This week’s episode asks the question: Why aren’t conservatives funny? Or, put another way: Didn’t conservatives used to be funny? At least some of them? And could they ever be funny again?
More specifically, we revisit a P.J. O’Rourke essay from 1982, in which the author takes a cruise to the Soviet Union sponsored by the magazine The Nation, and spends most of his time drinking vodka with the Russians on-board while making fun of the insufferable American passengers, who are sort of like the parents from Family Ties except with even less self-awareness. Shooting fish in a barrel, maybe, but also: what annoying fish!
In the second half of the show, we dig back into the NaNoWriMo forums to offer our (semi-solicited?) advice to this year’s crop of aspiring novelists.
As always, you can listen to the show right here on our site (stream or download below), or check us out in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts.
If you like the show, and you’d like to have some more of it in your life, you can subscribe to our Patreon for $5 a month and get access to our entire catalog of bonus episodes: Book Fight After Dark, where we explore various genres of romance novel, and Reading the Room, where we give writers (and readers) advice on how to live their lives.
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