Think about people deciding from the fullness of their intelligence that Boswell is a silly man, and who think that it’s easy to write down sayings in such a way as to allow them to appear intelligent. It didn’t even strike these people that there surely must have been somebody in all the previous millennia of human history who said things almost as interesting as Johnson. And if there were, why didn’t we have thousands of books in which these persons were memorialized?

And I said, “The American poet Ezra Pound said years ago that art is news that stays news. He was wrong—that’s a definition of history. What art is, is entertainment that stays entertainment, that’s what it is.”

And what you don’t understand, you people, is that art is entertainment! And if you’re not entertained, if you’re not interested, if you’re not pulled in, if you’re not excited, if you’re not enlivened, then there’s nothing there! Either that or you’re not reacting to it (I understand that). But if you think you understand it perfectly and you’re “impressed,” “depressed,” “upset” “feel solemn”—that’s not art. If anything that’s religion, I mean that’s church, that’s what going to church is like. That has nothing to do with art.

When I was reading the opening stanzas of Troilus and Criseyde yesterday in class, I was struck again—I look at that, I don’t understand how this guy rhymed eight thousand lines and more in that way. As far as I can tell, there isn’t a single forced rhyme in eight thousand lines. The poem reads exactly like a very lively animated conversation in colloquial diction between the most interesting people in the world, and it goes on for eight thousand lines in one of the most complicated stanzaic patterns invented in English. Then you try to read somebody like Spenser, and you understand that … There, it’s like, what, it’s like walking through molasses.

It’s all very well to say how wonderful it was to have those old ethnic jokes about blacks and Scotchmen and Jews and so on, but there is also a considerable improvement in the moral [inaudible] of society that such things can’t generally be talked about anymore.

Ethnic jokes are often very funny, largely because they’re so truthful about a certain kind of enclave. That tells you more, as a matter of fact, about the effectiveness of the Jewish mother than any sociological document a thousand pages long. Because the curiosity, the pushiness, the interest, the total irrationality, the absolute certainty [laughter]—all of these things together. And there is no way of budging it! You might as well reason with the moon. You might as well howl at the moon.

What a culture does—all the sentimental crap about culture ignores the fundamental fact that the only thing a culture is interested in is order. It wants order. And what appears to be the simplest way of perpetuating order is to make people as alike one another as possible—to put them into pigeonholes, to make them conventional, to give them the same kind of information, to establish the same kind of expectations, to produce even the same answers on tests, the same kinds of papers, and so on. And that’s what education does, and of course once having done this these people go on to become the teachers of the next generation. So that anything that is out of the ordinary, that is unconventional, that’s original, that has a kind of life and fire to it, is snuffed out.

If I had the choice, that’s what I would be: the funniest writer you have ever read.