The Alice and Bob After Dinner Speech (1984) | Hacker News Reader

The Alice and Bob After Dinner Speech (1984)

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52 pointsnwalfield10 comments

All was funny until I reached this paragraph: "These enemies have almost unlimited resources. They always listen in to telephone conversations between Alice and Bob. And these enemies are very sneaky. One of their favorite tricks is to telephone Alice and pretend to be Bob."

Talk about ahead of its time...

This is a very old concept, what changed is mostly scale.

And the execution. It's much easier to impersonate somebody through a text message or an email than a voice call.

This was really funny up until the prolonged domestic violence joke at the end, which kinda threw me off. Product of its times, I guess.

Domestic violence joke? Could you explain that, please?

He talks about the calculator like it's his wife. He mentions their anniversary, and has a candlelit dinner. And he punches it causing irreparable damage.

I think that was trying to be a pastiche of/homage to/rip off Woody Allen's bit on Mechanical Objects, which it's very similar to. (Excerpted and linked below)

> I have never in my life had good relationships with mechanical objects of any sort. [...]

> About three years ago I couldn't stand it anymore. I was home one night. I called a meeting with my possessions. I got everything I owned into the living room. My toaster, my clock, my blender. They never been in the living room before. And I spoke to them. I opened with a joke. And then I said "I know what's going on, and cut it out!" I have a sun lamp, but as I sit under it, it rains on me. And I spoke to each appliance, I was really articulate. Then I put them back, and I felt good.

> Two nights later I'm watching my portable television set, and the set begins to jump up and down, and I go up to it. And I always talk before I hit, and I said "I thought we had discussed this, what's the problem?" And the set kept going up and down, so I hit it, and it felt good hitting it, and I beat the hell out of it. I was really great, I tore off the antenna, and I felt very virile.

> And two days later I go to my dentist in New York. I had gone to my dentist, but I had a deep cavity, and he'd sent me to a chiropodist. I'm going into a building in mid-town New York, and they have those elevators, and I hear a voice say "Kindly call out your floors, please", and I say "sixteen" and the doors close and the elevator starts going up to sixteen. And on the way up the elevator says to me "Are you the guy that hit the television set?" I felt like an ass, y'know, and it took me up and down fast between floors, and it threw me off in the basement. It yelled out something that was anti-semetic.

http://www.ibras.dk/comedy/allen.htm#Mechs

Ah, given that context, that makes more sense / comes off a little less nefarious. I think it was mostly the references to forgetting an anniversary, trying to repair the relationship with a heart-to-heart by candlelight, etc., that took it to a kind of weird place for me.

Thanks for the link and the context!

To be fair, the Woody Allen joke is also allegorically about domestic violence and this updated version only reinforced those references, so I don't think your reaction was off base.

For even more context, around the same time as the Woody Allen stand-up Hunter S. Thompson gets confronted on CBC by a member of Hells Angels. It shows in stark contrast how much society has matured in 50 years (at least regarding public acceptance of domestic violence). You should really watch the clip, but I've again excerpted choice quotes from the Hells Angels member that the audience reacts favorably to.

(At 3:24 in the video) > Junkie George is beating his old lady. Junkie George's dog bit him. To me this is a personal feud. If a guy wants to beat his wife and his dog bites him, that's between the three of 'em. [Audience laughter and applause]

and a short time later (5:42 in the video): > To keep a woman in line you got to beat her like a rug once in a while. [Again, audience laughter and applause]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccyu44rsaZo#t=204

Wow, that was a pretty surprising video. The audience's reaction especially surprised me. While maybe not quickly enough, times have certainly changed.

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