David Simon Is Very Serious About Having a Sense of Humor

Remember when the Attorney General joked about how he wanted a sixth season of “The Wire,” and David Simon was all, “I’ll make it if you stop the misguided, destructive and dehumanising prohibition of drugs”? Well, it turns out that Simon was TOTALLY in on the joke and was being just as facetious as the attorney general. In fact, his sense of humor is so sharp that he wrote a bitchy letter to the Baltimore Sun about it.

I accept that a certain amount of snark is my due, now and then.  And I accept that for a couple years now, [Sun writer] Laura Vozzella has been no friend of mine, given some previous arguments.

But a certain amount of integrity is required in this dynamic.

It is one thing for Laura to pretend, for the sake of a blog item, that my tongue isn’t in my cheek when I tell the AG that he needs to end the drug war to get another season of a television show.  And it is one thing for her to omit in that item the tone and tenor of the AG’s initiating remarks to me:  That he was “ordering” a sixth season and that he was a “very powerful man.” Obviously, this is playful provocation and just as obviously my reply is delivered within the same context.

It goes on from there (you can read the whole thing and Vozzella’s explanation here), but the words start bleeding into each other and all I hear in my head is a whiny voice that drones, “Nyah nyah nyah.” I love Simon’s work, but somewhere inside him is the bitchiest mom in the PTA.