One of the pleasurable hooks of Pynchon’s writing is that it is funny as well as difficult and labyrinthine. The writer encompasses, even invents, a huge range of comic, witty, and humorous techniques, effects, and affects, seemingly for the purposes of just goofing around, but also for deflating or mocking conventions of realist seriousness and sentiment. This is especially true in the sense that such disciplinarian modes and moods prescribe what novels are allowed to do and be. Unusually, Pynchon’s novels incorporate songs, for example: How does it change the way we read a text if we are trying to hear it too, vocalized as libretto, soaring and sinking? And if laughter emerges also from certain kinds of unruly excess – the semantic excesses of a pun, let’s say, which Freud associates with pre-rational play – Pynchon’s willingness to concoct whole episodes of his novels around the extraction of “high magic from low puns” (CL 97) maximizes that experience. Who else would resurrect the Marquis de Sade as lawn-care specialist the Marquis de Sod (try drawling it) on a 1984 Northern Californian TV ad? Vineland (1990) contains precisely such visions. After physically chastising some substandard turf, the divine Marquis fades up a “post-disco arrangement of the Marseillaise” substituting the revolutionary exhortation “allons enfants de la Patrie” – “arise children of the fatherland” – with a description of “a lawn savant who’ll lop a tree-uh” (VL 46). This barely homophonic word-string demonstrates just how profoundly Pynchon’s works are animated by a kind of will-to-humor: a ravenous discourse that multiplies itself in its representations of the world, rendering everything ironic, uncertain, unusual, musical.