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.

After tapping out a whole mess of words about Martin Scorsese yesterday, including a digression about unlikely fare he could direct, my mind has spent most of today idly drifting back to this sketch from The Ben Stiller Show. It’s pure silliness, but I do recall that I could never again take Juliette Lewis’s performance seriously after seeing Janeane Garofalo’s expert mockery of it.