaught of technology ads that depict product-induced states of ecstasy and despair. One thing that people are emotional about, though, is their money and their work.
Scott Adams, the creator of "Dilbert," understands this. "Dilbert" entered the popular consciousness as a comic strip set in a high-tech office, and was originally championed by Silicon Valley nerds who identified with the bespectacled, flat-topped title character. But as this year's "Dilbert Principle" and the new follow-up, "Dogbert's Top Secret Management Handbook" (HarperBusiness), make plain, Adams is less interested in spoofing the world of computer technology than in satirizing the business world that has grown up around it.
"Dogbert's Top Secret Management Handbook" is as single-minded, in its own way, as "America Off-Line." Chapters have titles like "Management Zombie Stare," "Cash Awards for Things That Would Happen Anyway" and "Taking Credit for Your Employees' Ideas," but the central theme remains constant: managers get paid big bucks for being ignorant, doing nothing and torturing their underlings.
To Adams, the workplace is a theater of sadism; comedy is simply a seasoning to make the raw horror palatable. Unlike its competition, "Dilbert" sustains the longer form of a humor book — even one that in part simply recycles old comic strips — because its creator is actually upset about something. It draws its heat not from some ephemeral technology trendlet but from an actual cultural war that continues to leave casualties. Forget computer humor; Scott Adams understands that the only reliable source of comedy is the record of human stupidity.
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