Jokes, Fiction, and Lorrie Moore

The opening sentences of Lorrie Moore's "You're Ugly,Too" present a superbly comic picture of the contemporary intellectual faced with the arid, earnest culture of middle America. With its spunky prose and keen sense of the absurd, it has made Moore one of the most widely read writers in contemporary fiction.Yet the sort of humor exhibited there has not appealed to everyone.This is not because it betrays intellectual "elitism" or exhibits symptoms of what, since the story was first published in 1989, has become known as "blue state" snobbery. Here, Chodat examines the use of humor in Moore's fiction.