14 Funny Passages from David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster

Photo by Jay Lamm on Unsplash

29 pages of his biography talk about his depression. 14 touch on his anger. And nestled in-between at 20: references to his humor.

Page references in the index of D.T. Max’s Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace.

I’ve long found DFW hilarious. Granted, I often find essayists humorous, taking delight in writers from Max Beerbohm to H.L. Mencken to Joseph Epstein, but DFW might be the funniest non-humorist essayist of our postmodern era.

As proof, I offer these passages from his essay collection, Consider the Lobster.

From “Big Red Son,” an essay about the Annual Adult Video News Awards (something I didn’t even know existed and a lesser person for learning it):

Mr. Harold Hecuba is deep in conversation with a marginal porn producer about one of his performers’ being sidelined with something called a “prolapsed sphincter,” which condition yr…