avatars have to dodge oncoming cars, catch falling bombs, and meet incoming hamburger orders at increasing speeds. Or virtually any Thomas Pynchon novel, bombarding protagonist and reader with hundreds of informational bits which may or may not add up to a conspiracy. The dynamics of this aesthetic of incessant doing are thus perhaps best studied in the arts of live and recorded performance -- dance, happenings, walkabouts, reenactments, game shows, video games. Yet zaniness is by no means exclusive to the performing arts. So much of "serious" postwar American literature is zany, for instance, that one reviewer's description of Donald Barthelme's Snow White -- "a staccato burst of verbal star shells, pinwheel phrases, [and] cherry bombs of ... puns and wordplays" -- seems applicable to the bulk of the post-1945 canon, from Ashbery to Flarf; Ishmael Reed to Shelley Jackson. I've got a more specific reading of post-Fordist or contemporary zaniness, which is that it is an aesthetic explicitly about the politically ambiguous convergence of cultural and occupational performance, or playing and laboring, under what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello call the new "connexionist" spirit of capitalism. As perhaps exemplified best by the maniacal frivolity of the characters played by Ball in I Love Lucy , Richard Pryor in The Toy , and Jim Carrey in The Cable Guy , the zany more specifically evokes the performance of affective labor -- the production of affects and relationships -- as it comes to increasingly trouble the very distinction between work and