A Conversation with Fran Lebowitz, One of My Favorite Humorist

[Fran Lebowitz]: The one I really like is the least Law and Order-ish… I can’t remember his name …

SM: Is it the Law and Order spin-off with Vincent D’Onofrio? Criminal Intent? I love that one—it reminds me of Columbo.

FL: I love it too. But he’s not like Columbo, he’s like Sherlock Holmes. I was a great lover of Sherlock Holmes as a child, and that’s what I love about it. And it’s completely unrealistic. Unlike Law and Order, which seems pretty realistic most of the time, this character is completely unrealistic. You have this genius cop—and we all know, in the history of policemen, there’s never been a genius. It’s not the sort of gig that really attracts geniuses. It’s fun to imagine that a genius would actually be a policeman, though; and it’s our only opportunity to watch someone look at a dead body and start talking about Tibetan rituals. It’s funny, and I really like it.

SM: I find his monologue at the end of every episode—where he wraps everything up neatly and corners the bad guy into confessing—comforting, even if it’s the most unrealistic part of the show.

FL: You know, the reason it’s comforting is that it provides people who are disturbed with how idiotic the world is, with the idea that—should there be a very smart person in a terrible situation—that person would be listened to. That’s the thing that really attracts me to this show. Now, we all know that this guy would never be a cop. But we also know something much, much worse than that: anytime a person that smart appears someplace useful in society, they are not going to be listened to. Whereas, on this TV show, everyone, including his superiors, listens to him. More than that, they completely defer to him—the D.A., his captain. Why? Just because he’s smarter. We know the world works in exactly the opposite way.

Well, it's never worked that way in my experience, the smart guys getting listened to, not even in the academe, where you'd think something like that would matter. (Ha! You people are so naive sometimes.) In reality, it was probably worse there. There, I saw some of the brightest scholars -- frighteningly bright people -- get passed over in favor of the proles with the most pedestrian of minds. Sorry: There's no joke here, well, no intentional joke here. I'm just saying.

I really don't miss graduate school at all.