[lit-ideas] Re: Scrushy and the King of Arkansas
- From: JimKandJulieB@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 3 Dec 2005 20:49:56 EST
Dennis Miller, Bill Maher.
Julie Krueger
========Original Message======== Subj: [lit-ideas] Re: Scrushy and the
King of Arkansas Date: 12/3/05 6:44:38 PM Central Standard Time From:
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DR asks:
> Who do you currently find funny?
The humor I find most rewarding is that which comes out at moments most
inappropriate to humor. In that vein, I think Lorrie Moore's _Birds of
America_
is one of the funniest and most poignant collection of short stories I've
ever read. For pure witticisms, it's still Wilde as far as I'm concerned.
American bourgeois comedy of manners? Neil Simon's still king. Wonderfully
silly farce -- in America: Mel Brooks; in Great Britain -- Monty Python (and
many
of the movies by those same actors), also the Black Adder people. One of
the funniest novels I've read in the last 20 years was _A Confederacy of
Dunces_, by O'Toole -- take it out to 40 years and I'd have to include _The
Sot
Weed Factor_ by Barth and _The Ginger Man_, by Donleavy -- they were my
introduction to absurdity, I'm not sure I'd still find them so hilarious now,
but
only because that worldview is so commonplace now -- except among the Cheney's
of course, they're still true believers in their righteousness. The most
humorous essayists award goes to David Sedaris and Sarah Vowel. They are
unerring in their perceptions of humorous social incongruities. Stand up
comedy?
-- no one can touch Steven Wright, though I do like Chris Rock whereas David
can't find the humor there -- to me it's almost all attitudinal:
"We were so poor my daddy unplugged the clocks when we went to bed."
"Do you know what the good side of crack is? If you're up at the right hour,
you can get a VCR for $1.50. You can furnish your whole house for $10.95."
"_Gun control? We need bullet control! I think every bullet should cost
5,000 dollars. Because if a bullet cost five thousand dollar, we wouldn't have
any innocent bystanders._
(http://en.thinkexist.com/quotation/gun-control-we-need-bullet-control-i-think-every/347003.html)
"
"Yeah, I love being famous. It's almost like being white, y'know? People are
nice to ya, they give you the benefit o' the doubt... You drive a flash car
down the freeway and the cops'll pull y'over and before they even look they
like 'What the f**k are you doing?' and then they see it's you and they like
'Awww man, it's Chris Rock, it's okay, man we thought you was a nigga'."
And of course, there's probably his most famous quotable: "You know the
world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a
black guy, the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese, the Swiss hold the America's
Cup, France is accusing the U.S. of arrogance, Germany doesn't want to go to
war, and the three most powerful men in America are named 'Bush', 'Dick', and
'Colon'."
I think the funniest TV sit-coms ever have been Seinfeld and The Larry
Sanders Show. Memphis has spoken.
Mike Geary
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