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.

Lorne Michaels has long maintained that everyone’s favorite Saturday Night Live cast is the one that was in place when they were in high school. I think that theory is sound. My addendum is that everyone aggressively outgrows the venerable sketch comedy program sometime in their early twenties, defiantly deeming it a hopeless relic of redundant juvenilia. For me, that experience was kicked into turbo drive by the sense that Saturday Night Live wasn’t cool enough to concern itself with the cultural touchstones of my left-of-the-dial cohort ensconced in college campus debates. Into that void, The Ben Stiller Show rushed.

In retrospect, it’s not that the short-lived sketch comedy series starring Ben Stiller, Bob Odenkirk, Janeane Garofalo, and Andy Dick was trafficking in topics that were all that obscure. It was a long ways away from the resolute esotericism of spiritual descendant Documentary Now!, for example. Spoofing U2, then arguably the biggest rock band in the world, wasn’t exactly alienating to the masses. Even so, for those of us who were then regularly adding tracks from the band’s most recent album, Achtung Baby, to our playlists, a show that turned over several minutes of network airtime to a spot-on parody of “One” felt like it conspiratorially aligned with our interests.

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