The Lord's Our Shepherd, Says

The Civil Liberties Types Who Are Fighting This Issue Have To Fight It, Owing To The Nature Of The Laws, As A Matter Of Freedom Of Speech And Stifling Of Free Expression And So On. But We Know What's Really Involved, Dirty Books Are Fun. That's All There Is To It. But You Can't Get Up In A Court And Say That.

One Of The Problems I See With These Comics On Television, Particularly Cable Television, Is, Since You Can Say Anything In Terms Of Sex And Scatological References And So On, Therefore, You Should Do It. So They All Limit Themselves To These Subjects And This Vocabulary. My Objection Is That It Is A Lack Of Articulateness. Irreverence Is Easy, But What Is Hard Is Wit. Wit Is What These Comedians Lack.

I Find Enough Mystery In Mathematics To Satisfy My Spiritual Needs. I Think, For Example, That Pi Is Mysterious Enough (don't Get Me Started!) Without Having To Worry About God. Or If Pi Isn't Enough, How About Fractals? Or Quantum Mechanics?

The Real Issues I Don't Think Most People Touch. The Clinton Jokes Are All About Monica Lewinsky And All That Stuff And Not About The Important Things, Like The Fact That He Wouldn't Ban Landmines...i'm Not Tempted To Write A Song About George W. Bush. I Couldn't Figure Out What Sort Of Song I Would Write. That's The Problem: I Don't Want To Satirize George Bush And His Puppeteers, I Want To Vaporize Them. And That's Not Funny....ok, Well, If I Say That, I Might Get A Shock Laugh, But It's Not Really Satire.

In One Word He Told Me The Secret Of Success In Mathematics: Plagiarize; Only Be Sure Always To Call It . . . Research.