A middle aged upper class woman and her family live in an upscale neighborhood. The family's laughter turns malicious when they cannot distinguish between what is comical and what is horrendous and increasingly find amusement at the expense of others.

In France, an extremely wealthy man who owns a porcelain collection is invited to lunch by an odd-ball art dealer who has an elderly, eccentric socialite friend that collects porcelain de sax.

A middle-aged tax consultant who is dissatisfied with life has a night that begins with a wrong address and ends in a liquor-fueled spoken-word poetry party.

Cutthroat department politics leave a young English professor in danger of losing his job and falling into obscurity. To save himself, he seizes on a playful lie that soon spirals far out of his control.

Al Roosten, a local business owner always second-best to his competitor, Larry Donfrey, contemplates returning to an anti-drug charity event to ensure that Donfrey is able to help his disabled daughter.

Protagonist Leo Gold attends the annual Anarchists’ Convention in New York City, a spectacle predictably filled with divisions and subcommittees and impassioned debates over topics as banal as the order of events and whether dinner should be self-serve. But when the hotel manager asks the party to vacate the room as previously booked, the group unites to build barricades and sing protest songs to defend their noble cause.

Workers at an American franchise restaurant located in southern China learn of the different ways American capitalism exploits them and creates food waste, leading them to rebel against their bosses.

A young boy tries to help his parents make money by selling ice cream at his mother's work at a Snow White Laundry. An accident with one of the machines causes chaos and the narrator is forced to leave.

A working class man who wants his children to have everything their rich friends have purchases "Semplica Girls" — girls formerly living in poverty who sign contracts to hang as ornaments in people's yards — for his older daughter's birthday. When his younger daughter frees the Semplica Girls, the family is plunged into financial disaster.

When a Soviet state official attempts to coerce a celebrated poet into apologizing for a political joke he made, the official gets a taste of his own predatory medicine at the hand of the poet's vengeful wife.