I have little appreciation for the humor of Wodehouse. I don't choose to read about an asexual ineffectual Edwardian squire and his slightly more effectual manservant. Yet--here's the point--I don't doubt that those who do find it funny are really laughing. I don't think of their laughter as somehow not real laughter. Wodehouse is genuinely funny--to those people. If I don't laugh there's a mismatch between me as a reader and this kind of humor, not because Wodehouse is objectively "not funny." Now why people want to doubt that my appreciation and comprehension of Silliman or some other avant-garde poet is not genuine in this sense is something I don't understand. That is to say, people who don't "get it," in the same way I don't get Wodehouse, want to say that this poetry is invalid, biologically incorrect, and that somehow the people who promote it must be deluded. There's this idea that we are only pretending. It would be as if I said that the person rolling on the floor in laughter while reading Wodehouse was only pretending to laugh.

I'm sure that those who enjoy Billy Collins are getting something out of it, that they fully enjoy that kind of thing.