With comic scenic design (Susan Zeeman Rogers), comic sound (Arielle Edwards and David Thomas) and even comic lighting (Justin Townsend), "Three on a Couch" has lots of fun with noir clichés.
We also get a wealth of comic sound effects including a cow mooing every time an eccentric Teutonic doctor opens his mouth.
Still, not many radio hosts use the Imus/Stern model — with on-air sidekicks, comic sound effects and the ad-libbing host who trades in the provocative — while hewing to a message of virginity until marriage and the unquestionable authority of the Catholic Magisterium.
Musically, the parody is slightly different from the original, featuring a changed key, comic sound effects, and an Eddie Van Halen-inspired guitar solo from Yankovic's producer Rick Derringer.
Even though comedians are public performers, they can be an anti-social bunch, and these days a certain set of very famous older male comics sound as if they mostly want to be left alone.
This veneration of comedic truth, often at the expense of less-cited virtues like imagination, has become so widespread and unquestioned that comics sound like rappers boasting about being "real".
I have never much warmed to Enid Bagnold's play: what others call its high comic style sounds to me arch, precious and exhibitionist.
Today's comic sometimes sounds like a funnier Joe Klein or George Will, tasked with captivating an audience, sure, but also with articulating, and arguing on behalf of, a coherent world view.
McSweeney's ran an imaginary monologue by the font (and in it) in which Comic Sans sounds almost as irritating as it looks: Sorry the entire world can't all be done in stark Eurotrash Swiss type.
(The comic book sounded so interesting that I searched for it on Amazon — unfortunately, it's fictional).
