it’s this classic chiasmus from Leon Wieseltier:

“Mad Max is making Max mad, and Murray, and Irving, and Mort, and Marty, and Abe.”

Spoken (or something) to Maureen Dowd. The whole thing is nearly a prose poem (note the internal rhyme of Murray and Irving, and the Biblical and/or nursery-rhyme intonation of “Mort, and Marty, and Abe”); there are Iowa graduates who can’t build a sentence like this.

Meanwhile, the wise and droll Cary Tennis theorizes that Mel should have shown a bit more fighting spirit, apprehended-perp-style: “As anyone with experience in such matters could have told him, the proper way to attempt a drunken escape from an arresting officer is: Just bolt. Run. Do not say anything. Certainly do not say anything as pedestrian as ‘I’m not going to get into your car.’ That is inane.” He suggests a more creative dash from the fuzz, which of course recalls the zany high-speed chasers in that Tad Friend piece about escape-car-driving as an L.A. spectator sport. If I’m not mistaken, Tennis is a recovered alcoholic himself, so the humor has an unmistakeable and extra-potent bite.

Chiasmus in The New Yorker [Mardy Grothe]