To shore up my position, I made us watch them both again, back to back, in a single night. And then a few days later, Deirdre and I were having dinner, and we started talking about this moment a couple of years ago, at a big celebration for her sister. At the end of the evening, he and Deirdre and I were hanging out by an electric piano that the band had brought, and he was playing various easy-listening tunes for us. And so I was officially on a quest for the perfect joke. Joke-sorting might sound like fun, but there is, I'm afraid, a certain joylessness to the process.
Nothing beats rock.
More recently, the joke-nostalgia cycle has sped up, so that I can be sorting a joke even as I'm making it. When we were in L.A., Deirdre and I were staying for a while at the home of her friend Heather, who's into new-age spirituality and various unorthodox health cures. My friends and I spent a good portion of the 1990s telling jokes and retelling jokes and writing jokes and refining jokes and laughing at jokes. Now, apparently, what I'm doing is whittling down.