Sarah and I wake up to NPR. Which is usually nice, waking up to the soothing voices of Renee Montagne and Steve Inskeep … even when they’re reporting on devastating tragedies across the globe, they do so in a very calming manner. So imagine my surprise when I woke up this morning to hear this asshole screaming in my ear. The Sports Curmudgeon! If there’s anything more irritating than waking up to the Sports Curmudgeon, I don’t know about it.

Oh wait, I do … it’s waking up to The Loh Life with Sandra Loh. Just take a minute and try to get through one of those programs; I dare you. She is of that most irritating class of people: the people who think the secret to comedy lies solely in the tone of one’s voice.

Which brings me to my theory: there are three kinds of funny in this world, funny, stupid funny, and NPR funny.* Funny is what funny people do. It doesn’t really need to be defined, because it’s just funny. Stupid funny is what Will Ferrell and Ben Stiller do. Sometimes, stupid funny is still pretty funny. NPR funny is what Garrison Keillor and the Car Talk guys do. NPR funny is almost never funny. I’ll take tragic over NPR funny any day. I would rather watch a documentary about a baby murderer than sit through an entire episode of Prairie Home Companion.

*Note: this category does not include This American Life, which is often quite genuinely funny. The only reason This American Life is on NPR is because there’s no place else for it to go. Really, it should just have its own network.