Mr. Television Wants to be Mr. CRT

Everyone, and his/her Uncle
Miltie are now in computers

I thumb through my non-E mail about once a week. Last week I opened an envelope and there was a personal letter and an autographed black and white glossy picture of Milton Berle. The letter had boilerplate paragraphs but two paragraphs contain references to me personally (a joke about making his wife disappear, referring to my day job [for those of you who don't know what I do other than this column -- let your imagination run wild.]) Someone else may have composed the letter but I believe it was signed by Mr. Berle himself -- signed with a Sharpie or something -- not printed. The picture is really signed "Best Wishes, Milton Berle." Why am I getting personal letters and glossies from Milton Berle? Is it because I've done a few comedy shows? Maybe I ran into him at the Friar's Club when all us comedy guys get together to smoke cigars, bemoan the fact that "there's no place to be bad anymore," ask each other "What is funny?" and crack each other up. No, I never met Milton Berle. Maybe it has nothing to do with my sub-star showbiz status, maybe I just wrote him a fan letter because he was a big influence on me and he answers every fan letter he gets? Wrong again. He may answer his mail and I sure saw him on TV and at some level he influenced me, but I didn't bother to write him a letter. The reason Milton Berle sent a personal letter and picture to Penn Jillette is because . . . I write this column! It's not because I'm in showbiz, it's because I'm a nerd! Milton Berle is trying to make a buck in software and I'm his connection to you. Mr. Television wants to be part of our peer group. We are now the lunch table at which to be sitting. You're saying to yourself, "Milton Berle? I thought this techno-zero-backpage-writing-four-eyed-clown, did research to at least fake cool. Wouldn't this pseudo-hackin' fool at least know he should be mentioning Kriss Kross, Denis Leary or, classic old- timers like Springsteen and Letterman? Why doesn't he stick with talking about Uma Thuman? What the hell is he thinking with a guy that cross-dressed for our ancient relatives?" You don't get it. We weren't surprised to find out that Todd Rungrund could do his own computer animation, Todd's not that different from us, right? And, if I told you that Lou Reed wrote the lyrics for "New York" and "Magic and Loss," in WP 5.1, that wouldn't be an extraordinary claim. But this is Milton Berle, an icon that you, your parents, and your grandparents all have or had opinions about. Someone got the idea to take "Milton Berle's Private Joke File," a book of over 10,000 jokes and put it on disk. If you desperately need a joke about a cow, you can look it up. It's not fancy software, it's just all the categories for jokes and you pick "Out of Order Signs" and it gives you all the jokes about them. There's nothing else to it, it's a lot of old fashioned, Milton Berle jokes, but they're on computer. The one technological breakthrough that I was able to find in a couple hours of surfing is the "Ethic (Do-It-Yourself)" category - This includes such jokes as "--What do you call removing a wart from a __________'s rump? --Brain surgery!" Print the whole category to disk, find and replace "----------" with the appropriate minority dysphemism and you can do the Diceman's act in any country of the world. The countdown continues - enjoy being computer a weenie now because it's only a matter of months before being "computer literate" will be as meaningful as being "toaster literate." 1-800-MILTIEB, man, oh, man, the future really is here.