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.

Although I’d quickly concede that there are far more egregious omissions in the year’s big, bizarre batch of Emmy nominations, no miss makes me quite as wistfully blue as a certain unnamed gem in the down-ballot category meant to name the season’s best original song (which, I’m quite confident, most people don’t even realize is an Emmys category). Written by Jeff Richmond and performed by the Milk Carton Kids, the adoring Simon & Garfunkel spoof “New York Lonely Boy” deserved a little taste of glory. There’s no way it would have prevailed in the category, which has an outcome so certain that it almost seems unkind to nominate other songs, but it would have still been nice to see it on the list.

Previous entries in this series can be found by clicking on the “Laughing Matters” tag.