George, The Ocean Called...

After my review yesterday of Stardust, I had a classic l'esprit d'escalier moment with my line about not having a soul, which was something along the lines of 'and you're a Republican, right?' A Republican would have to be pro-Humperdink, yes? Think of all the info we could have gotten out of Khalid Sheik Muhammed with Count Ruggen's Machine!

For those not getting the title or the reference, l'esprit d'escalier literally means 'the wisdom of the staircase'. It's in reference to that absolutely killer joke or line you think of ten minutes too late for it to be topical or funny. Like schadenfreude, it's one of those things that everyone understands, and yet english lacks a term for.

There's a classic Seinfeld episode where, at a meeting, George is pigging out on shrimp. A guy at the meeting makes the joke 'George, the ocean called. They're running out of shrimp!' Of course it kills because, you know, George is fat, so it's funny. George has a l'esprit d'escalier moment when he comes up with the joke 'Well, the jerk store called, and they're running out of you!' Suffice to say, when he finally, through machinations too complicated to relate, gets to give his rejoinder, it falls appropriately flat on its face. I just realized this link this morning.

I always knew Seinfeld was secretly a French show. After all, a show quite famously 'about nothing' has to have something in common with the originating country of existential philosophy and absurdist cinema, right?