News Summary

• Is there a comedy cycle, the same way there are cycles in fashion?
• I became abnormally interested in what’s funny during the nineteen-nineties, the golden age of sketch comedy.
• Then ‘Anchorman’ came out, in 2004, with a cast of stars who seemed to make up the dialogue as they went along, training a generation of young men to say “That escalated quickly” whenever anything happened.
• The declining number of films released and the withering of the mid-budget picture have progressively relegated filmed comedy to comic relief.