Thing of the Week:

Steve Martin's tour rider. Dude is just a genius at taking forms like this and making the substitutions that exploit their ridiculousness. It's Mad Libs for the Mensa set, a beautiful act of juxtaposition.

Seriously, if you haven't read it, please, please check out Born Standing Up, his memoir of becoming a comedian. It's a reminder of how much knowledge goes into selecting the right elements of a joke (Woody Allen's comedy writing also used to be a textbook example of this. I recommend Without Feathers, Getting Even and Side Effects. The memoirs of Hitler's barber are worth the price of all three, as are the Kaiser Lupowitz stories, particularly "The Whore of Mensa.")—and a pathetic demonstration of how dumb our humor has gotten. I don't just mean that we're stuck on bodily jokes about sex, physicality, and physical functions. It's that our humor's gotten less educated, and as a result, the field of play for it has narrowed dramatically. If you could make jokes about the Hollywood blacklist, or Lionel Trilling's voice, and have everyone understand what you meant, immediately, without the need for contextualization or explanation, you could do so much more in your act, or in your writing. We live in shrunken times.