The brutality of communism was quickly swept under history's rug, in large part because so many on the left had embraced it as the solution to humankind's problems.
I've always been a fan of comedy, and I understood from a young age that what makes most comedy work is the immediacy of first person experience. I'd spent a lot of time from 1995-1998 focusing almost exclusively on poetry, and it's an incredibly difficult form in which to achieve a sustained comic tone unless you're Alexander Pope.