The Jerk: Waiting for the 30th Anniversary Re-release

I love The Jerk. Steve Martin can play a dumb white guy better than Dan Castellaneta or Carol O'Connor ever could, in my opinion.

In one scene, Martin's character, Navin R. Johnson, gets his name in the phone book. He is overjoyed because this now means he's somebody. Of course, ultimately this means that a deranged madman chooses his name at random out of the phone book and attempts to assassinate Navin. Navin works at a gas station and garage, and as the madman begins his shooting rampage — with hilariously poor marksmanship — Navin innocently notices that cans around him are exploding: oil cans, gas cans, and so on.

"These cans are defective!" Navin decides. His boss, played by Jackie Mason if I remember correctly, points out that the cans aren't defective: there is a man shooting holes in the cans. "He's mad at these cans!" Navin concludes. As he runs for cover, he can't get away from this killer's bullets. He hides behind a Coca-Cola machine, which promptly gets shot. Ever astute Navin makes the connection: "More cans!"

I illustrate this now because I have to wonder where the line between comedy and real life is drawn. In The Jerk, Navin can't understand that someone is trying to kill him. He comes to the conclusion that defective cans have enraged an armed stranger. In real life, people will try to write data to a floppy disk, and they can't understand that the floppy disk they've chosen is bad. So they come to the conclusion that, since the floppy is infallible, there must be something wrong with the computer. At this point, they call me and I assess that the computer isn't broken at all, it's just a bad floppy disk.

Of course, the same user who couldn't spot a bad floppy also couldn't spot the full-and-finalized CD-R disk he chose as his second choice, or the fact that he was logged in as a user without network-writing privileges. What this spells to him is that the A: drive and D: drive are acting screwy and he can't write anything to the file server. Better call Toby.

In my mind's eye, I see Navin R. Johnson sitting at the computer in his naïve charm, puzzling out the aforementioned dilemma. "This computer's defective!" he shouts. And then he runs around the building with his precious, but quite useless, floppy diskette, going from machine to machine: "All these computers are defective!" I stop him. "It's your floppy disk, Navin. It's got some bad clusters on it and we have to throw it away now."

"Floppy, huh? They sure don't make 'em very well."