Comedy of errors
I went to see The Play That Goes Wrong this week – the hit show about a hapless am-dram troupe staging a whodunnit where every mishap is delightfully intentional. Props fall apart, lines are fluffed and characters plough on through an avalanche of mistakes.
The audience loved it. So much that I had to Google it to work out why. Turns out, it’s a global smash - now in its tenth year and showing in 50 countries.
Don’t get me wrong, I liked it, but I couldn’t quite understand why everyone was laughing so hard at something so Fawlty Towers / Frank Spencer / Mr Bean like it was 1975. It wasn’t as if the audience was entirely ancient either.
So what is it about slapstick that people love?
It must be that we like to see human chaos - the glorious collapse of order, the character who keeps going despite everything falling down around them.
Slapstick shows us effort, vulnerability, and resilience. There’s something oddly reassuring and human about this.
But I wonder if this sort of thing is being particularly enjoyed now?
In a world smoothed out by digitisation, automation, and AI, imperfections are increasingly hard to come by. So much of life now is polished, precise, and optimised. No need to learn how to read a map or memorise a phone number.
That’s not to say mistakes aren't still made. It’s more the nature of them has changed. It’s no longer bad spelling or clumsy grammar, but strange errors. The AI that confidently recommends ‘pizza and glue’ as a tasty combo, or misidentifies a saw as a clarinet.
These aren’t familiar human errors – cute, cuddly and a sign of vulnerability – they’re more unsettling than endearing. And because AI presents itself so flawlessly most of the time - eerily pristine, overly correct - even small slips feel jarring.
We forgive human mistakes because they’re relatable. We need them, even. They make us feel grounded and alive. But when perfection is the baseline, as it often is with AI, mistakes break the illusion. They don’t invite laughter. They invite doubt. And doubt isn’t very nice.
So maybe that’s why a collapsing set and a panicking actor get a round of applause, and a chatbot hallucinating a rock salad gets a furrowed brow. One makes us feel more human. The other makes us question what it means to be.
Shameless plug
More musings on the the topic of AI and realness in this week’s Money Marketing via 80s R&B duo Milli Vanilli in The authenticity imperative.
Shell company
Some landlords are placing snail farms in empty offices to claim agricultural relief and avoid paying business rates. Councils say the loophole is costing them millions and are calling for urgent reform.
Big step
One in eight Britons (13%) deem it acceptable to have carpet in the bathroom, a figure that rises to almost one in five (19%) among 50-64-year-olds.
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