Los Angeles comedian Betsy Salkind

I haven’t felt like writing a column in a while. Not much has made me laugh. 2010 seems to have been a year rife with tumult: earthquakes, floods, religious wars, civil wars, media wars, collapsed mines, seized banks, stalled governments, oil spills, Glenn Beck…we’re all going to purgatory in a purse (Hell in a Basket is clearly full).

But I was recently made laugh by Betsy Salkind, so I felt it apt to share her humor with the world. Maybe the world will be righted, if but a smidgen. Perhaps those Chilean cities nudged off course from that 8.8 will regain their geographic positions.

What I admire about Betsy’s humor is not just her straightforward delivery but its keen intelligence. There are no fart jokes here. No racist how-many-Slavs-does-it-take-to-make-a-pie bon mots. No cheap I-don’t-know-what-to-say-next-so-I’ll-go-gutter defaults. Betsy writes material that is smart and delivers it in a way that’s funny.

Betsy’s secret might be that she’s foremost a writer. She wrote for television in the 90’s (“Roseanne” and “Saturday Night Special”) and writes books and plays now.

Speaking of which, if you have children (or nieces or nephews or vulnerable neighbors) and you care about their mock religious education but don’t have time for Temple or Church (mosques don’t count; this is a Judeo-Christian nation, after all; it says so in the First Amendment…right?) tuck your kids in with “Betsy’s Sunday School Bible Classics.” It will be just the ticket to get them on track so G-d doesn’t punish us all with more natural (they’re certainly not human) disasters.

And when Betsy's play Discontinuation Syndrome hits the stage, be sure to experience its profundity. Bring prescription pain killers for the portions of the play that throw your back out (from laughing, not from anything else; get your mind out of the cesspool) and also for the audience participation portion that is akin to a key party (that part is not written yet; I’m just hopeful).