Ms. Wormwood: Calvin, can you tell us what Lewis and Clark did? Calvin: No, but I can recite the secret superhero origin of each member of Captain Napalm’s Thermonuclear League of Liberty.
If you give a little credit to the concept of the artist, I think you ought to indulge excesses a bit, because that reflects the personality of the writer.
History is the fiction we invent to persuade ourselves that events are knowable and that life has order and direction. That’s why events are always reinterpreted when values change.
Now if a joke is in bad taste or it’s not funny, okay, that’s awhole different thing, but how you craft a joke is really what the writer’s job is, and I don’t think that technique should be subject to any editorial constraints.
