This--"Beware of Bush" is great. After watching it, I think that all anti-Bush ads should be sung in Spanish, with a Latin beat.

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Wife Kate found this collection of notes in her desk this morning--it's the background of the character she plays in "Danse Macabre," an improvised 1930s-style monster movie currently playing at Second City's Skybox.



"AGATHA BRACHNYA

Extraction: Russo-Ukrainian border (little-known Srebnian people)

History: Came to work with producer Conrad Brunst as young immigrant maid. Now in mid-60s...After a young actress had to drop out of a production owing to an hysterical pregnancy, Agatha stepped in to assume her part--Crette the parlor maid. Ever since, no actress has successfully been cast for any parlor-maid or housekeeper-like role with Conrad Brunst production. They have all fallen mysteriously ill before filming began.

Filmography:

Shrew in the Twilight--Bette

Craven Dreams--Frette

Nocturne of the Damned--Lette

Rash of Torment--Nette

Sphinxster--Smette."



So, as we can see clearly, I am not even the funniest person in this apartment. Some days I even come behind one of the cats.

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Trotter fan extraordinaire Sophie sent this to me recently, and I thought I'd pass it along. It is perhaps the most creative incitement to spamming I've received.



"Dear Friend,



A month ago, to this very day, I had a dream. A wonderful dream, full of revelations. Unfortunately, as is often the case with such dreams, I could barely remember it when I woke up. However, the most important revelation stayed with me, and it was a very important revelation indeed. Heck, it wasn’t just important, it was groundbreaking. It was humungously amazing. You see, I had the privilege of being revealed the Ultimate Answer. Yes, you got it- the answer to Life... the Universe... and Everything.



So what is this answer? First, you have to ask yourself, “Am I worthy of such an honour? Am I willing to spread the word? Do I have access to unlimited supplies of cornflakes?



If the answer to any of the above was ‘yes’, then you are ready to share the secret of the Ultimate Answer. The answer to The Ultimate Question is...



Hedgehogs.



Yes, friend, that’s right, hedgehogs. But don’t go putting that as all the answers on your next test yet! I did that, and did I get full marks? Did I heck! I jumped the gun. The thing is, you have to give the hedgehogs in question brain food, so they can answer your question for you. And, as everyone knows, there’s no better brain food for a hedgehog than cornflakes. So before my next big test, I spent a while going round my neighbourhood, sprinkling cornflakes anywhere it looked like those darn hedgehogs might be hiding. Sure, I got a lot of funny looks. But who cares? The very next day, I got a full 94% on my English exam! (I guess I must have missed a coupla hedgehogs there)



So, do what I did. Don’t spend the night before your  exams, GCSEs, whatever revising! Spend that night prowling the streets with a mega bag of cornflakes, keeping a sharp lookout for any spiky critters, and your efforts will be rewarded.



 WARNING! This won’t work if you don’t forward this email to everyone you know! You have to spread the word! I sent this to my brother. He did the cornflake routine but didn’t bother to forward it to any of his friends. The next day, he took his Maths exam... and failed. Not only did he fail, but all of the words he typed magically transmogrified into drawings of aliens having a shoot-up.  My friend Sally-Sue did the same thing. She fed her test to the teacher’s dog by accident and as a punishment for being so careless now has to spend all of her spare time sifting through the dog’s droppings to find semi-digested pieces of her test. So SEND THIS ON! Email it to everyone in your address book. The more people you send it to, the happier those hedgehogs will be! And if you just totally ignore this, well, you don’t want to know what’ll happen to you! Suffice to say, no-one could go within a 25-mile radius of my disbelieving friend Mary-Lou-Beth without fainting from the stench for almost five months after the ‘Cesspit Incident’. Send this email on, and everyone will benefit. Don’t send it, and I can’t be responsible for what happens."

