Column:

Bring back the singing telegram

By Charles Austin

Published Feb. 12, 2008

The greeting card industry exists exclusively for lazy, uncreative people. I think it’s ridiculous that we’re supposed to be touched whenever someone we know takes five minutes to go to a store, drop $0.75 on a mass produced card, shove it in an accompanying envelope and call it a day. If anything, receiving a greeting card should be considered offensive, as the message it conveys is nothing beyond, “I don’t care enough about your recent wedding, birthday, divorce, lawn mowing accident, etc. to emote anything genui ne.”

I think the typical justification for using a greeting card is something along the lines of, “oh but it states exactly how I feel so clearly!” This is almost always stupid. If a wacky depiction of Garfield wolfing down a tray of lasagna and delivering some nonchalant witticism expresses exactly how you feel about your 12-year-old niece’s birthday, you’re an idiot.

The greeting card industry is just a watered down, lazy new incarnation of the former telegram industry.One might think greeting cards compete with the letter industry, but this is not true. People who write letters have things to say, and while they may sometimes embellish their stationary with depictions of Hello Kitty and Keroppi, this only serves to highlight the tone of the assuredly meaningful banter contained therein.

Telegrams were used to relay messages of deaths and births of family members ­— the kind of things people buy greeting cards for today. While telegrams were stupid in their own right, they at least required a bit more effort. You actually had to take the time to hire people to deliver a message to a certain address, and then those people had to make themselves uncomfortable by delivering on-the-spot eulogies for dead grandmothers to complete strangers.

All the excess effort and embarrassment in that process showed that someone must care.Now, think about the only innovation in the entire history of greeting cards: the card that plays a song when you open it.

This was the most obvious technological advance in mankind’s storied history.

Instead of ripping off the regular telegram, the industry ripped off the singing telegram. Only now, the comedic thrill ride of a high school dropout coming to your front door dressed as a clown and singing about your birthday has been replaced by a MIDI-quality sound chip blaring 15 seconds of a god-awful Garth Brooks song in a ceaseless loop. This is a good way to tell someone you hate them, but not much else.If this dreadful practice is even worth salvaging, the revival of the singing telegram is the only way to go. By bringing back this tradition, we could feasibly kill off the miserable ritual of buying greeting cards, all the while creating a whole new job market.

Instead of rushing to the Hallmark store to find the perfect Spider-Man-themed card wishing your cousin a “Spidey-tacular seventh birthday,” why not humiliate a full-grown man by paying him to don a Spider-Man costume and deliver that same totally rad message himself?

This simultaneously excites a child, demeans an adult and makes that adult’s wife question why she ever married such a pathetic human being. I dare you to show me a greeting card that can do all that.

I sincerely hope to see a revitalization of the singing telegram industry in the near future, but in the meantime I hope my grandmother never reads this article, because she would never, ever love me again.