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# 14 Funny Passages from David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster
- URL: https://thedailyeudemon.com/14-funny-passages-from-david-foster-wallaces-consider-the-lobster/
- Published: 2025-02-16T12:47:00.000Z
- Updated: 2025-05-01T11:33:03.000Z
- Description: which means that some staff photographer came in and popped a flash in the face of a traumatized kid at prayer.
- Author: Eric Scheske
- Tags: Books, Humor

> 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. corresps. decline to follow up on in any way.**

### Writing about the porn starlets on the red carpet

> **Several of the outfits defy very basic precepts of modern physics.**

### On John Updike

> **Updike’s big preoccupations have always been with death and sex (not necessarily in that order)** 
>  
> **\[H\]is characters seemed to become more and more repellent, and without any corresponding sign that the author understood that they were repellent.** 
>  
> **It never once occurs to him, though, that the reason he’s so unhappy is that he’s an asshole.**

### Living in Bloomington, Indiana, on 9/11/01

> **\[H\]e’s out here on a stepladder polishing his \[flag\] pole with some kind of special ointment and a chamois cloth — I shit you not — although in the morning sun it’s true that his metal pole does shine like God’s own wrath.** 
>  
> **There’s a half-page photo of a student at Bloomington Central Catholic HS saying the rosary in response to the Horror, which means that some staff photographer came in and popped a flash in the face of a traumatized kid at prayer.** 
>  
> **Bloomington is a lot like a seaside community except here the ocean is corn . . .** 
>  
> **Mrs. Thompson’s is a tiny immaculate one-story home that on the West Coast would be called a bungalow and on the south side of Bloomington is called a house.**

### Regarding the September weather in Bloomington

> **The air is clear and temperate and wonderfully dry after several weeks of what’s felt very much like living in someone’s armpit.**

### He inserts this before a series of newspaper headline quotes

> **Everything to follow is sic.**

### On grammar snobs

> **\[A\] certain irony attends the publication of any good new book on American usage. It is that the people who are going to be interested in such a book are also the people who are least going to need it** 
>  
> **The same sorts of people who watched The Story of English on PBS (twice) . . .The sorts of people who feel that special blend of wincing despair and sneering superiority when they see EXPRESS LANE — 10 ITEMS OR LESS or hear dialogue used as a verb or realize that the founders of the Super 8 Motel chain must surely have been ignorant of the meaning of suppurate.**

### And finally

> **When a solipsist dies, after all, everything goes with him.**