War & Peace Quote by Michael O'Donoghue

Creation here isn’t a divine lightning bolt; it’s a messy, half-lit room where a title shows up early, arrogant and overcommitted, daring the writer to earn it later. Michael O’Donoghue, a patron saint of deadpan extremity, lets the process sound almost accidental: The War of the Insect Gods arrives before plot, before lore, before the high concept has even justified its own grandeur. That mismatch is the joke and the engine. The phrase “Insect Gods” is deliciously overinflated, a cosmic register applied to something small, crawling, vaguely repellent. It’s pulp bombast with a smirk embedded in it.

The subtext is a quiet satire of how stories (and creative careers) often run backward: you start with a hook, a promise, a piece of marketing language, and only later retrofit meaning. O’Donoghue isn’t confessing incompetence so much as demystifying the myth of the master plan. The repetition of “before we knew” performs ignorance as a rhythm, turning uncertainty into a punchline. Then comes the twist: “We had an ending.” In other words, they didn’t have theology, evolution, or worldbuilding, but they had a destination. The comedy is structural. You can build an entire cosmology as scaffolding around a final image that feels inevitable.

Context matters: O’Donoghue’s brand of comedy (National Lampoon, early SNL) thrived on treating the outrageous as logistical. Here, epic transformation into godhood is reduced to workshop reality: titles first, meaning later, and somehow it still lands.