COMMITTING TO THE BIT: Introduction

Welcome to Committing to the Bit, a Talkies column by Eli Smith.

One of the greatest comedy bits of all time has to be when Orville and Wilbur Wright decided to try and figure out how to fly. I would give anything to have been an onlooker at the time, watching them run stupidly around the hills of North Carolina with their shoddily-constructed flying contraptions, pretending to be birds. No one had seen an airplane at the time, and the first draft design isn’t exactly aesthetically pleasing. What’s the point of being able to fly if you’re going to look so dumb while you’re doing it? Ergonomically, it’s the 1904 equivalent of Willy Wonka’s teleportation device that makes you really tiny in the process.

I don’t know if the Wright brothers were aware at the time that what they were doing was hilarious, but it was. Whether intentional or not, they were doing a bit. And yet, we all know how the story ended: they committed so hard to the bit that they defied the laws of nature and changed the world forever.

Any historical event, work of art, or societal movement that creates a real cultural impact can be examined through the lens of bit commitment. There’s always a bit, and bits only work if you commit to them. That doesn’t mean that we have to laugh at everything—just go to your local open mic night if you need confirmation that not all bits are funny. But sometimes, even a bit that’s not funny can become funny if the bit-perpetrator commits to it hard enough.

This is a column that will celebrate the greatest bit-committers in both popular and unpopular culture. The real people and fictional characters that hold so tightly to some grand enterprise that you just can’t look away. They’re the ones making it happen each and every day, and it’s time someone shined a spotlight on their efforts.

Thanks for joining me on this journey. It’s going to be fun.