Consider these rules for speedway vaccines
Letter to the editor - published 01/29/2021
Alakazam!
From The Anniston Star of 01/29/2021 (click the link).
This is fairly obvious humor (not that my other letters were necessarily paragons of subtlety or originality).
What is humor, he asked plaintively while sitting on a grassy hillside as butterflies and robin red breasts—robins red breast—robin reds—as butterflies and indeterminate but lovely birds pursued their morning agendas—agendii—agendae—their various and sundry and ultimately disgusting morning pursuits, such as they were?
What, someone once almost asked, is humor?
I once went to a comedy club and the main act absolutely destroyed the room. I was primed and ready to laugh, but I didn’t laugh even once. I felt bad, because my companion was in stitches and was pounding on my arm and I really, truly wanted to laugh. I’m not one of those grim guys who sets the bar way too high or who only laughs at irony or social relevance, but I don’t laugh easily at everything. I’m a sucker for blooper reels, prank videos (harmless ones like Just for Laughs), and slapstick, and I do find some standup comics really funny.
The comic was not especially well known, but he was legit—a guy who had been in the biz for a while and whose main success was as a writer on several comedy TV shows. His shtick was to give us a setup, and at the point where I would expect a punchline he would say something like, “And I’m like…what?” And then he would roll his eyes and shake his head, conveying that in the scenario he had just described, he was the wise observer and the other people were stupid. That might have worked for me as the prelude to the punchline, but for this guy it was the punchline. The first time this got an avalanche of laughter from the crowd, I whipped my head around, thinking I had missed the entrance of some really funny-looking or funny-acting person. Nope, it was the “I’m like…what?” guy making them laugh. It must have been his delivery that was selling the non-jokes. He was like a more polished, southern-accented version of Cliff Clavin’s standup act (click the link), except he wasn’t funny to me. It was a long night.
Another time, I was at the improv night of the local high school theatre department. The kids were pretty good—much better than the “I’m like…what?” guy (who at that point was in my future—we’re time-shifting here). They were drawing low chuckles or nods of appreciation from me. Then came a bit where a dressmaker’s dummy was rolled out onto the stage. In case you don’t know what that is, it’s a life-sized cloth-covered model of a woman’s torso, discreetly anatomically correct except it has no arms, legs, or head. That is, it’s a rump, hips, waist, ribs, bosoms, and shoulders—those things around which a dress must be adjusted to fit. At “go” a few kids milled around trying to say funny things involving the dummy, but not much happened. After a minute of this the teacher called time and the kids left the stage. But before the stagehands could wheel the dummy away, one of the kids ran back out and grabbed the dummy and knelt down, cradling it in his arms, and screamed, “Mom! What did those dirty Japs do to you!?”
It was horribly inappropriate. Why Japs? It was also absurd since it was pretty obvious what had been done to “Mom.” I laughed for five minutes, and I replay that scene from my chuckle-bank whenever I need a quick laugh, even now 20+ years later. That is some powerful, lasting humor. Had he done that during the official improv segment, I don’t know that it would have had the same impact. At least half the humor, maybe more, was thinking about how the dejected kids had already left the stage, when suddenly the inspiration was upon that kid, and he fought against the tide of stagehands and grabbed that dummy to give us a scene. Also, the teacher was torn between mortification and laughter. I could speculate more, but I know that humor often defies reason, and reason deflates humor.
Come to think of it, it would have been fantastic if the kids had thought to start doing a number, perhaps “The Rain in Spain” or “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” from My Fair Lady while rolling the dummy back and forth between them. Funny, plus a trenchant commentary on conformity. I’m worse than that kid who took just over sixty seconds to think of a possible funny; it took me a couple of decades.
