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Funny pictures. Funny poems. Funny cats. New York, USA.

Colbert Declares War on Amazon, Via Cardboard Box

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[on a scale from wit to whimsy: Um, this one goes off the scale ;-)]

Colbert declares war on Amazon, due to loss of book sales through his publisher Hachette. Close your eyes and ears intermittently if you have a delicate cursing constitution. Otherwise, laugh out loud. Colbert is funny, even if book sale declines are no laughing matter.

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Write Funny: What’s Wrong With This Joke?

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The Humor Code Nose Glasses How to Write Funny

Want to Write Funny?

If you want to write funny, you may have to let yourself indulge in wrongs…

1. The apple pie you made without sugar (You didn’t? I did. I assure you it was a terrible wrong on Thanksgiving day.)

2. The alarm clock you set for precisely one hour before you would secure your child’s stunning grade on the SAT.

(But then you stunningly slept through the wake-up call, jeopardizing your child’s very future. You didn’t? I did. And only time will tell just how wrong it was to sleep through the possibility of a sane morning, a sane arrival to the test, and the proper use of a hairbrush before leaving the house.)

3. The Facebook audience you built with hard work, time, and attention (and maybe some hard-earned money), only to see Facebook unethically hold your audience for ransom, just because they thought they could.

(You did. I know you did. If you have any social media history at all, you did. Now comes the waiting—to see who the joke is really on: you (and me) or them.)

How to Be Funny, According to McGraw and Warner

If you aren’t funny, it might be because nothing’s wrong with your joke. Maybe you were raised not to complain. Too bad. Because a good complaint is where you need to begin. You need to see the wrong, make it obvious, then get set to…

Mitigate The Wrong

I know. Mitigate is a big word. And one of the rules of good humor is to keep it simple. But I like the word mitigate, so I am going to break the rules (which is another rule of good humor. I mean, breaking the rules is another rule, so you see how it all works out in the end).

McGraw and Warner don’t use the word mitigate. They are more cooperative with the universe. (Pete even wears a sweater vest.) McGraw and Warner say that we must make the wrong benign. And when we do that, somebody somewhere laughs.

The Final (and Not So Final) Word on Funny

Here is the good news for your bad kitchen (and bad alarm clock) days: If you are a master of complaint, you are poised to be the next Colbert. All you need to learn is the art of mitigation. Not the maternal art of mitigation, “Oh, Honey, everything’s going to be all right.” But the amusing art of mitigation. “Oh, Honey, you need a faster hairbrush and a sexier clock alarm.”

Righting a wrong with a comic eye, McGraw and Warner discovered, is not as simple as it seems. There’s no solid science, after all, to making the pie go down with a late spoon of sugar. Still, you can read more about the art and science of comedic possibility (including the surprising power of Venn diagrams, red velvet curtains, and hiring the right people to laugh at your jokes) in The Humor Code.

Let us know if break it. The code, not the clock, that is.

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The Good Mother’s Guide to Preparing Your 17 Year Old for the SAT

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Coffee Preparing for SAT

How to Prepare Your Student for the SAT

1. No studying. If a lifetime of education can’t get a person through the SAT, then… whatever.

2. Have the student prepare everything the night before the test:

-choose clothing
-set aside high protein breakfast in fridge (plain yogurt is good)
-pack a bag of snacks, ID, ticket, calculator, extra batteries and no cell phone

3. Make student go to bed by midnight (instead of the usual 2 am fare that keeps him/her sleeping until ten o’clock in the morning)

4. Go to bed late, because you are up trying to get student to go to bed by midnight. This will make you extra sleepy. So important! Set your clock for one hour before student is to arrive at test. You are to arrive no later than 7:45 am.

5. On the day of the test, sleep through your alarm. Get out of bed at exactly 7:44 am.

WAAAAA! [take a private Good Mother moment with the universe, then jar your student out of bed with a loud announcement of the final 30 seconds now available to show up on time. Take note of the uncanny speed with which your 17 year old is actually capable of moving. Save that knowledge for later.]

6. Race to the school (only 1 minute away, thank your lucky stars), try to enter by the wrong door, be chided by security, go to the right door with a hairstyle that would make any student proud of his mother, and deliver student to the SAT.

It’s all good. Student is awake (that counts for something) and couldn’t eat the plain yogurt in the car, because you forgot to sweeten it. You will, for the sake of expiation, accidentally eat the yogurt upon returning to your home (accidentally means the yogurt was sprinkled lightly with granola that has almonds, to which you are—not fatally—allergic).

That’s it. You are officially a good mother, who has successfully prepared your child to take the biggest exam of high school life.

Photo by Deborah Austin, Creative Commons, via Flickr.

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Literary Humor: Waiting for Godot

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Waiting for Godot comic

[on a scale from wit to whimsy: Funny]

My daughter, who has the utmost patience even for things like the appendices of Tolkien’s books, says Waiting for Godot was the most boring thing she’s tried to read (besides poor, dear Hemingway, who she says endlessly repeats himself—in which case, we are waiting for Hemingway… to get to the point).

“It might have been better as a play,” she told me about Godot.

Or it might have been better as a comic, as it turns out. I think I’ll share this post with her and set the universe back in literary balance.

Via Samuel Beckett Facebook Page

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