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Because I love to do it
And now, the Inevitable Substack. It seemed a natural step when my column was dragged to back of the barn like Old Yeller. I’ll show them! I’ll start a Substack and I’ll have a million friends and then they’ll be sorry! (Hot tears, runs to tree house, spends a sullen hour shooting caps.)
You know, they could be right. There could be no place, or at least no great demand, for the American humorous essay anymore. You’ll find examples in the New Yorker, but they rarely produce something I think is integral to the “humorous essay,” and that’s “actual laughter.” Not to disparage the authors – although obviously I just did – but I get the sense that they labored on them for a long time, honing and carving and polishing. I understand that S. J. Perelman was like that. I suspect that Fran Lebowitz would go a month without writing anything and then write a paragraph and go back to hanging around cafes and look vaguely disapproving.
All I know is that writing humor for newspapers meant speed and quantity, back when such a thing was prized. Column writing, for that matter, was the sort of thing done daily, regardless of inspiration or desire. That’s the genre I’ve inhabited for a long time. But does anyone want it?
The greats are gone. Most papers shed all the local humor columnist they hired in the wake of the Dave Barry Awakening, when papers realized that having someone write in an amusing fashion was a nice change from the social-issue and political columnists banging pots and pans about this and that. Management, I suspect, wants “humor” only if it’s folded into an Important Message about who we are or what issues bedevil the land.
I have messages now and then, but they’re not vitally important. We’re just discussing the quotidian peculiarities of the era. It’s not intended to be polarizing at all, but of course, someone will always take offense, because they have a mind an inch wide and see everything through a particular prism.
They’re not essential and they’re not GENIUS. They’re just feuilletons, as Perelman called them. The light part of the newspaper. Or the newspapers that used to be. You’re welcome to join up and I thank you if you subscribe for the $ part, which works out to be about .47 a column.
First one up around 10 AM Monday, like my old print column.
Published in Journalism
Outrageous. The whole paper used to be $.15. You know, back when I delivered them in the early 70s.
I grabbed a bargain at .47 a column, but I feel like a heel for not making it $1.41 a column. Maybe at renewal…
Nice pictures. I’m curious as to why it’s dated 2020… I’m terrible with dates, but that one seemed off. Am I having amnesia and deja vu at the same time? (Credit Stephen Wright)
I first read that as taking an hour and shooting craps. All I could see was a young Lileks in the tree house, rolling dice in an empty apple sauce can while yelling “Baby needs a new pair of shoes!”
Wasn’t that integral to the New Yorker? Seemingly endless back-and-forths between the writer and the gnomes scrutinizing every word of any submitted work?
EDIT: Tom Wolfe, “Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street’s Land of the Walking Dead!”, New York Herald-Tribune supplement (April 11, 1965). Reprinted in Hooking Up.
There has to be a way(s) to inject humor, raw or cooked, back into society – it is desperately needed. Remember when comedians offended everyone and that was the funniest thing about it? All In The Family, the stand up comics, even the old SNL, now everyone is afraid to offend. You could almost see humor and whatever avenue it could be delivered by (in every way possible?) as a ‘new’ concept! It could catch on again ……
Mrs. C and I are in. I like the group subscription option.
At least you never got a Pulitzer.
One question:how could anyone tell that Fran Lebowitz was looking disapproving?
I think it is just her look.
Fran expression Number One:
Another expression from Fran:
So that would be “resting disapproval face?”
Done, Laissez les bons temps rouler!
Thank you all! Next up on Wednesday for subscribers, the “Extrapolation of the Outtakes,” Part 1.
Reminds me of the Robert Mitchum line: “Listen. I got three expressions: looking left, looking right and looking straight ahead.”
He was great; totally upfront about playing himself in every role.
I’ve no idea why my tablet wanted me to pay you in euros and I had to go to my phone to pay you in dollars.
But I was happy to do so
He just got back from England and forgot to change his settings.
Or was using a VPN.
Someone asked him about his role in The Winds of War. “Oh, yeah. That’s the one where I smuggled millions of refugees out of Europe in the bags under my eyes”.