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: _atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (mailto:atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx) To: _lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (mailto:lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx) Sent on: 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