fiefoe

The comical bits:

The scripts came pouring out... each of them exactly the right length, like strings of sausages out of a machine
(After the scriptwriter discloses that he writes better wearing disguises:) "Do you acquire disguises to fit your characters, or do you invent your characters on the basis of disguises you already have?" He looked at me as though I were a newborn babe. "It's plain from your question that you're still very young," he chided me gently. "Don't you know that in the beginning is the Word-always?"
(After Marito got plastered to the gills, he harangued from a bar counter thusly:) "Lower your pants, all of you: you're in the presence of a poet."

And how's this for pathos?

As a result of the tragedy, his mother, (mother of the indefatigable, tyrannical executioner of the rodents in Peru,) the young woman of Basque descent, contracted chronic hiccups, which brought on spasms, kept her from being able to eat, and struck other people as hilariously funny... died of exhaustion.

There is histrionic language to go with all the melodrama:

His thoughts, moths hovering about flames in which they would burn their wings, went back yet again in time and space to the remote village...
Whenever he remembered that terrifying dawn, a burning, effervescent sensation, like acid bubbling inside him...
(He realized ) in the depths of his despair and rage, that he had not yet drained the bitter cup of that morning to the dregs.

"Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter"