10 Good Things: Curb, Seinfeld, Ramy, etc.

Also: Joking about Israel/Gaza, Matt Groening on Irish vs. Jewish humor, how to ask for more money, flight hours, and more.

NYC: I’m taping my next special in NYC on 4/21 (promo code SHINEON gets ya $10 off).

💥 Why Freud would find Curb Your Enthusiasm funny:

One simple way of considering the character of Larry is as a vessel of our wish fulfillment. As Cheryl Hines, David’s co-star, has said, “I think we all live vicariously through Larry,” because “if somebody asks you to dinner, you’d like to just say, ‘No, I don’t really like you that much.’ But people don’t in real life, you know? Larry does.” Sigmund Freud argued in his 1905 book “Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious” that laughter gives us a sense of relief because it releases the energy we normally spend on repressing our drives. Freud would say that when Larry acts out on “Curb,” we laugh because Larry lets us indirectly satisfy repressed desires to do the same.

💥 Kevin Kelly: Don’t be the best. Be the only.

You want to be doing something where it’s hard to explain to your mother what it is that you do…It requires a tremendous amount of self-knowledge and awareness to get to that point, to really understand what it is that you do better than anybody else in the world. And for most of us, it takes all our lives to figure that out.

💥 Ramy on political comedy:

Up ahead: Joking about Israel/Gaza, Matt Groening on Irish vs. Jewish humor, how to ask for more money, flight hours, and more…