Michael Feingold is starting to wear. Can anyone get all the way through one of his rambling missives? I mean, all the way through. No skimming.

It’s just, for The Voice, his voice is sounding laconic and curmudgeonly. Not at all like the streetwise rag that isn’t afraid to drop an f-bomb now and then. Take this excerpt from his latest theater review:

America’s sense of humor, I used to think, was its saving grace. We might throw our weight around recklessly as a nation, but at least we could laugh at ourselves. That was before the collision of global media marketing and the right-wing hegemony knocked out our sense of humor and left it for dead in the sandbox of nostalgia. The last few decades have been pretty drought-stricken in the laugh department.

I mean, where to begin? Was the past really that funny? I know I always laugh at the 60s, but, like, that’s because they’re lame. Maybe he just means he used to have a sense of humor, which, judging from his buzzkill attitude, seems more likely to be the case.