Spam, spam, spam, spam

It's a drag that we have this thing in our lives called spam, but if we have to have the affliction, we sure did pick a delightful name for it. A friend of mine accidentally spammed her inbox recently. My inner Monty Python dork still giggles every time I see or think or say the word. The 'spam in the sense of junk e-mail' meme is a true postmodern masterpiece. My Midwestern dad and grandparents used to eat Spam, not ironically. As a kid, I was mildly grossed out by it, but whatever, anything pig-based was fundamentally okay by me.

My aristocratic Tuscan stepmother Giovanna swiftly cured my dad of Spam. She put him in touch with prosciutto. Pigflesh-lover that I am, it still took me a long time to warm up to prosciutto - I'm still not a hundred percent on it. It came as no surprise at all to learn that Japanese robots equipped with a sense of biochemical 'smell' were reportedly unable to distinguish between prosciutto and, ulp, human. Also, just now, my spellchecker offered me 'prostitute' as a possible guess for prosciutto's correct spelling! No wonder pig is a forbidden food in so many world cultures. Luckily, Mom is the least observant Jew in history, so my dad and stepfather were free to indulge their love of bacon. I'm with Steven Colbert on this: there is nothing better than a BLT.

But so anyway. Why spam? Why that particular blue-collar brand? Why is the Monty Python spam skit still such a classic work of deep zen-like absurdity?

Nerds love Monty Python, because that 'sneering Oxford don meets stoned hippie artiste' persona is the masculine ideal to which every computer programmer aspires. The geeks who originally nicknamed junk e-mail after a beloved Monty Python meme were cursing it affectionately, attaching fond memories to a hated annoyance. Sort of like my dad's ambivalent relationship with his Spam-eating midwestern parents.

During the period when REM had a hit with Stand, Z100 had a parody of it in heavy rotation during the Morning Zoo. Sing to the tune of "Stand in the place where you live":

Spam, meat that's been through a sieve...

Passing something through a sieve destroys its structure and thus its macro-scale identity. Spam is unspecific meat. It could just as easily be ground-up human. A depressing product all the way around. Spam's creepy genericness makes it a perfect metaphor for junk e-mail sent by anonymous sleazy foreigners, and, increasingly, software robots.

Here are some classics from my inbox.

Update: great articles on this same subject from The New Yorker and the American Scientist.

© ethan hein 2007 | back to memebase | back to top