Why People Carry Towels on May 25
Towel Day works on one joke from one book. A towel, Douglas Adams wrote, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can carry. Fans have honored that line every May 25 since 2001.Share on X
Towel Day is May 25, and on that day fans of Douglas Adams carry a towel everywhere they go. To anyone who has not read the books, this looks insane. To anyone who has, it is perfect.
The towel comes straight from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where Adams wrote that a towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can carry. The Guide explains that a traveler who knows where their towel is commands instant respect, because anyone that organized has clearly got everything else handled too. It is a stupid joke built into a brilliant logical argument, which is Adams in one image.
The day itself started in grief. Adams died of a sudden heart attack on May 11, 2001, at only 49. Two weeks later, on May 25, his fans held the first Towel Day. The idea came from a single online post asking people to carry a towel in his memory, it spread fast, and it has run every year since. It is now a global geek holiday, the kind of thing fans mark with a towel around the neck and a knowing nod to anyone else carrying one.
How I Found the Hitchhiker’s Guide
I came to it backward from most people. The first version I ever saw was the BBC television series, six episodes, each a half hour. It was low budget, and I did not care. I was fascinated. The dry British humor, the way every absurd thread tied back together, the puns, the Vogons, I loved all of it.
I watched that series probably five times on VHS. Then I bought it on DVD. Then I bought it on Blu-ray. I have owned the same six episodes across three formats, which tells you something about how much it got into me. I never listened to the original radio shows, though I hear they are even better, and I confess I never read the books. The Hitchhiker’s Guide reached me through a screen and a game, not the page, and it still landed.
I did watch parts of the American movie version, and it did not do much for me. It was watchable. It was not great. The thing that captured Adams for me was never the big-budget version. It was the cheap, clever, fast-talking original.
The Game That Hooked Me
Douglas Adams built a text adventure so deliberately, sadistically hard that getting stuck was the entertainment. The Babel fish puzzle took about thirty steps. Players shared solutions like resistance documents.Share on X
The other way Hitchhiker’s got into me was a computer game. There was a text adventure called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a puzzle game where you type commands and walk through the story one room at a time. It was made by Infocom, the same company behind Zork, and Adams himself worked on it.
He made it deliberately, sadistically difficult, because he found player frustration hilarious. The infamous Babel fish puzzle took about thirty steps, most of which seemed insane, and players would spend weeks stuck on it and trade solutions like underground documents. I wrote a whole piece about that era of games and what they taught me about writing, in what Zork and Oregon Trail taught me. That obsession even led to my own novel, Dungeon, built on a full play-through of the Zork world from beginning to end. So Adams did not just entertain me. He pointed me toward a kind of storytelling I am still chasing.
Who Douglas Adams Was
Douglas Adams was born in Cambridge, England, in 1952. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy started life as a BBC radio show in 1978, then became the famous series of books, often called a trilogy in five parts, because Adams thought that was funnier than calling it what it was. He also wrote for Doctor Who and worked with the Monty Python crew, which tells you exactly what lineage his humor comes from.
His comedy has a specific flavor. It is dry, it is logical, and it takes an absurd premise and follows it with a straight face all the way to a punchline. The answer to life, the universe, and everything is 42. The most useful object in space is a towel. The way to fly is to throw yourself at the ground and miss. Each one is a joke wearing the costume of a sober argument, and that gap between the serious tone and the ridiculous content is where the laugh lives.
The Guide Predicted Your Phone
Here is the part that has aged strangely well. The Hitchhiker’s Guide, the object inside the story, is a handheld electronic book that can tell you about anything in the universe. You pull it out, you look something up, you get an answer that is often wrong but confidently delivered. Adams wrote this in the late 1970s.
Look at that description again. A small device you carry everywhere that answers any question, sometimes incorrectly, with total confidence. He described the smartphone decades before it existed, down to the unreliable-but-authoritative tone. Good science fiction does this. It is not really about predicting gadgets, it is about understanding how people will behave around them, and Adams nailed the behavior. We carry our guides everywhere now, and we trust them about as much as the book deserved.
The lore runs deep, and fans speak it like a second language. The number 42 is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything, except nobody remembers the actual question. “Don’t Panic” is printed on the cover of the Guide in large friendly letters. A “hoopy frood” is a cool, together person who really knows where their towel is. None of it makes sense out of context, and all of it makes perfect sense once you have read the books, which is exactly the kind of in-joke universe that builds a fandom loyal enough to carry towels in public twenty-five years after the author died.
What Writers Can Learn From Adams
Adams is a master class in comedic writing, and the lesson is harder than it looks. Funny writing is not about piling on jokes. It is about commitment. Adams takes one absurd idea and treats it with total seriousness, building real logic on top of a ridiculous foundation. The humor comes from the contrast, the deadpan delivery of insane content.
The deeper lesson is structure. Adams’ plots look like chaos and are actually tightly built. Threads that seem like throwaway gags pay off chapters later. The randomness is engineered. That is the hardest kind of comedy to write, the kind that feels loose and improvised but is actually planned to the inch. If you want to write funny, study how carefully Adams sets up the things that later make you laugh.
The last lesson is voice. You always know you are reading Adams. The narrator has a personality, a point of view, a particular way of being amused by the universe. That distinct voice is what readers come back for, more than any single joke. Build a voice that strong and readers will follow it anywhere, even across a trilogy in five parts.
So on May 25, carry a towel. Reread the books, or watch the cheap brilliant BBC series, or lose a weekend to the game like I did. And whatever you do, don’t panic.