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.