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Okay, so this year is our 20th anniversary year as you know
and we've been putting people through a fairly heavy, forced march over the last several years
we've had topics like peace and war
and migration and global warming
and it just seemed to us that it'd be good idea to do
to give people a break, but also to look at something in a way that it that hasn't been looked at before.
We decided that we would do laughter
Now, bear in mind we mean laughter, we don't mean happiness
people are going around saying "the Festival's doing happiness"
We're are not interested in happiness
Happiness is smug, it is self-satisfied
that is not us
Laughter can be raucous, it can be blithe
it can be innocent, it can be cunning, it can be damning
around here, we think that the funniest playwright of the 20th century is Samuel Beckett
that's what we mean by laughter
So there's all sorts of things
that I'm looking forward to in this particular Festival
Some that I'm directly involved in, in fact
one I'm very much looking forward to is my slap-down with Simon Schama
the great English historian who also happens to tell some of the best Jewish jokes
in the world
When I called to invite him
to do something with us, we ended up
outdistancing each other with Jewish jokes for like 45 minutes
and we then decided that's what we'll do
So it'll be the two of us on stage and we'll have a Klezmer magician
it'll be like dueling banjos
But then, I mean
laughter is an amazing subject when you begin to get into it
and you can come at it from so many different places
There's laughter of discomfort and and of political correctness
and of the whole political history of laughter
We have—*** Gregory is going to be fantastic
One of the great, great civil rights leaders
but also one of the great comedians
and how he blends those two things
in often wonderfully caustic ways
We're going to be celebrating Donald Barthelme
the great New Yorker short story writer
who died many years ago and is now just beginning to have a revival
Jonathan Lethem and I are going to be talking with Tracy Daugherty
the person who did his biography
but mainly I think we're going to read stories and tell stories
about Donald Barthelme
We've got one event which I'm looking forward to
which is a lecture, a professor's going to talk about Ludwig Wittgenstein and Buster Keaton
who in addition to looking very much like each other
illuminate each other in really fascinating ways
and we're not so much interested in the
philisophical depths of Buster Keaton
but in the drop-down hillarious depths
comic bliss, of Ludwig Wittgenstein
which is something that people don't ordinarily think about
We're going to go back historically
I'm really looking forward to
an event called 'The Book of Job and the Comedy of Suffering'
Turns out it was all a big joke
(Laughs)
Subtitles by the Amara.org community