The author of Empire Falls (Pulitzer Prize), Nobody's Fool and Bridge of Sighs, Richard Russo came to Benaroya Hall last night for a Seattle Arts & Lectures talk about, of all things, humor. He writes without a trace of condescension about life in small towns, about the gap between rich and poor, about the pleasures some people take in cruelty.

Often his work seems dark, but in fact--he told the audience of big-city sophisticates--he thinks of himself as a comic writer with a sense of wonder and astonishment at a magical world. He read a long, intermittently funny essay about a gravestone in the back yard of a house he owned in Maine, veering off into easy riffs about laughter being serious business and the moral blindness of humorless people.

After 90 minutes of set-up, he finally got the question everyone was waiting for: "Did you invent Sarah Palin?" And he had the answer at the tip of his tongue: "No, but I did invent Tina Fey."