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.

As I’ve mentioned before, often and perhaps tediously, discovering The Ben Stiller Show in the fall of the 1992 was like stumbling upon a secret passageway to a land where comedy made for mass consumption could be steeped in the same pop culture obsessiveness that kept me and my various college cohorts yammering opinion into the woozy hours of the morning. I was at the age where the repetitive, catch phrase–driven japery of Saturday Night Live had inevitably shifted from delightful to dreadful (if every person’s favorite Saturday Night Light cast is the one present when they were fourteen, then surely everyone’s least favorite cast is the one gamboling across the the Studio 8H stage when they’re in the in their early-to-mid twenties). Along came a sketch comedy show that was instead largely concerned with tweaking the music, movies, and television that formed the near-totality of my personal interests.

I think because I spent so many of hours devoted to my college radio station at that time, I had a special affection for the bits where the show’s writers cleverly skewered the weird cultural touchstones of the rock music scene. To this day, I’ve never set foot on the grounds of a facility where the Grateful Dead or any of their offshoots were prepared to regale a heavy-lidded, swaying crowd with hours of languidly exploratory instrumentation. That doesn’t mean I don’t instinctively understand the loving accuracy of the sketch built around the cunning sheep’s-clothing infiltration of an intrepid insurance salesman into the scene, all in the name of peddling policies to celebrants make pliable by herbal preparation for the day. There’s even a perfect capper that speaks right to me and all my fellow denizens of the left end of the dial.

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