Tested on Orphans by David Mamet

David Mamet, a cartoonist? Well, was not Henny Youngman a violinist? You might think the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and Oscar-nominated screenwriter-director has enough to keep him busy. Evidently not. Not sick humor exactly, but not well either. Example: warning sign at the entrance to movie theater. It reads "Shoah [no one will be seated during the last four million Jews]." Another: "If Kant had been a Valley Girl #5: Critique of Pure Reason." Beneath this heading, Mamet's sketch of a diary page with the inscription "Pure Reason Sucks," triple underscore that last word. In his other recent book, "Bambi vs. Godzilla," Mamet notes that a proper joke, as soon as its punch line sounds, seems both obvious and inevitable. He gives a two-line dialogue as an example: Q: Do you wake up grumpy? A: No, he gets up on his own. In Tested on Orphans he aims repeatedly at that sort of goofy irresistibility. Once in a while he hits it: Man waking to alarm asks wife looking out bedroom window,