A Comedian of Order (Titus Techera, 7/23/24, Law & Liberty)
The moral authority of the decent American is the running theme of Bob’s first big show, in which he plays Robert Hartley, a psychologist. On the one hand, it’s as normal as you could want—he plays a Midwesterner, he works in Chicago. On the other hand, life is crazy and psychology isn’t going to fix it, all it can really do is foster forbearance and even that is difficult. Freedom is hard to deal with, because everyone else is also free. […]
The comedy show as a whole suggests that there is something that endures in America, despite social transformations. Put otherwise, what’s funny about people is the variety of ways in which they fail to be solid. You want to think the best of people, in part because it helps you can go on with a sense of your own dignity; comedy suggests that’s much harder to do once the difficulties of life set in—in fact, you might go mad. In this sense, the show is all about a sound man confronting reality.