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As someone who spent many, many happy 36-hour periods in Northampton, Massachusetts during my college years (I had friends at Smith College, and fled from my New Haven pressure-cooker as often as possible), I enjoyed this article in the NY Times on what to do/see/eat in Northampton. Maybe Kate and I should go back there sometime for a visit; I don't think I did anything that would get me automatically thrown in jail. (But I better check out back issues of the Smith student newspaper on microfilm, just to be sure.)

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Jon Schwarz' blog, Tinyrevolution.com, reports a mysterious upsurge in popularity in Northern Iraq for former Kansas Sen. Ed Pugh.



Can anyone weld together all the bloody remnants of that country, wracked by war and centuries of ethnic and religious strife? ED PUGH CAN! The "Draft Ed Pugh" movement starts HERE.

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As some of you know, I grew up in St. Louis and am a fan of the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team--the team which just lost, in convincing, nay humiliating, fashion to the Boston Red Sox in the World Series. Something that is noticably absent in all the coverage of the Red Sox' victory is the deal I made with the Universe, as the Series began. "Universe," I said, "I will accept a Cards' defeat only on this condition: that George Bush loses the Presidential election." The Universe was silent, as usual (it thinks it's too good for us) but I consider the Red Sox' victory formal--and I'd like to add right here in public, legally binding--acceptance of my deal.



So: expect Kerry in a landslide, and you're welcome!

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My dad--who is, by the way, the Republican Party's worst nightmare, a solid Democrat in a high tax bracket--sent me an email this morning. In it was the following, John Cleese on the Bush Administration:



"How many Bush administration officials does it take to change a light bulb?



None. There's nothing wrong with that light bulb. There is no need to change

anything. We made the right decision and nothing has happened to change our

minds. People who criticize this light bulb now, just because it doesn't

work anymore, supported us when we first screwed it in, and when these

flip-floppers insist on saying that it is burned out, they are merely giving

aid and encouragement to the Forces of Darkness."



(If you haven't checked out John Cleese's website, TheJohnCleese.com , do so right away. I think I just registered as a member there, in the promise of future members-only goodies. I think I registered, but I'm not sure.



Back on the political front, here's Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing 2004--definitely worth a read. Nice to see that HST can still bring it.

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Yesterday, the New York Times Book Review ran an appreciation of playwright George S. Kaufman by Woody Allen. The occasion was the Library of America's new collection of Kaufman. I love Woody, like Kaufman, and adore anything put out by the Library of America--I smell an Xmas present! For the cheery cherry on top, the indefatigable Ed Page has posted a slight but amusing humor piece by Kaufman on his blog.

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Last night, my favorite baseball team, the St. Louis Cardinals, just won the National League pennant. Now, on to the World Series!

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That's what this article says, and it's pretty persuasive. There's no massive national infrastructure to build, just an acceleration of trends already afoot: the popularity of hybrid vehicles, and the growing efficiencies of wind farms.



If the Red Sox can beat the Yanks four straight, anyone can do anything, don't you think? Now, if my Cards can just get into the Series...My enthusiasm alone could power a city.

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There's a Barry fan from the Netherlands whose mom is very sick with cancer. I'm keeping her in my thoughts; perhaps you could, too, if it's not too much to ask. Thanks.

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...started reading this nicely done comedy blog. Todd Jackson found my earlier screed about editors and humor stimulating, so he had a few thoughts...Then I had a few thoughts...I 'spect the thinking will continue. Check it out here.



By the way, the blog's title comes from a famous EB White quote about the impossibility of analyzing humor. The quote's horseshit--anybody who's ever had to think of something funny when they didn't much feel like it has analyzed humor successfully--but it comforts civilians and others who require humor to be ineffable to allow themselves to laugh. "The thing that makes soemthing funny is that it's CRAZY!!!!" (Multiple exclamation points used to denote insipidness.)

