Jordan Klepper

There's a wonderful theater company called the Elevator Repair Service, which is doing a big run of...

Ulysses at Joe's Pub here in New York.

You should see them.

They're a wonderful theater company.

But in addition to putting that show up, they offered up a book club to actually read this notoriously difficult text, which I've attempted multiple times, failed horribly.

And for the last month and a half, I've been at a book club trying to work my way through this book.

And it's been infuriating, impossible at times, incredible at times.

It feels like when I was in middle school and we didn't have Showtime or Cinemax, but you'd go to the channel that had Cinemax and it was just all the squiggles.

And then every so often the squiggles would unsquiggle and you'd see a nipple.

That's what reading Ulysses is like.

I'm just like, I have no idea what this is about.

I have no idea about it.

Oh, it's about Dublin.

It's about Dublin.

I see it.

I see it.

So that has been my experience of reading Joyce.

But it's been wonderful to read something that is so dense and hard and difficult and yet rewarding because you start to piece these things together.

And quite frankly...

boy, getting lost in a novel that's not there just to make you escape, but there to sort of like challenge what you can do with a literary form has been, it has been wonderful.