No More Same-Day Humor Pieces
They’re not good (usually).
If I were in charge of humor, which I should be, this is a rule I would have: NO SAME-DAY HUMOR PIECES. By which I mean humor pieces composed quickly about something that just happened in “the news.” Covfefe, Mr. Met giving the middle finger, etc. Of course there would be exceptions but in general that would be the rule. I know why people do same-day humor pieces and it’s because:
- People click on newsy things, theoretically.
- It’s easy to riff on something that just happened because then you don’t have to have an idea.
But the thing about same-day humor pieces is: they’re almost never funny. I say “almost” not knowing an exception offhand, but just to protect myself in case there’s one out there. Actually I just remembered one, and it’s this. That was funny. It was when everyone was talking about how bad that Margot Robbie profile was. Exception proves the rule, as they say. (If you’re wondering whether that funny McSweeney’s piece about the election counts as an exception it does not because it was at least a month after Galaxy Note 7s started exploding and it was 11 days after the election and the election is not a particularly “throwaway” event, even though the Galaxy Note 7 aspect maybe was.) (So instead of proving my point by being an exception it proves my point by being the rule.) (See?)
Here’s someone who’s good: Jack Handey. Jack Handey takes a long time to write funny stuff — that’s why his stuff is funny. Look at what he said about writing Deep Thoughts in a Splitsider interview:
They don’t come gradually, or out of the blue. You have to sit down — or in my case, lie down — for hours, and try to come up with some. Usually, I lie down on the floor and throw a ball against the ceiling, over and over.
A Deep Thought, that’s just a sentence or two. How long is your throwaway current event thing? Longer? What do you think your humor writing skill level is? “Better than Jack Handey?” OK. Yeah right. Here he is talking about writing Deep Thoughts and his novel in his New York Times Magazine profile from 2013:
“For each one that works, I throw away 10. I find that easier than rewriting. I’d rather just scrap it and start over. That’s why the novel was so hard — I really had to rewrite things over and over.”
“Rewrite things over and over.” Are you doing that with your throwaway current event thing? Or are you just posting it online for me to get mad about right away?? So you get “clicks”??? Because no one is going to “click” on it tomorrow???? Because its “value” is not in its “content” or “execution” but solely in the fact that it is “topical”!?!?!?!?!??!!?!?
I don’t mean to say that you shouldn’t do a funny blog post about something that just happened. Please for the love of god I would love if one single person on earth would produce a fucking funny blog post every once in a while, PLEASE. PLEASE IT IS SO SHITTY AND BORING ONLINE NOW. EVERYONE IS TERRIBLE AND BORING I HATE IT!!!!!!! I just mean “humor.” You know what I mean. Humor writing.
Shoehorning a topical reference into a humor format so it seems like “a joke” but is actually “just words people recognize at the moment” is bad.
I like things that are funny and good.
NOT bad.
Stop,
Kelly