Chap 16, The Price of Wisdom is above Ruby's...

[kelber at mindspring.com]

I cringed, but rarely (if ever) laughed at anything in IV.  My impression is that mixed in with some of TRP's own corny jokes is lots of parody of bad sit-com humor.  He did this in VL and even at least once in ATD (there's one point where two characters -- Reef and Yashmeen?  - say different things simultaneously, then swap answers simultaneously.  "We're here on business.  No, I mean pleasure.  Uh, business and pleasure"  kind of thing -- a horrid dumbed down kind of joke that's a constant staple in bad sit-coms, along with the requisite laugh track.  That unheard laugh track is there, I'm convinced, throughout IV.  One reference to this kind of crap is more than enough.  There's way too much of this in IV.

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
 
>
>I, for one, am so bored with this plist spending so much time on Wood and I wish I hadn't alluded to him again. But it was just an allusion to see if some of the better pynchon readers on this plist, who DID find the humor in THIS book NOT the same as in (most of) his other books would make their cases. THAT I want to hear more of, from Laura, Rich, you and Morris (if he thinks along the same lines, can't remember)...I only found a joke or two groanworthy, because that's me, but I found the line-by-line writing joyously witty, in general. In a resonantly minor work of genre homage.
>