Last year, I went to write in a cabin in the middle of the New Hampshire woods. There were deer and bobcats and large, expressive racoons. I was excited to be off-grid. But even there, I still received data. My phone reception was better than ever. During the day, I placed my phone in a ziplock bag and stashed it in the unlit fireplace, then, late at night, abjectly clawed it back out. I understood why writers in the past cut modem lines and severed fibre optic cables, but I told myself it was OK to be on the internet as I was writing a novel about the internet, that semiotic deluge we’re all immersed in, which is something so strange and beautiful and wondrous and terrifying.
These are some of the things I return to. Though, if I’m honest, the funniest things I’ve seen aren’t always “ha ha” funny. It’s more that I’m drawn to a weirdness, a certain energy. These are the things that make me laugh.
1. Bill Gates jumping over a chair
It’s a very exciting video. Bill Gates jumps over an office chair. Something about Connie Chung saying “Yes!” makes me laugh. The quick cut to a slow-motion replay of the jump, like Bill Gates just executed a kickflip, makes me laugh even more.
2. Hi Octane Comedy Central – Sofia Coppola and Zoe Cassavetes
In 1994, the same year Bill leapt over an office chair, Comedy Central had Sofia Coppola and Zoe Cassavetes host a TV show. Hi Octane has the energy of someone stealing a camcorder and seeing what happens, except who steals it happens to be Sofia Coppola and Zoe Cassavetes. It makes a difference. They drive around in a red 60s Pontiac, have guest stars such as Keanu Reeves, Thurston Moore and Gus Van Sant, and always speak in a laconic Valley girl drawl.
In the first episode, André Leon Talley relays a message for Sofia from Karl Lagerfeld: “Karl says, would you please enunciate a little betteeeer … sometimes he can’t understand what you’re sayiiiing, because you talk like this, whhaaaaat … Just like, pick it up, girl. Work it.”
3. Bethenny Frankel’s TikTok
I love Bethenny Frankel. I do. Whenever I watch her TikTok, I get the sense that Bethenny would talk just as much without the camera present. She talks wandering through TJ Maxx, sitting in her house in the Hamptons, as she cooks. There’s a chaos to it that’s difficult to describe. She’s funny and somehow always entrancing, like an Ottessa Moshfegh narrator. Here’s Frankel eating crawfish in an Atlanta hotel room.
4. New York Post headlines
On my way to work, I stand on the tram and scroll through the New York Post’s X feed. I often tell myself this has a literary precedent. In Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, the narrator reads the Post on the subway on his way to factcheck at a magazine alluded to be the New Yorker. In the novel, as in life, the Post headlines are a hallucinatory, sensationalist, almost phantasmagorical pleasure.
They’re not always funny. Most of them aren’t. There’s tragedy, world events, but then you hit something abrupt and anecdotal: “Dog escapes kennel mid-flight by chewing through cage”, “Mom blasts school after daughters told they can’t wear Vivienne Westwood shoes”, “Emojis can cost you thousands of dollars or land you in jail— here’s why”.
5. Alexis Neiers’ voicemail to Nancy Jo Sales
I’m roughly the same age as Alexis, and the words “Nancy Jo, this is Alexis Neiers calling” are seared into my mind. If intoxicated, I might even act out the scene. If you know it, you know it.
6. Angelllboys London
I usually find influencers opening Hermès boxes to be grotesque, but I find these two very charming. The artifice cuts it like a chaser. TikTok Brideshead-cum-Birkin Revisited. I don’t know how they’ll turn out. Evelyn Waugh’s novel is a tragedy, but the times have changed. This weekend, I’ll order “a restorative Americano” and experience “decibels of tranquillity” and hope for the best.
7. Lana Del Rey in the bathtub with her cats
I don’t think Lana Del Rey is funny per se, but I think she’s more playful than people recognise. She appears in this video piece for Interview magazine. She sits by a typewriter and types. She sits, fully dressed, in a bubble bath, holding her two cats. Her lines are electric. They’re very glamorous things to say. They’re funny if you repeat them in everyday settings.
“It’s different being extraordinary, it’s hard being eccentric.”
“Crazy? Me? No. I mean, look, we’re at a magazine shoot.”
8. Dial Dan
Dial Dan is New York City photographer Dan Allegretto’s podcast. I’m hoping it becomes a sleeper hit. In the past, he’s had guests such as Naomi Fry, John Early, Alissa Bennett and Cara Cunningham. I prefer his solo episodes. Not a lot happens. They’re calming, like a certain kind of domestic Japanese novel. Topics for an episode include: beef tartare with too much cheese, bisexuality, low tire pressure warnings, a panic attack in a Lowe’s parking lot. If you try to explain the meaning of the word simpatico, you’re describing Dan. He’s funny, charismatic and infectious. You can also find him on Cameo.
9. Val Kilmer
I’m not sure if I can link to the video for legal reasons, but it’s Val Kilmer’s DVD commentary to the David Mamet film, Spartan. Clips are online. In them he discusses Mamet. He says, “He [Mamet] actually had to confess publicly that I’m funnier because everybody knew it.” During a shootout, Kilmer shares, “That’s David’s rabbi. I’m not even kidding. It sounds like I’m kidding but that guy I just killed is his rabbi. See, that’s what I mean by ‘sick’. I wouldn’t have him shoot my practitioner in my film. Why’d he make me shoot his rabbi?”
Instead of that video, here’s a clip of Val Kilmer at the beach.
10. New York Times advice column
I remember once working at a magazine with an advice column and every time it went to print there was a scramble to fill it with questions we’d invent. I can say this because I never signed an NDA and the magazine no longer exists. I sometimes wonder if the New York Times does the same. This is an incredible question. I saw it screenshot in a tweet with a caption that said something like, “Meanwhile, during the decadent decline of the west.”
Paul Dalla Rosa is the author of An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life. His fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, Granta, Forever Magazine and McSweeney’s
This article was amended on 3 May 2024 because an earlier version misidentified Cara Cunningham by her former name
