The essence of comedy is the mechanical encrusted upon the living.
—Henri Bergson
We know comedy isn’t pretty; so, too, is it ever not cruel?
I mean, are you trying to make me uncomfortable?
Do swear words possess even the slightest power anymore?
Do dirty jokes?
Would you like to tell us one?
Too namby-pamby for you?
So we’re back to talking some more about you, then—how formative it was for you as a California kid to listen to four hours of slightly risqué comedy every Saturday night on KPFA when you yourself could not say a single sentence?
How do any of us—you included—escape the doldrums of reality?
Other than talking to another human being?
Are illusions better than nothing?
What else can we do?
What else are there but dreams, phantoms, other people?
I was trying to remember the last time I had laughed as hard, and I thought of Houellebecq’s Whatever; did you ever read that?
Seriously?
Him?
Were you disappointed that some of the critics didn’t pick up on the humor?
That book was all about irony, was it not?
Could you read aloud that passage I found particularly funny?
But really nothing beyond that?
A cure for irony?
It’s pretty hardwired into the human condition, wouldn’t you say?
That’s what Wallace got wrong, in your view?
Do you—did you—find life fun?
It can’t all be one long death spiral, can it?
Too bad there aren’t people here; they could be asking questions right about now. What might they ask?
If every joke is an epigraph on the death of a feeling, then your lifelong obsession with stand-up makes you . . . what . . . kind of a serial killer of feelings, then?
Did people laugh, at least a little?
Was it kind of a joke?
Do you remember the line?
How does it go?
Really funny?
No final questions, comments, quibbles, brickbats?
And Errol would then play the piano on the tarmac? Amazing.
Was the whole suicide thread just a ruse, then?
A “joke”?
A not very funny joke?
How ironic are you being, even now?
How serious, behind this rather elaborate and somewhat tedious mask of “irony”?
Isn’t that like an impotent man vowing abstinence?