Sent From My Oral-B Toothbrush - Stone Cold Magic Magazine

There’s nothing new under the sun . . . you’ve all heard it, and many (maybe even most) of you believe it. I say . . . B.S.! It’s total crap. Things change; the world progresses; we grow. New stuff under the sun appears.

Case in point. I recently got an email from David Acer. His tagline at the bottom of his email was “Sent from my Oral-B Toothbrush.” First of all, that’s freakin’ hilarious . . . secondly, it’s full of “new under the sun” stuff.

Root:

Let’s remember our roots. This month’s root is don’t trap yourself in boxes. Let’s take a peak at David’s sign off. First of all, what makes it funny is the fact that we’ve all seen the default sign off that comes with an iPhone or Blackberry or Droid, etc.: Sent from my Blackberry.

Without the existence of smart phones that send email, there never would have been a sign of that said “Sent from my iPhone 5.” Without the sign off, David’s sign off would never have existed and even if it somehow existed it wouldn’t have any context and thus would be not funny.

The simple point is this: 20 years ago there would have been no foundation for the joke because smart phones didn’t exist . . . email barely was well known. Go back another 40 or so year before that and the Oral-B toothbrush didn’t exist, and go back another 80 years and no telephone either.

David’s joke is a new joke – a new thing under the sun. New technology (phone, Oral-B, smart phone) had to be created over the course of 120 year for the doorway for this new comedic material. Imagine a court Jester in the 1500’s attempting to entertain the king-folk by saying . . . “Sent from my Oral-B toothbrush.” It was impossible for that “joke” to even exist until just a decade (ish) ago.

It’s an incredible cycle. It’s almost like the unobtainable perpetual motion machine. New ideas spawn newer ideas which spawn further ideas. If it weren’t for the invention of the toothbrush, an electric one might never have existed. Better said, if electricity was never harnessed, it would have been impossible to create an electric toothbrush, and further, nobody would have thought of it because electricity – harnessed electricity – didn’t exist.

Once those things exist, then someone else can come along and say “hey . . . what if we put them together?” Once that happened someone else had to have a similar thought after the invention of email and the invention of phones, followed by the invention of cellular phones: “hey . . . what if we put them (email and phones) together?” Oh did I mention that the smart phone wouldn’t exist without someone first creating a computer. Hey . . . maybe we could combine a computer with a cell phone . . .

All these various doorways opened other doors which opened other doors and more doors, and so on . . . all leading up to everything needed for David Acer to make me laugh hysterically for ten minutes after reading “Sent from my Oral-B toothbrush.”

Sure, you could say that a cell phone isn’t new because it’s a phone which already existed . . . here’s my argument against that: between every two whole numbers (say 4 and 5), there is an infinite amount of fractions. There is 4.1, 4.2, 4.1232, 4.123098092, etc. . . . an infinite amount of possibilities just in the small space between two whole numbers. If you want to be absolutely “technical” about “nothing new under the sun” then sure . . . the fact that every single thing we’ve ever made, invented, thought of, etc. is all part of this Earth and is nothing new . . . then fine . . . there’s nothing new.

However, that’s like saying that the wheel wasn’t a new thing because it was just a rock that had been chiseled into a round shape . . . of course it was new. Something old was modified to create a new something else that led to billions of other new “something elses.” Like the infinite possibilities between two digits, there are infinite ways of combining our existing “stuff.” With every combination we create, we discover that there are other combinations we hadn’t thought of before.

This point/root I’m attempting to make has rambled on ad naseaum . . . so I’ll make the branch short:

Branch:

Let’s build our branches. This month, I want you to truly believe that you can come up with “something new under the sun.” Even if it’s not magic related; even if it’s something you don’t have the resources to create. Think of things you know about (or find things you don’t know about) and ask yourself how you could combine those two (or more) things into something else. This is a creative exercise that will help you grow as a performer and entertainer. It will get you thinking outside of the box as they say.

Maybe when you’re done, you’ll have the combination that turns two poisons (e.g., Sodium and Chloride) into something delicious and amazing (e.g., table salt).

Now go study the classics and go discover your true magical self.

P.S. Watch the video below which is the ultimate in combining “stuff” to make something new . . . if you haven’t seen this before, prepare to have your mind blown!