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So I spent the first half of the weekend cobbling together a comprehensive 1967-era version of Brian Wilson's "Smile," based on the 2004 version. That was fun. (I couldn't've done it, not in a million years, without the reference disc I got from Project Smile last year. They're a Yahoo Group of fellow Brian Wilson fans--not sure if they're defunct or not, but they collected all the best-quality tracks from a million different sources and I got the disc.) Now that I've listened to "Smile" a bazillion times, I'm getting back into "Pet Sounds." If you haven't heard it, run out and buy it immediately, and know that I envy you.



Amazing. Just amazing. Makes me want to stop writing and learn every instrument in the world, just so I can make more of this good stuff!

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If the media coverage of this Presidential election has pissed you off as much as it's pissed me off, you'll love Matt Taibbi's search for the worst campaign journalist.

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Usually I can take or leave Jon Stewart. His manner's a little too cute for my taste. But after his appearance on Crossfire yesterday where he tore Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala new ones, I think he's friggin' tops. Do yourself a favor and read the transcript.



Memo to all media types: Notice how Michael Moore and Jon Stewart are getting rich by utterly speaking their minds. Stop filtering everything through the corporate mind, and you just might get rich, too!

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Todd Jackson writes to ask:

"Lots of people on TV gang up together to write funny stuff for their shows, often with mixed results. But often with great results (see Simpsons, Mr. Show, etc.) I always got the impression that writing funny by committee was the way to go... but obviously print resists this. Is this by nature of the medium or is it possible for a group mind to work well in print?"



Yes, Todd, it is possible for people to team-write print comedy successfully--see the National Lampoon High School Yearbook, or The Onion, or even this recent Daily Show book. What keeps this from happening more frequently is that the amounts of money at issue with any print project--both what publishers are willing to spend, and what they expect to make--are too small to support a team of writers. TV is big, big money. Print just ain't, anymore. Also, remember with a TV show, the well to fill is HUGE--with a show like SNL, the amount of comedy that has to be produced every week is too big, even for an obsessive joke-machine freak like myself.



In print, there is a type of texture that you can't get without team writing; compare the Barry Trotter books with Bored of the Rings. But there's a personal feeling, a unity, with a single author that team writing doesn't produce. I've enjoyed running a team (at the Yale Record) and would like to do it again in the future, but the economics of print have meant that I've had to write singly so far. And I must admit that I enjoy the auteurist aspect of it, where I can take more risks and go odder places than if I was part of a team. Team writing tends toward blandness, and devolution into a house style is always a danger. I'd argue that The Onion has fallen into that trap; in the beginning the writers had a lot of shared experience which gave them an unusual unity of viewpoint.



If you like The Simpsons, you really ought to check out National Lampoon magazine from 1970-75, and perhaps the Harvard Lampoon Big Book of College Life (co-edited by George Meyer). Both of those are excellent examples of team written comedy at a high level.

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"Everything he said," writes William Saletan, "and the facility with which he said it, conveyed a man ready to assume the presidency in wartime." Slowly, slowly, the mainstream media is waking up to reality. Read the rest of the article here.



The rats are leaving the ship, and twitchy, smiley Bush is desperate. If he can't win--and lock up all the internal documents of his Administration--indictments will stream out of the Justice Department; it will make Watergate look like a lovers' quarrel. This election is life-or-death for W, Condi, Rummy, and all the other bad people in high places, hiding behind cute nicknames. So expect the worst from them in the next few weeks.

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Anybody else notice that whenever the debate turned to the subject of jobs, President Bush began talking about No Child Left Behind? I love schoolchildren as much as anyone, but being homeless because your parents can't get a job tends to depress your test scores.



Kerry looked poised, his answers were clear and thorough--clearly a man qualified to be President. Bush seemed programmed, coached and intellectually slow--clearly the figurehead for an unelected group of toads lurking behind the scenes. And what was the deal with that twisted half-smirk he was wearing? Is that the Ambien, or did he catch it from Cheney?



Another strong win for John Kerry--and I'm not the only one who thinks so.

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...have participated in a My Lai-style massacre of Iraqis.



