“Far be it from me to make noise while you’re asleep but I should like to notify you that you are under arrest for being boring.” Midway through one of the best—funniest, most troubling—essays in her first book, Metropolitan Life (1978), Fran Lebowitz turns on her reader. The flash of sudden hostility is too campily deadpan in its bureaucratic politesse to give real, or at least immediate, offense. It cannot be mistaken for the rude and noisy grimaces of comedians like Andy Kaufman and Sam Kinison, populist inheritors of the avant-garde artist’s open contempt for his bourgeois patrons. She must be kidding.
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