Humor writing can be stressful

Kelly Kazek

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September 5, 2009

By Kelly Kazek The News Courier Sat Sep 05, 2009, 06:45 PM CDT

Y’all may think it’s easy writing a weekly humor column but I am here to tell you it can be downright stressful to try to be funny on demand.

It’s not like I’m some Dave Barry type who not only was possessed of a very strange mind — OK, maybe that does sound like me — but had five whole days to whip out 500 words — That’s only 100 words per day, or about six every waking hour. (See, despite all those rumors, journalists can do math).

I can’t sit around all day writing brilliant openers like “A funny thing happened on the way to Dog Days …” or “Take my publisher … please.”

I have a paper to run here.

Some days, like has happened this month, the sheriff will call and say. “Get over to the jail, quick. We’re bringing in a moonshiner and his still.”

What kind of journalist would I be if I passed up the chance to see a real-for-sure still and put its picture on the front page to embarrass the entire state of Alabama? (Again.)

Even Californians would have made fun of the sad looking cannabis plant authorities found behind the still. It looked a little like poke sallet that had been boiled to long.

Or I might have to go take a photo of a “spa” that turned out to be a home to an alleged prostitution ring. Who could have looked at the sign that said “Pleasers” with a photo of a woman in a sexy pose and not thought this was simply a place for mani-pedis and an herbal wrap?

So, as you can tell, my job gets complicated at times. And humor, like any art form, takes time to create.

Then it hit me. I wrote “art.”

So I said to myself, “Self, whaddya know? You are an arteest — no matter what that woman said in her e-mail last week after the column on Chuck Norris and the Ten Commandments judge. What was that naughty word she called me again? Oh, yeah, feminist.”

Seems if you are a woman with a job and an opinion, you are a feminist.

Any-hoo, because I didn’t have any funny ideas for a column this week (despite the story we published last week on the fundraiser in which people will be hung by their skin from hooks) I am writing about humor in hopes it will make a good substitute.

To enhance my column, by which I mean pad it out until it’s long enough, I took myself all the way to the bookstore to check out the offerings in the humor aisle.

As I had begun to learn from the anti-feminism woman, I realized humor is very subjective.

One person’s Hemingway is another person’s “Farts: A Spotter’s Guide.”

Would a publisher release a book called “Stuff on my Cat,” which contains, by the way, photos of various stuff on various cats, if she (notice the feminist pronoun) did not believe there would be an audience?

Apparently there also is an audience for: “Things Drunk People Do,” “Things White People Like” and “A Pot Smoker’s Handbook.”

Huh.

From an author’s standpoint, I particularly liked the format of the book “11002 Things to Be Miserable About,” which was just a list of things that make people unhappy. I imagine it's a real gut-buster.

However, in my book “Fairly Odd Mother, Musings of a Slightly Off Southern Mom,” on sale now at Pablo’s on Market and amazon.com, I use the tried-and-true method of trying to be funny without writing anything my grandmother couldn’t read.

So that’s my column on humor writing, which, by the way, was not a ploy to plug my book.

Just be sure to look for my next book: “Peanut Butter on My Cat: Things Drunk Dogs Do.”

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