Whether this particular account proves verifiable or not, how much more evidence do we need that we're wearing the black hats...again?



Elect. Kerry. Now. I want someone in the White House who understands what happens to soldiers and civilians during wartime. Kerry's been shouting about this stuff since 1971, and suffered politically for it. Nobody--not Nader, and especially not Bush--can address this issue like Kerry can. Iraq's a mess and won't be solved for years (if not decades) but as we grope towards a new future for that country, I want a President who will do something about this.

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Friend Mollie Wilson has an interesting essay in the Village Voice Literary Supplement, equating our dear President with Peter Pan.

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After Kate and I watched a PBS documentary featuring each of the candidates' life stories, I'm more convinced than ever that John Kerry is the only appropriate choice for President in November. He's simply a much more thoughtful and substantial person than George Bush. This election is so clear, that it's really a referendum on the intelligence and responsibility of the American people. Which do you want, a real President, or a football coach?



These days especially, with his Bristling Yokel routine, George Bush reminds me more and more of a football coach cornered by a reporter at halftime during a loss.



"Coach, Michelle Tafoya, CBS Sports. I'm sure that wasn't the kind of first half that you were hoping for--you've dug yourself a 56-point hole. What adjustments are you planning on making in the second half to get back in the game?"



"Well, Michelle, we're just gonna keep doing the same thing. As much as some people might want to, now's not the time to question all the things that have worked for us in the past..."



"Actually, Coach, it hasn't. You've lost the last four games."



"Everybody goes through ups-and-downs. That's what this game is about."



"But Coach, there aren't any ups--"



"We just have to execute better. And when I say execute, I mean 'kill.'"

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...the just-released reimagination of the Brian Wilson/Beach Boys album begun, but never completed, in 1966. It's very cool, and I highly recommend it to anybody who enjoys tuneful 60s pop. What a wonderful end to the formerly tragic story of Smile.



Those of you unaware of the history: I found a web site that gives a fairly concise description of Smile's journey from Brian Wilson's head to your CD player. Also, here's Rolling Stone's five-star review of the album. Check it out!

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1968! You tell me we've moved one inch since then:



"The [next] priority for change - the first element of a new politics for the United States - is in our policy toward the world. Too much and for too long, we have acted as if our great military might and wealth could bring about an American solution to every world problem..."



Note that this is the FIRST element; without changing that attitude, none of the rest of the changes can be made. Until we learn to look at the world in a different way, we'll remain trapped in war after war, conflicts that not only kill our citizens and drain our treasury, but isolate us and necessarily contain the seeds of the next war. The best outcome is a temporary, expensive victory (see the first Gulf War), but that's unlikely the longer we go down this road, getting sysmatically weaker, more despised by others, and more cynical ourselves.



Remember to vote. You, too, Wesian--I figure if dead people are allowed to vote here in Illinois, Malaysians should be okay, too :-).

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...on PBS, and I'm a little raw, since that story always upsets me a great deal. But I thought since I had a blog I'd write to you how the show made me feel. I was born in 1969, almost one year exactly after Robert Kennedy was shot dead while campaigning for President, and I know that most of the people who read this are even younger than I am. Some friends who read the blog regularly, have taken the opportunity to tease me about my obsession with the Kennedys and their assassinations in particular. Maybe I'm speaking to those people, or maybe I'm speaking to all of you for whom the politics of the 1960s (or even of the US) are as locked inside history as the invention of the telephone or the birth of Jesus Christ.



In my country, we're suffering from the politics of a broken heart. Our country's heart was broken in the nineteen-sixties, as one inspiring leader after another was shot down, in public. A terrible message was sent--doesn't matter who sent it, really--just that it was received. Don't care about your leaders, don't become passionate about them--if you do, they'll be removed. Whatever momentum they created will be lost. You will have to begin again, a little older, a lot sadder, with a blacker, bleaker view of the world than before. More and more during the last four decades, under the spur of that denied pain, we have been lashing out to share our misery all around the world. Our hearts are armored, and inside the armor is fear, and anger, and sadness.



