Last night after The Daily Show (Jon Stewart is the latest in my stream of nonsensical TV crushes), I caught the last half of Pennies From Heaven, which has Steve Martin daydream-lipsynching to all these old ’30s songs, like “We’re in the Money,” in order to get him through his grim Depression-era life. I’d forgotten how good it was; it had been recommended it to me as being in the same vein as Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, which also had Steve Martin and invoked movies of old, but was much funnier and less dark, so when I realized how grim Pennies From Heaven was, I was taken a little aback.

Also, I was really into old musicals at the time**, so seeing a movie that was basically about how they give you false hope and that living by these cheerful Depression-era jazz-pop songs or Fred and Ginger movies just made your life disintegrate was kind of disturbing for me. Actually, the first time I watched it, I saw Follow the Fleet, the movie Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters do their last fantasy dance number to, right before, so it all seemed to fit together and be trying to tell me something a little too clearly. I was in high school, I didn’t listen to the world back then. Even now it takes me awhile to get the message.

As the credits rolled, I realized that it was directed by Herbert Ross, who also directed Play It Again, Sam, in which a hallucination of Humphrey Bogart gives Woody Allen love advice.

Play It Again, Sam has this scene where Woody is on a date that doesn’t go well. They’re eating Chinese food and he’s explaining how the Chinese, they use the chopsticks to shovel rice into their mouths and he demonstrates, and he’s all trying to impress her, and she’s not impressed. I saw this movie a few months before my first date with an old boyfriend***. We went out for Vietnamese, and we were eating with chopsticks and I can’t totally remember how it came up, but he made the exact same explanation as in that scene. I just kind of smiled and said, yeah, I’d heard that. I didn’t try, because there was no way of explaining it that wouldn’t embarrass him, and make it seem like I was judging him, when I was in point of fact utterly charmed. What can I say?

Today, when I friend emailed me about a calamitous situation he’d recently been in, instead of writing back sympathetically, I related it to an episode of Full House.

Includes: Bruce McCulloch, both Masterson brothers, Mickey Dolenz (when he had curly hair), Dave Foley, Rick Mercer (very briefly), &c.

**Shut up.

***Not the one I just split up with.