Another source of humor in After Magritte comes from the reader imagining how the play must look actually being performed. One scene involves Harris hastily trying to balance the aforementioned fruit basket counterweight: he removes the bulb from the light fixture, causing the basket to descend as the light ascends, so he removes an apple from the basket, but this is too much weight and so the basket begins to ascend, causing Harris to quickly take a bite from the apple and replace it. This small piece of missing apple is enough to offset the weight of the missing bulb, thus evening out the delicate balance of the light fixture and the basket. This is such a comical scene to imagine, mostly because of how silly it seems to be balancing a light with a fruit basket in the first place. The description of Harris balancing the whole arrangement reads like a Rube Goldberg contraption on a smaller scale. Continue reading →