Describe one sitcom dad and you’ve largely described all of them. They’re snowmen, crafted to be observably humanoid by people who either lack the time, talent, or audience to manage…

There was a moment towards the end of the new Hellraiser when I settled into the fact that they weren’t gonna nail it. The villain—whom we’d seen at the beginning,…

Soldiers are whores the Pimp State lures with false promises of the kind of social standing that would make a streetwalker cry and the kind of cash that would make…

Part of what makes sitcoms a form of comfort food is that they fly in the face of standard narrative wisdom. There’s no journey that leaves its characters changed here,…

Nobody is proud of being an underachiever. People require a positive sense of self to live, and this sense is maintained via socially acknowledged markers. Most of these markers relate…

There is a fundamental connection between horror and comedy, and for proof we need look no further than the clown. It doesn’t even need to be a horror clown, with…

There’s some old advice on narrative writing from Arthur Quiller-Couch about murdering your darlings, by which he meant ornamental prose. The phrase has since evolved to “kill your darlings” and…

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