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happiness is a warm gun: the 2 things america is good atare annihilation and fun. Sarah Vowell was the last speaker in this year's Festival of Ideas at WVU. Her performance was last night in the Mountainlair Ballrooms. I went and sat with my buddy Mike, who goes to nearly every one of these things each year. I snapped his picture with her as she signed his copy of her newest book Assassination Vacation, from which she had read several excerpts in the show.
Listening to: Smashmouth Reading: periodicals Weather: 46, partly everything She was absolutely hilarious in that way that many of my favorate comedians are. I just love when an intelligent comedian ferrets out a little nugget of hidden solid truth, usually about something pretty significant like justice or humanity, spins it from a fresh angle, and delivers it up as a pithy well-formed humorous statement or question that really makes ya think. Like Chris Rock, George Carlin, and Whoopie Goldberg back when she did stand-up. Sarah probably thinks of herself as a writer rather than a stand-up comedian (she even talked a bit about how uncomfortable she is speaking relative to writing, where she can tweak it 20 times till it's just right before it gets to audience). But I laughed out loud way more than I ever do for most of the solo shows on Comedy Central. When one of the audience questions at the end was about what her number one reason for thinking Bush sucks is, there wasn't even a fraction of a second of silence between q and a, she said "war." Then followed it up with something like "I'm a pretty simple body-count kinda girl, basically whatever kills the most people fastest is the thing that I think sucks the most." You know it's true when all you can say is ain't it the truth.
permalink posted by cat 7:59 AM
