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.

When I was a kid, I was a big fan of old Abbott and Costello routines. I think I responded to the dynamic of snappy banter interrupted by Lou Costello’s cartoonish overreactions that were clearly calibrated for the vaudeville stage. Even then, watching superstation airings of their various works, I was instinctively aware that the movies and television episodes were little more than slipshod delivery vehicles for bits they’d already worked out for live performances. That was fine with me, because I was really only there for the jokes anyway. Befitting my hummingbird attention span, it helped that the incorporated sketches were often noisy and short. I offer “Two Tens for a Five” as a case in point.

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