Stamos is extremely unfunny to me. 11ie writers of Full House deserve to have their fingers cut off. K., who is taking a ridiculous amount of time at her homework, turns to me. (2) "Why do you have to be such a snob, Nick?" my girlfriend of two years asks me. I lie back on the bed and close my eyes, choosing to ignore the question. I mentally, en1otionally place myself above A., the girl who lives in a dream world, the girl who chooses to look at the pretty people on the flashing box with their easy-to-mend problems. I think about the ridiculousness of a family so tightly lrnit yet so smooth with one another, and about the ignorance of the people who accept such a real– ity as viable. I think about how serious I am and how flighty A. and my girlfriend K. are. I think about how they are wasting their liberal arts education and how I am doing my best to expand my experience beyond the white bread, Full House experience. My girlfriend breaks up with me a few months later and I can– not get a straight answer as to why she's leaving me. And that's that. I try to put into dear, concise terms the things that make humor so compelling for the human race. Why it's such a huge part of conversation. Why we quote passages from Seinfeld or reference that one episode ofThe Office (3) whenever something even remotely innuendo-like is n1entioned. I spend my time looking through medical journals, reading articles on a "theory of humor." I search "brain" and "laughter" in Google and get answers that muddle things for me even more. (Apparently, instead of being isolated to the frontal lobe like most emotional responses, laughter takes a kind of circuit that involves the entire brain. It's interesting, but it doesn't help me parse a thing.) I find something E.B. White once wrote-"Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it." This is thoroughly disheartening. I navel-gaze for hours. I watch TV like a man with nothing bet– ter to do and I try to find some sort of transcendence in it. I list what I like about comedy, decide it's pretentious and scrap it, write another 36
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