<HTML><BODY STYLE="font:10pt verdana; border:none;"><DIV>>C/A: F.H. Buckley argues in The Morality of Laughter that humor is deeply moral and requires a butt. Do >you agree with this, and if so, how would you say this relates to your writing? <BR><BR>>PJ: Humor—good humor, at least, in both senses of the term—is probably not possible without a >realization that the world has a moral order and an equal realization that one is hopeless at >understanding how that moral order works. To be technical, "humor" is a perception of how things are >and have been and will be, as much as we try to pretend otherwise (a sense of the "humors"—bile, >phlegm, and so forth). "Satire" is humor with a specific moral point to make. The rest is one or another >form of mockery, which is just aggression with slippers and pipe. As I have said elsewhere: "There are >three forms of humor: satire, where you make fun of people who are richer than you are; parody, >where you make fun of people who are smarter than you are; and burlesque, where you do both while >taking off your clothes." <BR></DIV> <DIV>What interests me about this is that O'Rourke deflates the whole of Doug Wilson's worldview in the first sentence of his answer. So, the world has a moral order, but we're hopeless at understanding how it works? You mean Doug doesn't really have all the answers? He just thinks he does?</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>We knew it all along. Funny lurks in that cognitive dissonance the real and the imaginary.</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>Joan Opyr/Auntie Establishment</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>PS: Do you really find P. J. O'Rourke funny? He's forever falling flat on "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me," especially next to Roy Blount, Jr. And as for William F. Buckley . . . there's a difference between humor and har-de-har-har. Thanks, but no thanks. Make mine a Margaret Cho. <BR></DIV></BODY></HTML><br clear=all><hr>Get more from the Web. FREE MSN Explorer download : <a href='http://explorer.msn.com'>http://explorer.msn.com</a><br></p>