Cherish Your Memorized Weakness

“Most English-speaking people,” the fantasist and philologist J. R. R. Tolkien wrote, “will admit that cellar door is ‘beautiful’ . . . More beautiful than, say, sky, and far more beautiful than beautiful.” This comeliness is partially attributable to the psychological phenomenon called semantic satiation, in which the repetition of a word or phrase causes it to lose, or somehow transcend, its meaning. It is experience that defines the most memorable sequence in the HBO comedy The Comeback, which first aired on HBO in 2005 and is returning after a twelve year-absence for a third and final season.