(Groves, at his desk, is still playing idly with a pencil. Paul, with a thick batch of paper in his hand, stands and paces excitedly as:)

PAUL: Which really cracks the whole thing wide open. ’Cuz the thing about what’s comic, then, isn’t just some other guy’s a clown and doesn’t know how to behave. It’s that our behavior too is screwed up, in that it fails to predict properly. ’Cept that it’s, number one, not really or fault we failed to predict, and number two, no harm is done. So there’s this big jolt, quickly followed by this big relief. Like that we’re all of us bozos.

GROVES: (still focused on the pencil) Interesting.

PAUL: ’Cept I won’t say bozos in the paper. I’ll say fools. Or foolish maybe. And what humor expresses, see, is a feeling of no concern. Which is like a really