In his standup-comedy days, forty-plus years ago, Woody Allen did a routine called “Mechanical Objects.”

It was a narrative about the highly mixed blessings of living at the tail end of the Machine Age, at the start of The Age of Electronicus. I found the following transcript of the routine on the Web; I can’t swear to its accuracy, but it conforms to what I remember:

I have never in my life had good relationships with mechanical objects of any sort. Anything that I can’t reason with or kiss or fondle, I get into trouble with.

I have a clock that runs counter-clockwise for some reason. My toaster pops up my toast and shakes it, burns it. I hate my shower. I’m taking a shower, and somebody in America uses his water. That’s it for me, y’know, I leap from the tub, scalded.

I have a tape recorder, I paid a hundred and fifty dollars for, and as I talk into it, it goes, “I know, I know.”

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’d 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!…”

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 picture on] 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-Semitic.

I thought of this story the other night while helping The Missus with a bit of the evening’s dinner preparations.

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