Oooooh. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a coveted staple of this generation's popular culture. Seeing it as the topic of discussion for this week evoked so many middle school memories of me reading this book and then proceeding to reference it as if I was so clever. However I feel that reading it as a middle schooler caused lot of the humor to go over my head, so having a chance to re-experience it excited me. I also did not even know that it was originally a radio series, not a book. In order to appreciate it in its full glory, I would have to read the book again (or in this case, listening to it), now as a young adult. At once, I remembered how Douglas Adams has a peculiar way with words, and was particularly adept at presenting what would otherwise be mundane descriptions, as extremely entertaining. He takes common, relatable problems such as the impact of expanding infrastructure on local residents, or the search for the meaning of life, and blows it up to a universal scale, achieving a comedic effect in the end. Placing these issues on such a massive scale amplifies the scale of its proposed solutions, and seeing aliens struggle with the same problems as us only makes them more relatable. The result is hilarious parody on everyday human struggles and not only puts our problems in perspective, but lets us laugh at it as well.
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