The Narrative Logic of Rube Goldberg Machines
Abstract: Rube Goldberg’s cartoons famously depict absurd, unreasonably complex machines invented by Professor Lucifer G. Butts to carry out simple tasks. Rube Goldberg machine has now become a byword for overly complicated machinery or bureaucracy of any kind. The specific structure of Goldberg’s original cartoons, however, is quite interesting. Beyond simply being complex, his machines are based on a particular repertoire of objects used in stereotypical, coincidental, and comical ways, exhibiting almost as much of a narrative logic as a mechanical logic. In this paper, we analyze the structure of these cartoon machines’ construction, with a view towards being able to generate them using a planning formalization of this analysis.
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