Watch Martin Starr read a filthy letter James Joyce wrote to his wife

By Kevin McFarland | February 10, 2014 | 8:30pm

Aux Features Comedy

“In the early 1900’s, famed Irish author James Joyce wrote dozens of love letter to his wife Nora. They were discovered many years later tucked into the sleeve of a long-forgotten book.” So begins “James Joyce’s (Actual) Love Letters (That He Actually Wrote),” a Funny Or Die sketch directed by Natalie Morales (Lucy from Parks And Recreation, Meg from Trophy Wife). The video features Martin Starr giving a droll reading of one particularly saucy missive from Joyce to his wife on December 6, 1909.

It’s a private letter from a legendary author to his wife, starting with a description of her “drawers” and spiraling into significantly more intimate details. Starr’s dramatic pauses in all the so-wrong-they’re-right places only enhance the NSFW qualities of a graphically vulgar turn-of-the-century letter. Armed with an old-timey pipe, Starr is quite composed as a narrator, making it easy to laugh through the humanizing discovery that the same guy who wrote Ulysses also wrote dirty letters to his wife.