Remember--or take the time to learn--what's happened in the US since 1968: the sleaze of Nixon and his Iago, Kissinger; the bumbling blandness of Ford, an unelected President; then Carter, a well-meaning liberal totally overmatched and ineffective enough to be safe; then Reagan, and the mass delusion of a return to a pre-heartbreak past that never truly existed; then Bush, a shadowy CEO with no morality save winning and a heart two sizes too small; then Clinton, a Kennedy manque with an obvious flaw which his enemies knew in advance and used like a whip and a leash; and finally Bush, who needs no more castigation than what the newspapers he doesn't read provide fresh every day. Are these the leaders of any great country, much less a democracy? Do we not seem as though we are afraid, as a people, to truly invest our hearts and minds fully in the political alternatives that face us? It doesn't make sense until you use the template of a broken heart.



We're pretending like it doesn't matter--that we've seen it all. Then, we're choosing people beneath us, in the hopes that they will not hurt us too badly if they leave. The country has gone to shit in the meantime--we needn't argue about this, and both parties compulsive pandering to our national "greatness" only makes it clearer. Politics has been turned into a sport, with no more immediate impact than the Harvard-Yale game--though the evidence mounts that this is not so, we are all too willing to believe it, and the parties are all too willing to encourage us to do so. As long as the money flows, they're all too willing to have the minutiae of manuevering stand in for policies; to have weary cynicism play the part of actual choice. To choose is to declare allegiance. To declare allegiance is to believe. And to believe is the one thing we don't do, mustn't do.



And yet believing is so sweet. I would argue it's so fundamentally connected to the democratic process that we can't let it go. So our political world is full of ghosts, of lost loves. We escape into Sixties hagiography, remembering the good times in an obscuring golden haze. Or--and I am guiltier of this than most--replay the events of the assassinations, examining them for that one detail that solves the mystery and, perhaps, reverses the evil spell. Or we dredge up the dirt and expose the flaws, in an effort to convince ourselves that the Kennedys--or MLK--or Malcolm X--weren't really so much to lose. Or we pin our hopes on a proxy (Teddy, Gary Hart, Dan Quayle, Bill Clinton, John Kerry, John Edwards), replaying the same story with a girl that looks slightly similar, in the hopes that this time, the story will end differently.



When all the remedies prove fruitless, as they do in failed relationships, we swing into bitter impotence. We try to lessen the robbery by devaluing what was stolen. The talking heads are experts at this, explaining that Vietnam would've happened the same way had the assassinations never happened; that the civil rights movement would've petered out into identity politics as it did; that the fundamental inequalities that we all suffer under in this country would remain unaddressed and unimproved; that we would still export the worst of our country into an increasingly resentful world. It's cold comfort--which is to say, no comfort at all--and it's wrong.



Well, folks, I'm here to say that I'm tired of it. I'm going to do the only thing a person can do to mend a broken heart--give up the past, while at the same time focusing even more clearly on what was valuable it. What was appealing about the Kennedys, or Martin Luther King, or Malcolm X, or Medgar Evers, or Fred Hampton, wasn't their style, or the flotsam that can be arranged into nostalgia. It was that they believed in our country's capacity to change itself for the better. They knew that it wouldn't be easy, and knew, too, that any attempt to change necessarily creates an oppositional force determined to prevent change.



In every situation, with every leader, in every time and place, it is that small bit of belief generated by willing hearts, that tips the balance in favor of progress. It is not always there--in the Clinton years, for example--but we all know inside that if we do not begin to generate this bit of belief, this flame, once again, our country will continue to deteriorate, and in its deterioration be even more selfish and stupid and venal, and continue to lash out. As with a broken heart, the good that can be outweighs the good that was lost. I say all this in the hopes that somebody out there understands what I'm talking about.

