Reading a few pages of Vanity Fair — the book, not the magazine — before retiring for the evening . . . I say to my wife, “Man, this Thackeray guy is really funny.”
“Funnier than you?” she asks.
“He must be.”
“Why?”
“Well, this book is almost 200 years old and people are still reading it.”
“Imagine at the time he wrote it,” she says. “People probably laughed till they choked.”
“Exactly.”