Triangle of Sadness (2022) Review
Triangle of Sadness (2022) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A luxury cruise, a great deal of vomit, and an island where the toilet manager is in charge. Blunt satire in three parts, and the third one…
Tag: Comedy (Page 5)
ComedyOscar Wilde Day: The Machinery of a Line
Wilde produced a body of work you could read in a fortnight, and he is quoted more than writers with forty books. The reason is mechanical, not mystical: he built the surprise into the sentence instead of the paragraph, and…
BureaucracyDouglas Adams Day: The Comedy of Bureaucracy
Adams wrote a radio comedy that became five novels selling over fourteen million copies, missed nearly every deadline he was given, and died at forty-nine. His method was to take the machinery of science fiction and point it at ordinary…
AprilTerry Pratchett Day: The Anger Under the Jokes
Pratchett left school at seventeen, spent seven years as press officer for four nuclear power stations, and wrote forty-one Discworld novels that made him the best-selling author in Britain. He was dismissed as a comic fantasy writer for most of…
Character DevelopmentCaptain Picard Day: The Prop That Became a Real Holiday
Captain Picard Day exists because a set decorator hung a banner in the background of one scene. No dialogue explains it. Fans picked June 16 and made it real. That is the clearest example I know of a detail becoming…
2020sCoyote vs. Acme (2026) Review
Warner Bros. finished Coyote vs. Acme, shelved it for a tax write-off, and refused to sell it at a sane price for eighteen months. Ketchup Entertainment released it anyway, and the film is holding three weekends deep. Rated 9 out…
Book ReviewsThe World’s Worst Assistant
Sona Movsesian's book about thirteen years as Conan O'Brien's assistant is a comedy bit stretched to full length, but it's smarter than it sounds. Under the jokes about napping at work and watching television on the clock sits a real…
AgingStupid Things I Won’t Do When I Get Old
Petrow started this book as a list of what his parents were doing wrong. Then they died while he was writing it, and the whole thing changed, the tone, the point, everything. By the end, he's writing instructions to himself…
ComedyAlien Abduction Day: Why Invented Holidays Live or Die
There is no founding body and no origin story, which describes most of the modern calendar. The interesting question is why a handful survive and the rest evaporate.
Character DevelopmentTalk Like a Pirate Day: Why the Joke Survived
A private joke between two friends in 1995 became an international observance in 2002. I drove to a pirate faire for it once, in the worst costume present.
Book ReviewsEats, Shoots and Leaves
A witty, bestselling defense of punctuation that turns commas and apostrophes into a genuine pleasure, the rare grammar book to become a cultural phenomenon. Funny, scholarly, and surprisingly moving about why these marks matter, held from the top by a…
AmbiguityThe Paw
A cat catches a hamster behind the dryer, pins his tail, and gives him a choice: find her missing kitten or get eaten. He goes down into a pipe no cat can follow, finds the kitten, and finds out why…