Hang On; This One Gets Away From Me
So... um... how's it... uh... how've you... er...

Boy.

There are plenty of things I could write about I guess, but I'm coming up against a wall here and really, I'm in no mood to be depressed. All the available current events topics then are mostly verboten.

Russian school children massacre? Nope.

Election whatnot? Yeesh, maybe after the first debate.

The last two Florida hurricanes and the third one on the way? Barrel of laughs, that.

That leaves us with... um... er... uh...

The funny thing is that this blogging nonsense has come pretty easily to me so far. As a writer-in-failing I used to compulsively buy up journals, notebooks, legal pads and nice new pens in order to add to my collection of Paper Products Unsullied By Ink and Completely Unworn By Use Pens. I even got a laptop a few years ago. I dutifully transferred all of my writing files over to it. And there they sit, unnoticed and unloved while I wear a hole in my Grand Theft Auto CD-ROMs.

I think the reason I can be productive here--and yes I realize that "productive" is far too strong a word--is that I am under no obligation to provide a) quality or b) even a single pass at rewriting.

This is where I'm supposed to whip out the old Dorothy Parker chestnut "I hate writing; I love having written", but then I'm not completely sure she actually ever said that. Anything remotely witty gets attributed to Ms. Parker, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Will Rogers, Groucho Marx or Woody Allen. That's it. That's the list. Some guy sitting at home alone in his boxers somewhere in Iowa could craft a list of pithy one-liners tomorrow and it would be divvied up amongst those six people by the weekend. The internet, apparently, handles the mind-boggling volume of disseminated information by condensing the untidy bits of verbiage into a few, easy to handle carrying cases.

So the really really funny people in history are denied credit because they don't fit the profile. Harriet Tubman, for instance, was fond of knock-knock jokes. You didn't know that, did you?

That's it, that's what my goal for today will be: like Michel Foucault, I will endeavor to rescue this particular subjugated knowledge from the oppression of conventional thinking.

Those with the most historically "serious" reputations could be funny too. Gandhi's predilection toward the Whoopee cushion, Abe Lincoln's readiness to launch into another "Guy walks into a bar..." story, Hitler's fondness for killing people in large numbers as efficiently as possible...

No, forget that last one; in retrospect, some people's senses of humor just aren't that funny. Not universally anyway. I hear Goebbels thought Hitler was hilarious though. But that was Goebbels for you. Quite the brown-noser.


This post on the Narcissus Scale: 9.9

This post on the Basic Human Intelligibility Scale: 0.6


Pops

- posted by Pops @ 9:41 AM