The Unlikely Relationship Between Comedy and Code: A Conversation with Baratunde Thurston
Every day, technologists across the country work through similar challenges to those faced by the U.S. Digital Service. In all types of industries, innovators are moving analog systems to digital, modernizing software development practices, and designing with users, not for them.
To help share what we’ve learned, we’re kicking off an interview series with civic minded technologists who share a similar mission to the U.S. Digital Service.
Baratunde Thurston is a writer, cultural-critic, and likely the only comedian to ever mention COBOL on stage. In 2012 he co-founded Cultivated Wit, a company that merges comedy and technology into a new genre of creative expression. The company produces Comedy Hack Day, during which developers and comedians collaborate to make intentionally funny tech projects that humanize technology.
Most recently, Thurston helped re-launch The Daily Show with Trevor Noah and created the show’s first Digital Expansion team. David Kaufman from the U.S. Digital Service sat down with Thurston to discuss the unlikely relationship between comedy and code.
David Kaufman: You’re a strong candidate to kick off our interview series for a number of reasons, not least of which is that your mother was actually a programmer for the government.
Baratunde Thurston: It’s funny man. It always struck me that my mother being a programmer was a big deal — I mean, in a way she was the original Black Girls Code. There was no organization for that in the 1980s.
I have considered for a while not just my mother, but the arc of my family’s relationship with the government. I have ancestors who belonged to the government, who rebelled against it in the form of literacy. My grandmother went on to work for the government — she was actually the first black employee at the Supreme Court building. My mother protested outside of its walls, but also entered it as an employee. And then she gave birth to my older sister who would chronicle government as a journalist, and then me, who takes all that and comments on it, through satire and technology.
DK: Given that you are (likely) the only comedian to ever mention COBOL on stage, tell me how you began to weave together comedy, technology, and government.
BT: These interests were separate and parallel in the early days. My political interests were transferred from my mother, as was the tech interest. Because of her, we had a computer in our house very early — I think an Apple II. These began to fuse, and then the humor piece came in during high school. I went to Sidwell Friends School, and one of the parents there donated a T1 line — a full time Internet connection.
One of the first things I did was start the first mailing list at Sidwell School — jokers@sidwell.edu — where I was a “digital comedy DJ.” I’d curate text-based jokes and send them out to other students.
At the same time, I was heavily politically involved. I was the head of the Black Students Association and I was a member of the school paper. But the real spark was when a friend of mine got expelled, and I thought it was done unjustly. I found the public records of the depositions and I distributed them anonymously to my fellow newspaper editors. I actually masked my email address by hacking into Yale’s email server and pretended to be an informant from The_Informant@Knowledge.com. [laughing] I was a little obsessed with being the next Woodward and Deep Throat. That led to articles, protests, a real movement.
All of that — a full time Internet connection at school, a sense of humor, plus a sense of social justice — that’s where my voice came from.
DK: We talk a lot about human-centered design at USDS. In a way, comedians are truly human-centered designers. You write material, you test it, and you iterate based on a crowd’s reaction. How has your work as a comedian influenced your work as a technologist, and vice versa?
BT: One of the beautiful things about art, especially stand-up, is that the audience is essential. They are part of the production. A comedian without an audience makes no sense. It’s like Facebook with no people. It’s an explicitly social platform.
In terms of the digital work I’ve done, I always start with people. What is their need? What are they missing? What problem can I solve? To me, a joke plus a bit of technology can be a solution to a problem. A problem of pain, a problem of ignorance, a problem of sadness. The best digital products come from a deep level of empathy. You only develop that by understanding your audience. That’s the same whether you’re shipping code or stand-up bits.
The best digital products come from a deep level of empathy.
As a comedian, it’s hard for me to see technology just as machinery and data and code — that’s all very impersonal. Comedy…comedy is so personal. It leads to laughter, to feelings, to an emotional connection. I think fusing that into tech is a very good thing and it enables us to build with people, not for them. This is a phrase I learned and internalized from Laurenellen McCann at the 2014 Personal Democracy Forum conference
DK: You were recruited by Trevor Noah to be Supervising Producer for Digital Expansion at The Daily Show. That’s a pretty broad title.
BT: [laughing] Yes, we took inspiration from government titles.
DK: What did that role entail? Similar to USDS, I imagine there were immense challenges building a startup in such an established group.
BT: I swear, in my early conversations I thought — wow, I’m the U.S. Digital Service for The Daily Show! And the parallels run as deep as you can imagine. You have a powerful, centralized legacy organization with ample resources, a vast opportunity to upgrade the infrastructure, the process, and the message.
