FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Hey now.

•    Just a few months ago Garry Shandling was horsing around with Jerry Seinfeld about Robin Williams' suicide, and he made a joke: "‘63 is so young’ is a phrase you never hear relative to anything but death." Now that Shandling's dead, the New York Daily News calls the coincidence "chilling," but to me it's almost the opposite. Like all the classic jests on the big sleep, it's slightly discomfiting, especially if you're anywhere near the target, but overall it's reassuring, because it shows that someone else (as well as, hopefully, a number of people laughing all around you) understands that we're all in the same boat, and this makes death a slightly easier thing to live with. At its best, comedy does what seems like a cruel and selfish thing -- takes an individual and literally "makes fun of" him -- but produces a generous result: the shared recognition that we all have to occasionally make fools of ourselves, or fart, or sublimate, or die, and that's what being human is. Here's a pretty good Shandling monologue transcript (including the great "'I'm hot, I'm on fire' -- me, me, me!" gag), but we all know Shandling's great achievement was The Larry Sanders Show, in which Shandling's trademark insecurity not only spawned a great extended joke about the dysfunction that attends power -- I think The Thick of It and Veep actually owe a lot to Larry Sanders -- but one of the greatest comic characters since Moliere, Jeffrey Tambor's Hank Kingsley. A few names quickly come to mind when we think about the American comedians who ascended into artistry; some of them I'm sure we'd fight over. But for Larry Sanders alone I think we have to agree on Shandling.

•    Meanwhile in culture war woo-hoo, here's an essay from (naturally) The Federalist by the unfortunately-named Maureen Mullarkey entitled "What Vintage Pulp Fiction Covers Say About Today’s Vices." In short: The luridness of these old covers may be humorous to you sinners but it accurately portrays the wages of SIN ("However much titillation accompanies it, judgment is inexorable. And unsmiling"). Here's a choice excerpt:

Ignoble Layne made sexual bargains of all kinds to get ahead in the music and film industries. Alas, his infidelities brought on a lethal end. Was it AIDS before there was a name for it? Or did he run into the wrong guy? 

Either way, in 1965 even gay porn acknowledged the ancient insight that promiscuity comes with consequences. They were born too soon, Layne and Carrie. Today they could down antibiotic cocktails or protease inhibitors while they checked the hook-up apps on their iPhones.

Somewhere deep in a deep red state, a bright young fellow is inspired by Mullarkey to prepare a scholarly defense for when his mom finds his bondage porn stash.