"I spend a lot of my time saucer-eyed with horror at the rapid degeneration of this country, agog at the terrifying power amassed by Silicon Valley big shots who sound like stoned Bond villains."

Writes Michelle Goldberg, pushing this new HBO show "Mountainhead," in "From the Creator of ‘Succession,’ a Delicious Satire of the Tech Right" (NYT).

No one, I suspect, can fully process the cavalcade of absurdities and atrocities that make up each day’s news cycle. But art can help; it’s not fun to live in a dawning age of technofeudalism, but it is satisfying to see it channeled into comedy.

I liked "Succession" and will give this show a try, but the trailer did not appeal to me. Was that music needed to mask the deficiencies of the script and the acting? 

"I hope you rich folks don't mind slumming it in the humble abode of the poorest billionaire in the gang" — that's the first line in the trailer! I can't believe present-day billionaires would talk like that. It sounds like the way a high-school student in the 1960s would write dialogue for a rich guy. Remember when any time a door was opened to reveal the innards of a mansion, some character would say "Welcome to my humble abode"?

I don't mind unrealistic dialogue if it's brilliant somehow — comically, tragically — but that's just so embarrassingly dumb. I don't get it. "Succession" was great. But I see this show was written and filmed very quickly:

"In the writers’ room, we have occasionally had a kind of recurring phrase: 'Which is the most funny thing that could happen here, and by that I mean the most painful?'"

"And, sometimes, 'Which is the most painful thing that can happen here, by which I mean the most funny?'" 

Said Jesse Armstrong, quoted in "The End of 'Succession' Is Near/The show’s creator, Jesse Armstrong, explains why he has chosen to conclude the drama of the Roy family in its fourth season" (The New Yorker, February 23, 2023).

That's a quote I read recently — after watching all 39 episodes of "Succession" in something close to 39 days, which I did because I kept seeing New Yorker articles about the greatness of the final season and felt doomed to see the spoilers sooner or later. Having watched the show, I could finally read the articles, and so I have a vast trove of things to be reminded of when I'm reading other things, and that's how a post like this ends up happening. That last paragraph of the previous post — "Drinking is funny until it's not.... The need to say things like 'self-care,' 'virtuous aftercare,' and 'biohack' sounds desperate, but that can be part of the funny, especially for the drunkards" — got me thinking about Armstrong's quote about comedy and pain.

This is a big topic — comedy and pain — and I challenge you to discuss it without quoting Mel Brooks.