"I got to be a joke-maker as the youngest member of my family. My sister was five years older than I was, my brother was nine years older, and at the dinner table I was the lowest ranking thing there. I could not be interesting to these vivid grownups. My sister was a sculptress and doing extremely well, my brother was a scientist, my father was an architect, and so they had really big time stuff to argue about. I wanted to talk in order to learn how to do it, to engage in give and take, and I must have made accidental jokes at first. Everyone does. It's a chancy thing, it's a spoonerism or something of that sort. But anyway it stopped the adult conversation for a minute. And I understood the terms under which I could buy my way into the conversations, small as I...