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My sense of humor, I have come to realize, is based on a strong appreciation for the absurd. This is what you're laughing at when you end up going, "Oh my God, I'm so sorry--I shouldn't laugh, it isn't funny, but..." It's ridiculous; it's absurd. And after a couple of years debating with people whether it was harder to parody a good movie or a bad movie, I realized that good and bad don't really have anything to do with it. It's all about the absurd--something bad movies have an abundance of, and the reason you can't parody comedies, because they already deal in the absurd. But this is why you can also parody a good movie--because life is absurd enough as it is, so when you condense it down to a two-hour movie, no matter how good that movie is, you're going to be dealing with a concentrated amount of absurdity. You can poke fun at a character's behavior the way you'd laugh at a real person--not because the movie's badly made, but because people in general do stupid things. In the same vein, I probably could find jokes to crack about Schindler's List. I'm just not going to.

Also, "absurd" doesn't look like a word anymore. Sorry about that.

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