On this, the last day of her television show, Oprah might say her plan all along was to become an invisible conduit through which you, the simple viewer, could just believe in yourself—but don’t you fall for it.

Underneath the sincere sweep of false eyelashes is a brilliant saleswoman, an excellent actress and a shameless self-promoter, a woman whose wealth and power has been built by our belief in her.

A funny thing happened while I was writing today’s main blog about Randy Pearlstein’s Writing for Comedy workshop. I was in the public library, intending to write over my lunch hour and headed for my favourite spot by the large windows in the reference section upstairs.

In April this year, during Frye, the popular annual literary festival in Moncton, New Brunswick, I attended a workshop called “Writing for Comedy.” The speaker was Randy Pearlstein, a Toronto native who now lives and works in New York City.

Dressed in jeans, blazer and blue Nike skater shoes, he looked like an updated version of Jerry Seinfeld. (Who, by the way, Pearlstein quipped, is “a bit of a dick.” Let’s hope the six readers of my blog don’t tell Jerry that Randy dissed him.)