I’ve been searching high and low from New York to San Francisco looking for laughs to get us through these challenging times and I’ve found that, especially since the election, entertainment fare has become grimmer and more earnest than ever. Movie theaters are jam-packed with made-for-Oscar-Academy titles, which means we get our annual dose of Holocaust flicks (The Boy in Striped Pajamas, Valkyrie, Defiance, The Reader, Good, etc.) and self-serious melodramas (7 pounds, Marley & Me). Bookstores aren’t faring much better. With publishers struggling like never before, interesting titles in literary fiction are becoming harder than ever to find, especially in the States. 

It took a business trip to Frankfurt and walk around to the various English-language sections of German bookstores to discover that laughs might be alive and well in the Old World. It’s frightening to think that there were actually a number of very funny books written by Americans this year and you can only find them halfway across the world in bookstores in Europe. Ever heard of Ron Currie Jr.? Well, his book God Is Dead last year was perhaps the funniest book of 2007. God comes down to Earth as a Sudanese woman to observe the conflict in Darfur only to get killed in the opening pages. Dogs feed on God’s dead flesh and become sentient beings who complain that God’s flesh tasted anything but divine. Currie Jr. makes George Saunders seem ordinary. Try and find Ron Currie Junior’s books in an Borders or a Barnes and Noble. I walked out of that Frankfurt bookstore with five literary comedies to haul home on the international flight. In America, if the comedy isn’t romantic and the cover isn’t pink or baby blue, you won’t find it. Is this the new American zeitgeist? The Tina Fey as Sarah Palin phenomenon was just a blip in the radar.

There are a few outliers to this disturbing trend in the red, white and blue states. They may be hard to find, but worth looking for:

Best Picture: JCVD

Do I lose all credibility by saying that JCVD was the best picture I saw this year and that Jean-Claude Van Damme deserves a best actor nod for his role as, well, Jean-Claude Van Damme, a washed-up, broke action star who is humiliated at every turn by his fame and accidentally gets taken hostage in a botched post office robbery. Viewers get to see Van Damme act for the first time in his career and you’ll even find yourself shedding tears for Van Damme the man as he begs his agent to put him in a studio instead of getting him cast in movies entitled No Limit Injury II. By the time Van Damme rises above the movie set and gives his existential monologue about what it’s like to be Van Damme the celebrity drug addict, the many-times ex-husband, and the karate kid, you’ll be ready to open the envelope and read his name in February at the Academy Awards. Seriously. If Forest Whitaker, his fellow cast mate in Bloodsport, can win an Oscar, why can’t JCVD?

Best Fiction: The White Tiger, by Aravand Adiga

Forget the saccharine film “Slumdog Millionaire.” If you really want to get an insider’s view of what’s it’s like to be from the Darkness in India, pick up the 2008 Booker Prize winner, The White Tiger. Adiga’s novel about a servant who kills his master is a scathing, hilarious look at a corrupt, present-day India, where the slumdogs left behind by India’s outsourcing boom are treated as sub-humans.

Best TV (a tie): The Office, “Moroccan Christmas” and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, “The Gang Cracked the Liberty Bell”

After watching hundreds of hours of television this years, two half-hour episodes stood out to me in 2008 as the funniest on television. The second-to-last episode of this season’s The Office finally pushed the show up to the cringe-inducing-I’m-laughing-but-I’m-not-sure-this-is-funny level of the U.K. original. When one of the office workers literally gets lit (gets drunk and inadvertently lights her hair on fire) at the office Christmas party, Michael Scott stages an intervention for her and literally drags her kicking and screaming into rehab. Funny or horrifying? You be the  judge.

As for It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, in the episode The Gang Cracks The Liberty Bell, the gang tries to get Paddy’s Bar certified as a historical landmark and makes up a story of how Paddy’s Pub was responsible for cracking the bell. The episode puts the gang in Revolutionary Period garb with muskets and wigs. Dee is, you guessed it, a Salem witch and Dennis drafts a Declaration of Dependence on the British.