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
To anyone who hasn’t read Douglas Adams, a fan carrying a towel everywhere on May 25 looks insane, and to anyone who has, it’s 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’s a stupid joke built into a brilliant logical argument. That’s 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’s run every year since. It’s 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.
Watch: DOUGLAS ADAMS: Parrots, the Universe and Everything, University of California Television (UCTV)
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 didn’t care. I was hooked. 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’ve owned the same six episodes across three formats. That tells you something about how much it got into me. I never listened to the original radio shows, though I hear they’re 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 didn’t do much for me. It was watchable. It wasn’t great. The thing that captured Adams for me 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. Infocom made it, 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 didn’t just entertain me. He pointed me toward a kind of storytelling I’m still chasing.
Who was Douglas Adams?
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. That tells you exactly what lineage his humor comes from.
His comedy has its own flavor. It’s dry, it’s 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 comes from.
The Guide Predicted Your Phone
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’s 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’s about understanding how people will behave around gadgets, 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’ve read the books, 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 can writers learn from Douglas Adams?
Adams is a model of comedic writing, and the lesson is harder than it looks. Funny writing 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, but he builds them tightly. Threads that seem like throwaway gags pay off chapters later.
He engineers the randomness. That’s the hardest kind of comedy to write, the kind that feels loose and improvised but that the writer plans 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’re reading Adams. The narrator has a personality, a point of view, a particular way of finding the universe funny. 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.