Sucker's Portfolio

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

My adopted son Steve Adams wrote funny stuff for TV out in Los Angeles for a while. He made a lot of money, but he had to quit. He could not stand it anymore that every joke he wrote had to refer to something that had been big news on TV during the past two weeks. Otherwise, his audience wouldn’t know what he was having fun with. TV was expected to be a great teacher, but its shows are so well done that it has become the only teacher, and an awful teacher, since there is no way for it to make its students learn by doing something. Worst of all, it keeps saying that whatever it has taught in the past doesn’t matter anymore, that it has found something much more entertaining for us to look at. So the wake of North American TV is something like the wake of a bulldozer, in which everything has been made nice and neat, dead level and lifeless and featureless. But a better analogue of TV’s wake in the space-time continuum is a black hole into which even the greatest crimes and stupidities, and indeed whole continents, if need be, can be made to disappear from our consciousness.