Remember You Are Mortal by Garrett Millerick

"A few years ago, I had a silly idea. I often have silly ideas, but I make my living as a professional clown. So, they tend to be more of a help than a hinderance, in my line of work. I was staring at the back of my iPhone, and the Apple logo caught my eye. Apple Inc. has quite a weighty place in the foundation story of our society, and I started thinking about how to connect the bible story of creation to this friendly little logo. Finding a ridiculous conclusion and working backwards is usually a fertile place to start writing jokes, so I settled upon an idea. What if the Apple logo that adorns the devices, we have grown dependent upon, wasn’t a logo? What if it was a warning?

As an ex-smoker, I’m relatively familiar with warning labels on products, bringing superficial joy whilst slowly destroying myself from the inside out. I began playing with the idea and then, events overtook me. The world went into lockdown, and I’d have a year’s-long wait before I could road test my comic hypothesis.    

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The idea of the iPhone as a piece of religious iconography is quite an obvious one. We have worshiped at the altar of technology for quite some time now. The late Steve Jobs spent decades preaching to hordes of devoted followers, gathered at his feet waiting for him to deliver the latest miracle. It was genuinely exciting to watch those product announcements, and I hold my hand up, I was a Jobs acolyte. As the original tech rock star, he was a captivating and exciting presence. Being included in, what felt like, a counter cultural movement was an attraction to the experience. You only need to watch the original launch of the Macintosh on YouTube where a young Jobs is railing against the notion of Big Brother, standing up to the power and dominance of IBM (International Business Machines Corporation). It’s captivating stuff! Plus, it’s easy to see how he was able to amass such a devoted following.   

Very soon, the tech billionaire-as-rock-stars morphed into something else. They became Gods walking amongst us. A decade into the new millennium, Jobs was performing stone cold miracles. Being able to feed 5000 people at an outdoor event, isn’t really in the same ballpark as putting an entire record collection in your pocket. In a culture screaming out for something to believe in, a new religion to invest a little faith in… Jobs seemed like a good bet and many! Many signed up to worship the new deity, me included, but Steve was mortal.  Snatched from us too soon and those who followed in his wake, have upped the ante slightly in the intervening years. ‘Running the US Government’ and ‘colonising Mars' feels like a bit of a leap from promising to sync your contacts across your devices, but it all links back to the same place.   

The silly comic hypothesis I was kicking around in 2020 was rapidly becoming a reality. The notion of a warning from the heavens unsettlingly prescient. I had eaten the apple and now had all the knowledge of this warning in my pocket.  The world now more foreboding than the garden I’d been living in before. The silly little story I got fed in Sunday school may have had a bit more weight to it than I thought, and I could’ve afforded to pay it more attention.

The idea was a fun one to knock around on stage for a few years, adding to it, and even pushing the more ridiculous aspects of it. I leaned into my fire and brimstone preacher persona for effect, amped up the religious elements. Recasting the most famous tech billionaires into the holy trinity, with Musk as God, Bezos as Jesus, Jobs as the Holy Ghost and Richard Branson as the Virgin Mary. The whole thing makes a certain amount of narrative sense. Three living characters locked in a battle for the heavens. It was essentially a group of old, white men going to live in the sky. Sounded near enough the image of what I was taught about Gods when I was a kid. It was a fun little pantomime to perform. I wasn’t looking for anyone to take me seriously, least of all them.   

Now, here we are in 2025, and the joke has gotten a little out of hand. If these guys aren’t casting themselves in the mould of the Gods of the Abrahamic faiths, they’re making a good fist at playing Roman Emperors with accompanying salutes. But as the triumphant Emperors rode through Rome, their self-styled god-like majesty on show, a slave would be tasked to stand just behind them to whisper in their ear, ‘remember you are mortal.’

So maybe it’s time for a good old-fashioned word in someone’s ear, before the joke gets completely out of hand. "

-  Garrett Millerick

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Garrett Millerick’s comedy special Just Trying to Help - where he discusses many things, including the terrifying rise of the tech billionaire - is available to stream on YouTube, hosted by 800 Pound Gorilla now

Find it here

www.garrettmillerick.com  

Main image by Edward Moore

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