When it comes to books, I don't read a lot of non-fiction. It's not that I'm not interested, but rather that the stuff worth reading tends to be non-conducive to being read in short spurts and easily interrupted - i.e., it's no good on the bus. Also, it tends to cost an arm and a leg. (But what book doesn't, these days? How I long for the good ol' days, when I could get mass-market paperbacks for $4.95...)

Anyways, I think I'm going to have to grit my teeth and settle in (eventually) to read Mike Sack's And Here's the Kicker: Conversations with 21 Top Humor Writers on Their Craft. Why? Because in an interview in today's National Post, when asked if there was a common thread between the writers Sacks interviewed, he replied that most of them suffer from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

This information intrigues me. It puts a new perspective on American TV humour. OCD enslaves those who suffer from it, making them unable to do things like leave the house until a piece of furniture is placed exactly right - which could take hours. That's strange, isn't it? And when people do strange things, it's common to mock them for it, or at the very least let off an innocent laugh. I can carry on a conversation with someone if the levels of water in our glasses aren't equal, but what if I couldn't, and were stripped of my ability to choose not to? I'd be a prime target for inadvertent humiliation.

Consider how many sitcoms base their laughs on someone inadvertently humiliating themselves: Seinfeld, Friends, The King of Queens, and Two and a Half Men are good examples of that. On Seinfeld, it was a regular gag that one of the main characters did something a new acquaintance found unorthodox, and thus wound up looking like a fool - and it was usually little things, like ordering a drink with no ice, or wearing a certain colour. Another regular source of laughs was how Jerry couldn't handle messy spaces, or items in his house being out of place. Remember the Friends episode where Joey buys a "European carry-all"? And basically every episode of Two and a Half Men? For me, the best part of Futurama is the hapless Dr. Zoidberg. Speaking of Futurama, cast member Maurice Lamarche played The Brain on Pinky and the Brain, which depends on the fact that, every week, The Brain will be foiled and humiliated as he fails to take over the world. The first four seasons of M*A*S*H, with lead writer Larry Gelbart - who is featured in And Here's the Kicker - are primarily comedy, the main source of which is Hawkeye and Trapper playing a cruel and humiliating prank on Frank and/or Margaret, or Frank's frantic obsessions and guilt complexes. An unreliable source alledges that Gelbart's preferred pseudonym, when he used one, was Francis Burns. The plot thickens.

The crowning example of a comedy based on that kind of humour is probably Tony Shaloub's Monk, an excellent show which is hands-down the most tragic comedy on television. Det. Adrian Monk suffers from severe OCD, and his compulsions are usually what's played for laughs...or are they? Monk often seems like it's daring us to laugh, because it also exposes Adrian's torment in his actions against the inherent humour of a middle-aged man with wet feet shrieking, in full panic mode, "There's ocean in my shoes!!!". That scene, from "Mister Monk is Underwater", is one of the funniest things I've seen on television. It's also incredibly sad, and the fact that it's so funny makes me somewhat uncomfortable.

In other words, I'm really excited about reading And Here's the Kicker, and am at this time kicking myself for forgetting about it when spending a substantial Indigo gift card yesterday.