Sometimes comedy illuminates hard truths with a pointed urgency that other means can’t quite achieve. Sometimes comedy is just funny. This series of posts is mostly about the former instances, but the latter is valuable, too.

This will be two straight weeks with a clip from an Albert Brooks movie in the space. That seems fine to me.

As we traipse into the annual part of the film calendar overstuffed with fare that is desperately seeking Oscar, there are little flares of especially intriguing news here and there. For example, after months of speculation as to whether or not Martin Scorsese’s Silence would see release in 2016, it was finally confirmed that Our Greatest Living Director (yep, I typed it) would have a potential contender in the mix.

With the brilliance of Brooks still lingering in my cranium and the recent news about Scorsese, I naturally found my way to this clip, the scene that, all by itself, justifies the existence of Brooks’s 1999 film, The Muse.