Whether its a report from the real Cannes or a young couple discovering that reading Jacques Derrida aloud can lull their child to sleep, Jim Hanas finds the strange in the everyday and the everyday in the strange.

Hanas writes a lean and powerful line that makes even absurd situationsa man who cries professionally, a beauty queen leaving her slob boyfriend for an astronautseem painfully familiar.

Why They Cried answers its own question and the answer is funnier than you think.