Years later, I was at a Tenacious D concert and their opening act was the comic Neil R. Hamburger. I had never heard of him, and I don’t think I had ever seen or heard an anti-humor specialist before. He slew the arena, including me. I don’t only enjoy anti-humor by any means, but he is the only comic whose albums I went out and bought—even his execrable country album (NSFW) (click the link). My wife reacted to NRH the same way I reacted to the “I’m like what?” guy at the comedy club. Different strokes, you know.
Another so-bad-it’s-good favorite is Jon Benjamin’s jazz album (click the link). I am a huge jazz fan. While I think anyone might find Benjamin’s idea funny, I think it is enhanced for me because I have listened to so much jazz, and his badness is not just bad, it is artfully bad in a way that perfectly fits the genre. It is actually good jazz, but terrible music, which is a funny if unoriginal concept, but very hard to execute. It would not be the same if, for instance, you inserted the sound of an infant pounding on a keyboard. It’s a studied badness, and could perhaps also be seen as performance criticism.
Benjamin’s solos and his comping are timed and executed exactly like those of expert players, except they are musical gibberish. Perhaps the existence of be-bop helps the humor, for his gibberish might actually draw some finger-snaps from the be-bop crowd. His first solo in the very first number on the album (included in the video) is perhaps the best moment because it comes after such a jaunty, promising lead-in from the rest of the combo, but he does a very gratifying amount of work by carrying the joke out for an entire album (which sits next to my Neil R. Hamburger collection). His rendition of “It Had to be You” (click the link) approaches actual playing, especially at the start when he is just doing some tasteful noodling underneath the sax player’s melody—note the fluid turns and trills, reminiscent of Oscar Peterson. It probably helped that this number has a simple, well-known tune. The number degrades as it goes along, and the piano solo is awful in spite of his knowing the tune, yet the less-discordant bits evoke Dave Brubeck recordings of the 1950’s and 1960’s, for Brubeck often wandered far astray from harmonious sounds, but in a way that was still musical (suggesting that perhaps Benjamin has a jazz soul but he just needs some more practice).
I also love the distaste expressed by his session musicians in the making-of video. They were of course in on the joke, but they were the perfect musical straight men throughout the recording. Not once in the entire album do they deviate from good, solid playing. I didn’t have all these thoughts the first time I heard Benjamin’s album, of course—I just laughed.
Maybe humor doesn’t depend on originality, or even being particularly clever. Those things are nice, but rare. If you consume a lot of humor, such as by watching TV, listening to radio and podcasts, and reading, do you find every bit of it, or even most if it, to be all that great? I don’t, but I keep going back for more because I prefer it to serious stuff. Maybe what audiences appreciate is the act of attempting to be humorous, and so we make allowances for middling results, and we also enjoy it from many different angles. Look at that guy—he thinks he’s funny. Ha! Hey wait, I’m laughing—I guess he is funny.
The approach that I follow for many of my letters intended for newspapers is to examine an issue from an idiotic angle, and to explicitly combine things that are only loosely-coupled in real life. I think everyone’s brain does that to some extent, but not everyone says it aloud or commits it to paper. Most people don’t follow the stupid idea to its conclusion, and they certainly don’t express it. And so maybe, as with the kid crying over the dressmaker’s dummy, the humor is in seeing the common-but-usually-suppressed thought process brought to life.
For the vaccination-at-the-speedway letter, I wrote it after reading an editorial in the local paper that promoted the idea of using such large, open facilities, and which contained not an ounce of humor. No problem there, as it wasn’t trying to be funny. After writing and submitting my letter, I looked around the country at newspapers in other states that have NASCAR tracks, and I found an article from a reporter who actually went to the Charlotte Motor Speedway and got vaccinated. His article mostly gave a minute-by-minute account of the experience, but he also worked in a couple of jokes about tire changes and speedy pit stops. So you see, it’s pretty obvious stuff.
So I’ve worked up one answer: humor can be pretty obvious stuff, made humorous by someone making the effort to say it or write it or perform it and carry it to its illogical conclusion. We can laugh at the humor itself, or at our own thoughts about the subject, or at how the person is expressing it even if it’s not all that funny.
