Ridiculous Ways to Act Serious

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In this episode

The connection

Searching for something funny enough to cause a loud laugh leads to a specific kind of comedy: the sight of someone being intensely serious about something that doesn't matter. Writing in late June, Andrew Martin imagines a Supreme Court Justice in a sticky TGI Fridays booth, applying an originalist reading to a laminated menu just to secure a milkshake. Then, in a script from earlier this month, Jesse Eisenberg captures a father sitting his child down for a grave talk about musical theater rather than sex. There's a strange delight in watching someone treat the trivial as if it were the law of the land. Humor often lives in that gap between a person’s dignity and their surroundings.

Martin leaves the listener in that sticky booth, watching a man use the gravity of the Supreme Court to secure a secret "Island Heat" sauce. The humor comes from the gap between the high-minded language of originalism and the low-stakes reality of a chicken tender. But notice how the performance of seriousness actually serves as a shield for personal preference. If the history says the milkshake is mandatory, the judge doesn't have to admit he just really wants one. Turning to Jesse Eisenberg, that same air of misplaced solemnity moves from the courtroom to the living room. Where Martin uses the law to justify a craving, Eisenberg uses the rituals of parenting to enforce a taste. The "talk" usually covers sex or safety—the things a child needs to survive—but here, the life-or-death urgency is reserved for dissonant chords and librettos. Both pieces hinge on the idea that if a person uses a serious enough tone, their specific, quirky obsessions can be framed as universal truths. Martin’s judge demands onion rings as a matter of law; Eisenberg’s father demands Sondheim as a matter of morality. The two writers are pointing at the same human tic: the tendency to dress up a private whim in the robes of an institution.

A judge’s heavy black robe looks out of place in a booth at TGI Fridays, just as a father’s stern lecture feels strange when the topic is a Broadway composer. There’s a quiet comfort in these performances, a way to make the small, messy parts of life feel like they carry the weight of a courtroom. It seems dignity is often just a costume worn to get through a long Tuesday. The question these two pieces leave behind is: which habits are kept up only to prove to others that life is being taken seriously?