Inside Jokes.

Hi, can I buy some interesting?

I like my gummy candy powered by Jews!

Oh, I love that song! OH. I LOVE THAT SONG!

Understand those phrases? Of course not; that is because they are inside jokes between my roommate and I.

I love everything about inside jokes except that one thing.

Inside jokes are funny, intimate, and contextually valid.

They are also intensely exclusive.

I tend to write like an inside joke. I got this from Christopher Durang because I read The Idiots Karamazov and loved it and the reason I loved it was because it was a giant inside joke to all those of us who had basically absorbed The Brothers Karamazov with startling intensity.

(Christopher Durang is a handsome gay man who writes and acts in plays. You can tell he has been burned by the Catholic church because there are so many Aloysiuses in his plays."Aloysius" is a name that ex-Catholics use from their Catholic school days because it's funny.)

Another thing that I like because it's an inside joke is Arrested Development. The difference between the plethora of references made on Arrested Development and the plethora of references made in Christopher Durang's plays is that I understand all of the references in Durang (because they're all from classic literature and classic American theatre) and none of the ones in Arrested Development (which decided to be self-consciously exclusive and just have a ton of inside jokes that are rarely explained and generally don't come from anything.)

(Arrested Development's inside jokes were a reaction to and satire of inside jokes that are on many shows such as The Simpsons, which has inside jokes for intelligent people, and South Park, which has inside jokes for cheesy musical theatre people.)

So there you go. Long live the inside joke... as long as I'm on the inside.

And with that, Benny See. Bacon lips.