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 have mostly unkind opinions to offer on Rob Reiner’s new documentary about his friend Albert Brooks, the film deserves credit for being the catalyst to finally get Brooks to sit across from Marc Maron on the podcast WTF. Nearly fifteen hundred episodes deep into his justly revered podcast, Maron has openly coveted the chance to talk to Brooks for a very long time, and the resulting interview is indeed a treasure. Anyone looking for a proper primer on why Brooks is such a special performer would do well to start with that conversation.

Of course, sampling the many clips that are readily available on line is a helpful part of the process, too. The ventriloquist bit that Brooks performed across a range of variety shows is about as good as it gets. There’s a reason that Brooks tells Maron it was like a Beatles song. It’s easy to see why it always killed. More than that, it demonstrates how well Brooks was able to leverage his tremendous inventiveness. It is essentially a one-joke bit, but it’s amazing how many different ways Brooks can present the joke, always with the precision timing of an atomic clock.

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