If it bends …

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Cartoon above is by the great Kliban and testifies once again that comedy and satire, in particular, ain't pretty.  I once interviewed for a writing gig on a Canadian television show, a sitcom the producers imagined be an entirely good-natured affair.  They wanted the characters to be decent people, the stories redemptive.  I said such was not possible, that happy, well-adjusted people did not comedy make and didn't get the job.  The show went on to get produced and ran for many years with fewer and fewer viewers, staying on the air for many reasons other than it being fit to watch.

No one really understands what makes something funny.  One theory I've heard says the laughs come from incongruities, from the calamitous collision of what's expected and some beastly improbability. Boudu, the bum, becomes the perfect bourgeois, your mother farts and so on. [image error]

But the outrage must be rooted in truth.   Homer Simpson, an expert in the arena had it right.

I've had questions from a few early readers of Easy to Like about  the veracity of the book.  The things that people sense are real, the movie titles ("there just had to be a movie called "Total Conquest"") or the matou de gethsamane grape for instance, are  fabrications.  The things that people find absurd and improbable, the private wire taps in Hollywood, the feral zebras at San Simeon, the management non-speak, are real.   The ludicrous "360 degree management","branding pyramids" and "everyone, every way" are verbatim from the CBC executive suites. And, yes, a few years back, someone was, like my protagonist, invited into those same executive suites on the basis of  his dubious Tinseltown credentials.

Of course there is nothing so unfunny as explaining a joke or, as I'm doing here, theorizing how comedy works.  Woody Allen had great fun with Alan Alda's character's tiresome analysis in one of my favorite of Mr. Konigsberg's films, "Crimes and Misdemeanors", a picture that was as Old Testament serious as it was funny.