Sublime

His material is his life—his family, his walks around the neighborhood, his French lessons—and the most amazing thing about him is that he never fails to make it fresh or meaningful. I can think of very few writers—in comedy or elsewhere—with better timing or sense of the absurd.

What does an artist do, mostly? She tweaks that which she’s already done.

Marc: Ah, the situation room. So this is your office? A lot of boards, things being outlined. It’s like—I can’t read your fucking writing. Judd: Well, part of the reason why I have bad handwriting is when I used to do stand-up comedy, I would write jokes on planes and I was always embarrassed that the person next to me would see what I was writing

Team Δy chief Alan Britton, M.S. & J.D., of whom one sensed that no one had ever even once made fun, was an immense and physically imposing man, roughly 6'1" in every direction, with a large smooth shiny oval head in the precise center of which were extremely tiny close-set features arranged in the invulnerably cheerful expression of a man

And don’t get me started about the “talking head.” A brilliant element of direct address to the camera and crew that the creators, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, perfectly lifted from documentaries and reality shows and then twisted to their own comedic ends. In a handful of lines, a character could 1) move the plot forward, 2) reveal somethin

understand. My daughters were not writers. To a writer, this is so funny. To send a word, instead of a body! Haruki was a writer. He would have understood. If he had been there, he would have laughed, too,

Trout doesn’t really exist. He has been my alter ego in several of my other novels. But most of what I have chosen to preserve from Timequake One has to do with his adventures and opinions. I have salvaged a few of the thousands of stories he wrote between 1931, when he was fourteen, and 2001, when he died at the age of eighty-four.

The Little Kid

no.” Because my problem was always that when I thought of something funny, if I called up a buddy, and I did it, the ship had sailed. I didn’t need seven thousand people. One person worked. The chromosome had clicked and I had an orgasm. I was done.