The hard work of humor

The late, great southern columnist Lewis Grizzard said humor writing is hard work. "It's like being married to a nymphomaniac. The first two weeks are fun, after that it's work."

Humor writer Dave Barry said (in News Writing Interviews): "It's hard to think of an ending. The beginning is really hard, and the ending is always really hard, and the middle part is also very hard. It's just hard, hard, hard. Kids, don't go into this ...
"I am an obsessive rewriter. I don't even remember how I used to write without a computer because I have to change everything so often. But I write every sentence dozens of times, and that's literally true. ... If they ever had one of those programs that shows all the different versions of a document, mine would be in the thousands for almost every column I write. It's supposed to look the opposite of that. it's supposed to look like it just came out, and you were probably drinking when you did it — in five minutes. But for me it's hour after hour after hour of staring at the screen and just changing, changing, changing."

I am on a self-imposed hiatus from my humor column which appeared most Sundays in The Paducah Sun until earlier this year. The columns were getting a little flat as I found myself with less time to put into them. And a humor column that doesn't make readers laugh is a waste of valuable newsprint.

What P.J. O'Rourke and Dave Barry and Lewis Grizzard all say reflects my own experience. It IS a lot of work and surprisingly time consuming. I might start a column on Wednesday, tinker with it on Thursday, finish it on Friday, then come in on Saturday and finetune it — only to read it in print on Sunday and wish I could change another sentence or two. All that for a piece that is only 600 words long. I usually had it memorized by the time it went to press, and I can quote some columns almost verbatim, including some I wrote years ago, just because I stared at them so long on the screen.

That's not the process I use in editorial writing, which is more straightforward and predictable and routine. I can write two to three editorials in the time it takes to write one humor column.