How to Give Someone An Intangible Gift

When I was a standup comic I tried to write a joke about how the inhabitants of a distant world would feel to find out that their star was named after a random person whose friend or family paid a small fee. I could never quite get it to work.

Later, as you can see, I used the same idea in panel four of this comic.

Later still, I used it for a throw-away joke in my novel Master of Formalities.

In a sense, my entire career, or series of careers, could be seen as a still uncompleted quest to find a form of expression in which a joke about naming a star after a friend or relative will work.

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