I did not write today’s letter with our local newspaper editor in mind, but it is a fact that he’s a major racing fan, and I did think that fact would improve the odds of publication. I also sent it to AL.com, but an editor there replied via email, “I laughed at this, but I don’t think our readers enjoy satire.” Since I see precious few sparks of humor in that publication, I wonder how he knows? I’m not saying he doesn’t know—maybe they try humor occasionally and get a lot of complaints and cancellations in response. I thought of replying to the effect that if he laughed at it, did he not think a certain percentage of readers might also laugh? But that led me to imagine that his comment might be a sign that he sees himself as the enlightened gatekeeper for a humor-impaired readership. And, given the tone and logic behind many of the political rants sent in by readers, maybe he’s right. I do wish more publications would go out on a limb, humor-wise, as The Anniston Star has done with my letters, to see what happens.
I have also made state-specific versions of today’s letter and I am still working on submitting them to publications in those states. I’ll report on that effort in a future Road Trip post. Meanwhile, you can watch the related post in my other blog (click the link), which I will update with the different versions as well as publication results.
I kind of miss rapping about editing, but this letter was published exactly as submitted. Also, I did practice ruthless self-editing in advance thanks to the running word count provided by my word processing software, and the knowledge that the text box on the newspaper submission form would be even more ruthless, coming down like a guillotine on anything that didn’t fit into the box. There was at least one more joke to be made, but it would have required four words so I threw it to the wolves of oblivion.
In case I have not expressed it directly before, providing print-ready copy that respects the submission guidelines is every bit as important as providing good content if you want to get published. It behooves the writer to remove all obstacles and annoyances, so why not make the editor’s job as easy as possible? If you are submitting 220-word letters to a pub that asks you to stop at 200 words, even if your 220 words are gold-plated platinum, you are covering the road to publication with jarring speed bumps by creating work. First, the editor will notice your letter is too long. Just that thought consumes time; it is work. Then, if he bothers to read it (after you reduced your odds of success right out of the gate), he has to decide if its quality justifies the extra length; those thoughts are work. If not, but he wants it, he has to cut it down; that is work. If he runs it as is, he may have to revisit other letters he has already accepted, and edit them to make room for your extra-long masterpiece. That is work. If your letter got in in spite of all that, well goody for you; but imagine next time the editor sees a submission from you, and he’s on deadline and everything is starting to look blurry. He will just see “work” and move on to the next blur of ink that fits in his remaining empty space.
All of that, by the way, is why my other blog is called Column Inches, to emphasize my awareness that the content, as much as I enjoy reading and writing it, is at a fundamental level just a commodity, and the commodity needs to fit inside the allotted space in the delivery vehicle. It is best, while trying to do work that you are proud of, to occasionally blur your own vision and see it for the gray-black filler that it is. Besides, you can always write as much as you want in your own publication, and you can even trot out the jokes that were amputated from your submitted work. In this case, it was a hi-ho hilarious thing about “BYOP” to the dragway, where “P” is for “parachute”. No great loss, but I do hate to toss a baby joke out to die like that. On the other hand, acting as your own editor forces you to realize that the premise is the joke, and the elaborations don’t need to go on forever. And maybe the discards will be waiting for me across the writers’ equivalent of The Rainbow Bridge. Once can hope.
As for the headline, well, I am not only increasingly tolerant of the on-the-nose, spoiler nature of most editor-supplied headlines for my letters, but I am also starting to think maybe they are an advanced form of deadpan anti-humor (a la Neil R. Hamburger). It also occurs to me that, since I know exactly what’s in the letter or column, no headline can intrigue or surprise me; the author is the worst judge of the drawing power of the headline. Rather than expect them to contain a kernel of cleverness or to attract my jaded attention, I am going to try reading them with my analytical capacity set to “low” and see what happens.
Boing!
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