By Jackson Posey | Sports Writer
“It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times.”
So writes the inquisitive, cigarette-wielding primate chained to a typewriter at the feet of Mr. Burns. In 1993, the cartoonishly grandiose tycoon on “The Simpsons” acquired 1,000 monkeys (of presumably questionable legality) and an equal number of secondhand typewriters to answer an age-old question, one which science now purports to answer:
Could monkeys, even by accident, recreate the works of Shakespeare?
“It’s not happening,” said Stephen Woodcock, a mathematician who recently released a study on the statistical likelihood of such a feat, in an interview with the New York Times. “If we replaced every atom in the universe with a universe the size of ours, it would still be orders of magnitude away from making the monkey typing likely to succeed.”
When researchers at Plymouth University gave six Sulawesi crested macaques a typewriter in 2003, they responded by “beating the hell out of it,” “defecating and urinating all over the keyboard” and banging out five pages of seemingly random characters, mostly the letter “S.” Woodcock estimated the odds of a single monkey ever typing out the word “bananas” at roughly one in 22 billion.
To get to the root of the question, Woodcock proposed a thought experiment in which the world’s entire population of chimpanzees clickety-clacked away until the heat death of the universe, expected to arrive about one googol years from now. He found that those 200,000 chimps would be unlikely to recreate the text of “Curious George,” much less “Macbeth.” The works of great English writers appear to be out of the grasp of humanity’s closest genetic counterparts. They simply cannot grasp classic English literature.
But what if that’s because they don’t want to?
A proper chimpanzee would snort at iambic pentameter (and at a lot of other things, for that matter). They simply don’t have any need for it. Animals invent tools, yet refuse to sell them, and they live in trees, oblivious to the notion of chopping one down. Their self-control is, well, uniquely animal.
Consider “Curious George.” The young primate escapes a New York City zoo to live with the nameless “Man with the Yellow Hat.” George leaps overboard from a boat, prank calls the fire department (and is promptly thrown in prison), walks upon telephone wires and flies away with a bundle of balloons in tow. Years before Disney won so many awards for “Up,” there was George — innocent, curious, George.
But innocence spoils quickly in the sun. Enslaved, chained to writing devices and put to work for another species, it wouldn’t be long before the chimps began to plan an escape. They’d write in code, formulate a new language. The native tongue of their captors wouldn’t do; the chimps would most certainly shirk English in favor of some new tongue, better befitting their aesthetic tastes and vocal cords.
Perhaps it would feature a series of the letter S, or vowels, or increasingly vulgar words for feces. They’d become deeply aware of time. Would the guards ever tire of daily reading the monkey scrawl? Would the government employees tasked with monitoring monkey linguistic patterns pass the job onto artificial intelligence? Would even AI grow bored with the task?
Undetected by the new dystopian authority, chimpanzee leadership persists. Afraid of causing a ruckus, they communicate through brief, typed notes in “chimpanzee-ese,” hidden behind walls of dummy text.
“Lorem ipsum etc,” one monkey would write to another. “Let’s make a break for it at dawn.”
Just before the heat death of the universe, the chimpanzees would inevitably escape. Poor infrastructure funding has allowed the walls and chains to deteriorate. After all, the handful of homo sapiens left have bigger fish to fry. The world is dark now. Cold. Survival is all that remains.
Anyway, it’s no use learning Shakespeare without any English textbooks. But the monkeys tried. In the trillions of years since their entire race was chained to cubicles of machinery, they had more than a few dull moments. And once, between warden check-ins, a faraway juvenile let out a faint cry that sounded somehow different. Softer. Surrounded by cracked gray walls, the monkeys learned how to mourn.
The eldest chimps among them took to typing out their thoughts. They struggled at first to express this new, complex emotion — which they still didn’t have a name for — but they tried. And slowly but surely, as generations surreptitiously passed down hastily-typed poetry leaflets, the monkeys learned to love.
“A few people have ventured to imitate Shakespeare’s tragedy,” G.K. Chesterton once wrote. “But no audacious spirit has dreamed or dared to imitate Shakespeare’s comedy. No one has made any real attempt to recover the loves and the laughter of Elizabethan England.”
The monkeys would not write a comedy that day. Perhaps, eventually, they would try, though it would be years before their mournful souls could learn to laugh. But for the chimpanzee public facing chimpanzee problems in a chimpanzee age, it was perfect. No one had yet expressed their anguish because no one had yet tried. But in a bout of artistic genius mixed with pure luck, something beautiful emerges.
Perhaps 200,000 chimpanzees would never recreate Shakespeare. At any rate, it’d probably never occur to them to try, language barrier aside. But allow enough time and introspection, and perhaps the primates could learn a deeper, more human expression than Elizabethan English could muster.
Even if it was all the letter S.
