Readers and writers blog

I was reminded the other day of an old Bob Newhart routine about a room full of monkeys with typewriters — you know, the one based on the premise that if given enough time, the monkeys hitting keys at random would eventually type the complete works of Shakespeare.

In his monologue, Newhart is a monitor in the room. “Wait a minute, Charlie,” he says to another monitor. “I think number 17645 has something: ‘To be or not to be, that is the qwertyuiop’ . . . Never mind.”

Now I’m misquoting the comedian. The nonsense word he originally used was something like ‘gezortenblatt,’ but whenever I’ve co-opted the joke, I’ve always used ‘qwertyuiop’ because it’s the top row of letters on a typewriter. (Why did I once memorize that? Ask the fudgsicle. And if that makes no sense, look at the middle row of letters. Don’t ask for the mnemonic for the bottom row.)

In fact, the comedian is misquoted everywhere. As I’ve scoured the Internet looking for the original text, the nonsense word is listed variously as gzrbnklap, gzortnplatt, gazerninblatz, gezundenplatz, and the imaginary sidekick is listed as Charlie, Harry, Fred, even Bob. (Where’s YouTube when you need it?)*

And the premise is quoted everywhere. The best guess is that it originated in 1913 with French mathematician Emile Borel, a pioneer in the fields of measure and probability theory. But one guy in England, who doesn’t seem to like monkeys, uses the mathematical improbability of the premise to argue that it proves Darwin’s theory of evolution wrong. Ah well.

Other humor has spun off the premise. I found a cartoon at an old website, the WSFA Journal, showing a balding man looking at the work of a monkey at a typewriter: “This is Hamlet,” the man tells the monkey typist. “We wanted the WSFA Journal.” At another site, a cartoon shows two guys standing in a room filled with monkeys except for a pig in the front row. “It is the complete works of Shakespeare all right,” one guy says, “but the pig’s claiming he wrote them.”

I once bought a birthday card for my mother. The front was a photo of a monkey at a typewriter hitting a key, click, then another photo showing him hitting another key, click. Inside the card, a two-letter greeting — “H I” — then, “Just monkeying around, but I wanted to wish you a happy birthday.” My wife wouldn’t let me send it. Mothers like sweet cards, she said.

The greatest birthday card my wife ever gave me shows a photo of a goofy dog sitting beside a toilet bowl, one paw on the rim, and looking into the camera with a quizzical smile: “It’s your birthday?” Inside: “Well, this round’s on me.”

That card has a place of honor on my bookshelf.

Anyway, what reminded me of the Newhart routine was a couple of pieces of spam we received the other day at R&W Blog. Yes, I’m still fascinated by spam, maybe because it’s mostly what we get in our comments section.

Last time, I wrote about spam in French. Now we’re getting what I can describe only as Q&A spam. One, from an Arwin Mercy, asked the question:

Please suggest me where I can find a website where I can purchase accessories by seeing them before I purchase them?

Then, as if by magic, a spammer named Robert Crain in the next file offered:

To purchase a accessory I would better go to a retailer rather than staying online but if you still wish to then do try this site accessories about.info.

Hell, the spammers are now conversing with one another in our comments section. Not really, but the messages purportedly were in response to two different entries on our blog, both of them posted months ago.

Those spam computers are getting more and more clever. In fact, another comment, this one from Nikky Bikky, had a certain poetry to it:

The whore had delecate blueness and Clare off at a jessica simpson hair syles stand. It felt pouty to hover that way.

Wow, it almost made sense. But then there was the next comment, this one from T.W. Ha at mail.com:

Bvonuzytd fayj blipta ejafdhzvt yahrxjtom ebrc xevwol.

As Bob would say, “Never mind.”

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

*The original is on Newhart’s second album, The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back (1960), which I do not have. According to Amazon, the cut is called “An Infinite Number of Monkeys.”