Afternoon Links: Seinfeld's Archives, Make Me a Bicycle, Clown!, and a Divested Running Mate

Here’s a joke. It’s from the late Mitch Hedberg: “I write jokes for a living, I sit at my hotel at night, I think of something that’s funny, then I go get a pen and I write it down. Or if the pen is too far away, I have to convince myself that what I thought of ain’t funny.” Mitch’s jokes tended to be brief, but they were often quite thoughtful. Jerry Seinfeld, one of the greatest comedy talents in modern history, also wrote his jokes down, too. (Who doesn’t, I guess?) At the Wall Street Journal, John Jurgensen has a fun item on Seinfeld tied to his new Netflix special, where Seinfeld opens his archives and shows how he dissects jokes on legal pads:

Mr. Seinfeld initially got excited about featuring a 19th century German existentialist in his bit. “If I can get a joke that refers to Nietzsche, it’s like shooting an arrow into the sun.” However, the average audience member’s sketchy knowledge of the philosopher made the set-up wobbly, so the comedian spiked it. “There’s a lot of places you can use that joke, but in a nightclub it’s not going to cut it. I love that [juxtaposition]—you’re talking about Cookie Crisp and using Nietzsche—but that was a dream that died on the page.

Just make me a bicycle, clown! One of the dumber online retorts is “Stick to _______!” It’s a lazy form of disagreement. It’s frequently lobbed at sportswriters, since they tend to be left-leaning and have been for … pretty much ever. It’s also lobbed at writers with opinions to “just report the facts!” (Yet nobody alive seems to remember such a time when this actually was reality.)