I swear, in my early conversations I thought — wow, I’m the U.S. Digital Service for The Daily Show!
I was brought in under a broad mandate. There was no list, no KPIs. I was simply told: “We’re trying to make a new show, and it launches in 5 weeks. What does the digital layer look like?”
The very first thing I did was request whiteboard paint for my office walls. There was only one real whiteboard in the building! After that, Post-It notes and MacBooks for my team. I mean, when I showed up, my computer was a desktop tower PC! I thought they were kidding.
After we had those things, I defined our role in terms of a three-dimensional axis. The Z axis was our role in processing yesterday’s show, the X represented our role in today’s show, and the Y was creating original content.
The Z axis was our first job — processing yesterday’s show. We had to facilitate taking a 21 minute video file and find a way to get it to where people are. Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Medium. How do we translate and transcode the show for these platforms? And this isn’t something I thought would take a ton of time! I thought we’d make a few GIFs. But the infrastructure — translating the show, building memes, extracting clips, making GIF stacks — was such an important first thing for us to tackle. How do we lay the pipes down so that our audience can enjoy the show in ways beyond sitting on their couch at 11pm?
Job two, my X axis, was building a partnership with the writers, the graphics folks, the booking department — everyone — to work on building a show where the Internet audience was in mind from the get-go. Before this, digital people weren’t really in the room. It was more of an assembly line where you’d shoot the show and hand it off to the network’s people to post on Facebook, etc.
Our revolution was a simple thought: let’s just do this all at the same time, all in the same room. Whether we were doing something simple like giving Trevor a hashtag or call to action, or something a bit more involved like buying a domain name and building out a site to support a joke, our responsibility was to activate and enhance every episode by building a Daily Show that was participatory. It boiled down to one thing: we wanted The Daily Show to be something we built with the audience, not just for them. Leveraging technology made that possible.
The third axis, the Y, was around creating original content. I saw this as a way to unlock amazing talent that had just been dormant for years. For the people who worked on the show, their only outlet was a 21 and a half minute slot that aired 160 times a year, that had to fit a certain aspect ratio and ship in a specific encoding scheme. I just thought we had so much more creativity available. What if we could marry all the creative genius that sits in here and express it beyond the TV format? Now that’s a revolution! That’s the Y axis. A totally separate plane for the The Daily Show — something that was born digital.
DK: What’s an example of how this took form?
BT: Third Month Mania is a project where we created a March Madness style bracket. Instead of being about basketball, we made it about social issues — all the things that were making people mad.
The best part was that the idea didn’t even come from my team! Roy Wood Jr., a new correspondent, pitched the initial concept. And using PowerPoint, he built an early prototype. This is a stand-up comedian coming to me with a minimally viable product and saying “can you guys do this?” And it was like, you already did half the work!
This is the beauty of what we accomplished at The Daily Show. It’s not about bringing in the brilliant Silicon Valley loaner who comes into your squad to come up with a great idea. We built a model and a culture where Roy, who was hired primarily as on-camera talent — not to build apps or websites —was finding a way to be funny with design and code.
DK: We’ll close with a final question on process. The three axis framework is the “what,” but talk to me about the “how.” The Daily Show is an institution. Did you encounter a lot of “because this is how we’ve always done it?”
This is a television program that has been running for twenty years with a specific way of doing things. They’ve got their workflow for everything from how meetings work to how files are stored. So yes, there was some resistance to some of what we proposed or how we proposed to do it because often it was just so foreign to how things had been done.
My team had to respect that, as well as integrate and engage with that, to be able to do basic things. But we also had to build something new that moved faster, that talked to things that are outside the building. No one had thought much about the process for accessing APIs or integrating an analytics platform before. And we needed new approval processes for all this new output, new slots in the edit bays, new meetings to explain how we would live tweet, and all that time had to come from existing time. We did not have a machine that could manufacture new time (ooh, that’s a good idea though).
One of the biggest lessons I learned and tried to communicate was that new infrastructure (from software tools to workflows to creative processes to new meeting styles) are required. Of course, I sketched out versions of these new systems on my mad scientist whiteboard walls.
We had to plug into the existing systems while becoming a new system. Infrastructure may not be sexy, but it’s what made all of this possible.
The U.S. Digital Service works with other players inside and outside of the government to rethink how we build and buy digital services and attract top technical talent into public service, to improve the efficacy and efficiency of information technology in the federal government. By engaging technologists from outside of the U.S. government, the U.S. Digital Service will illustrate best practices and methodologies by sharing examples of how this work has been approached and completed in other industries, inciting future action across the government technology ecosystem.
