Each time a mediocre singer performs, he is saying, in effect, "This is good enough for you." The audience, thrust into that familiar American mood of knowing something is wrong but not knowing what it is, unconsciously absorbs the insult and projects it back onto the mediocre performer in the form of inattention, rudeness and noise.

Any discussion of the problems of being funny in America will not make sense unless we substitute the word wit for humor. Humor inspires sympathetic good-natured laughter and is favored by the healing-power gang. Wit goes for the jugular, not the jocular, and it's the opposite of football; instead of building character, it tears it down.

God may have loved the common people, but a trip to any shopping mall suggests that He made far too many of them.

Wit goes for the jugular, not the jocular, and it's the opposite of football; instead of building character, it tears it down.

I don't mind being regarded as perverted and unnatural, but I would die if people thought I was a Democrat.

In social matters, pointless conventions are not merely the bee sting of etiquette, but the snake bite of moral order.

By sending the contradictory message that the famous are just plain folks on Mount Olympus, America has forged a relentless tension between loftiness and accessibility. Stir in the fact that the inborn talent and intelligence needed to achieve fame are immune to distributive tinkering by government programs and you have a definition of fame certain to produce envious rage: somebody screwed democracy.