Uppity Stuff

But to be fact-checked too much … well, sometimes that ruins the humor. I wrote a piece for the New Yorker about my family collecting art [“Suitable for Framing”]. I had a line about a painting costing as much as the average person pays in car insurance. The fact-checker asked, “How much does the painting cost?” I told him, and he called back and said, “That’s more than the average person pays.”

And I said, “OK. Then insert, ‘The average epileptic.’ ” He called back and said, “You’d have to change that to ‘epileptics in Connecticut,’ because Connecticut has the highest rate of insurance for epileptics.”

Then it becomes a paragraph about car rates. To me, it was just a throwaway line. And there goes the humor.