The "kiss of death" for satirists
Mary Beth Ellis
Changing Attitudes, changing latitudes
I officially decided to be a humor writer as a freshman in college, when I attended a debate featuring political satirist P.J. O'Rourke. (You had to love this guy. They made him speak in Stepan the God-awful Center, and the first words out of his mouth were, "Thank you for inviting me to your University, and this very attractive building.") At a post-presentation reception, teems of people pressed adoringly against him: "I really enjoy discussing your articles with my parents."
"Buy you a beer, P.J?"
"You've changed my entire outlook on politics!"
"How many books have you published now? Eight?"
I stood at the fringes of the crowd absorbing these declarations of brotherhood that writing had wrought, a profound realization zipping through me: If you become a successful humorist, people will give you beer. To hell with joining the Air Force and becoming an astronaut! You can't fit a keg into an F-16!
Humor writing is easier than fiction, in which you have to make up a completely original storyline, which is basically impossible since there are only about five plots in existence. (Shakespeare took three of them; Steven Speilberg got the other two.) It's more respectable than free-verse poetry, which allows you to scatter about 17 words around the page and call it a day, but then you have the problem of convincing people to give you money to do this.
Still, humor writing isn't a tremendously stable occupation. Rarely do people offer to buy you beer when you really need it, which is when you're actually attempting to write. And it's an extraordinarily dangerous line of work.
That's no joke, here's a random sampling of major humor columnists: Dave Barry. Will Rogers. Mark Twain. Erma Bombeck. P.J. O'Rourke. Lewis Grizzard.
What instantly leaps out at you from that list? Correct: Four of those writers are dead, for a kick-off rate of approximately 67 percent. (It could be more. This figure involved math, so somebody double-check me on this.) And the ones left standing — Barry and O'Rourke — are prime candidates for Charter Health System commercials. Dave is on something like his ninth wife and is currently running around promoting a work of fiction that apparently involves an alligator. O'Rourke was a Vietnam-era radical who smoked hashish and God knows what else before suddenly deciding to become a very loud conservative. Grizzard wound up unbalanced AND dead: He married his fourth wife just days before reaching his expiration date. Kamikaze pilots have a better mortality rate.
They say that Grizzard suffered complications from major heart surgery, Will Rogers went down in a plane crash, and Mark Twain died of general crotchetiness, but that's what they WANT you to believe. The leading cause of death in humor writers is this: editors.
You see, written humor, like spoken humor, hinges upon timing. And in writing, timing is dictated by precise word emphasis, paragraph breaks and punctuation. Colons, for instance, are WAY funnier than exclamation points. Capital letters are HILARIOUS. And when editors start tinkering with your timing — two paragraphs forced into an arranged marriage here, a comma benched for a period there — life as we know it ceases to exist. It would be as if Mark McGwire let a pitch go by him, waited for George Steinbrenner to fire somebody, bought a Lemon Chill from a passing vendor, hung around watching the first baseman scratch himself and THEN swung the bat. You simply wind up looking like a total pothead. So, when a conglomeration of fuel-clogged writing hits the general public beneath your name, the first thing you do is start looking for a plugged-in hair dryer cheerfully bobbing in a body of water.
This happened to me with my most recent column. I opened The Observer to find that poor, unwitting sentences had been rammed together, the — what the hell is this? — the opening paragraph had been rearranged, and OH MY GOD THEY COMPLETELY CHANGED THE ENDING! NO! NO NO! NO!
There it was: A horribly timed wad of the English language, credited wholly to me, circling my alma mater and the whole entire Internet. So the only logical course of action, from where I was sitting, was to e-mail a copy of the original, unedited column to every person I had ever met (all 11 of them), explain what had happened, and ingest about 8 gallons of Draino. And although the reaction of all the people I have ever met was comforting and sympathetic ("Hey! I didn't know you still had a column!") I think I should've taken the advice O'Rourke dispensed when it was my turn to press adoringly against him and beg for words of wisdom for a blossoming humorist: "Go to dental school."
Mary Beth Ellis is a 1999 graduate of Saint Mary's College. Her column is featured every other Tuesday.
The views expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.
All Viewpoint Stories for Tuesday, October 12, 1999