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For the first time, Thursday's debate revealed the extent of Bush's weakness. (This shouldn't be surprising; it's easy to forget in the wake of 9/11, but the man wasn't popular enough to win straight up in 2000.) Since the towers fell, pumping up Bush has been considered a handy substitute for authentic patriotism. But he's never been assured of winning reelection, because he's simply not that good at convincing people who don't already agree with him that he's right. His only defense has been "don't change horses in midstream"; last night, it was clear that this horse is drowning!



In the words of that great political thinker Michael Douglas, "The Presidency is the greatest home-field advantage in the world." That didn't help Bush Thursday. Incumbency didn't help him; being a wartime President didn't help him; having a taller podium didn't help him; talking about foreign policy didn't help him. With all these advantages, a reasonable candidate would've steamrolled John Kerry. Not only did Bush not win, he actually LOST. This is the biggest debate debacle since Reagan took Carter out behind the woodshed in 1980. Anybody who tells you different is sweating and spinning.



Don't get distracted by the horserace that the media will use to keep selling ads and making money. President Bush's performance Thursday showed more than ever why he needs to go. This is not a partisan issue, or even a question of style--the debate demonstrated that Mr. Kerry is simply more qualified for the job, and more worthy of our trust.



This morning, The New York Times says that Bush is attacking John Kerry on Iraq; he can attack all his likes, but the truth is, there's only one person responsible for the continuing bloodshed over there, and it isn't John Kerry. Could Kerry still lose? Sure--but only if we let him, by not showing up to vote.

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Spider-Man reviews crayons. I quit halfway through, but funny for a while. Whaddaya expect from the internet--and it's free, too.

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This, from an email to a friend of mine in the publishing business:



"Here's my general feeling on editing and humorous prose: when in doubt, don't. Robert Gottlieb, the editor of Catch-22, rejected A Confederacy of Dunces; many times since, even after Dunces had won the Pulitzer Prize, Gottlieb has reiterated that he'd reject it again. That's insane--and that's Robert Gottlieb, probably the greatest editor of his generation, with the kind of credentials editing humorous novels that no other editor can match. Experience has taught me that the best way to learn how to edit humor is to write an incredible mass of it yourself. That's the only way to develop enough sensitivity to the proper things. Thurber's fights with Gus Lobrano were legendary. Perelman fought, too. Benchley's stuff was, I suspect, uneditable--it's too light. Editors are constantly trying to give humor more weight--turn it into a form of journalism or essay or in general make it like some other type of writing that they can understand better, but this is a real mistake, because the first thing to die is the writer's voice, which is the single biggest factor in whether a piece is funny or not. I'm an obsessive about this, and I couldn't tell a Henry Alford piece from a Bruce McCall piece from a Hart Seeley piece, just by reading it. This isn't their fault--their pieces have to go through the editorial sausage grinder--but it has, and probably will, keep them from ever being considered great humorists. Out of the people working now, I'd trust Dan Menaker at Random the most, because he spent so many years editing casuals at The New Yorker, but I'd also be wary of him with something like the college book, precisely because it's as different in audience and intent from a NYer casual as chocolate cake is from cherry pie.



When it comes to humor, most editors must be viewed as simply particularly close readers--a humorist can't let the editor get too empowered with a funny manuscript, as much as that editor is used to being empowered, because humor is in some sense the imprint of the writer's ego hidden by craft. The better hidden it is, the funnier the book is, but the better hidden it is, the greater the chances that an editor--regardless of background or skill--won't really understand how it works or doesn't work. Often times, the humorist doesn't really understand him/herself. Humor is some weird mix of the personality of the writer, and a painfully learned ability to predict the psychology of an absolute stranger--the reader. It's a bizarre and difficult transaction.



If a pre-publication reader sees a structural or logical flaw, I want to know. If there's confusion, I want to hear about it. Heck, I even want to hear which jokes they liked--all feedback is useful when's in the proper context. But (the inevitable but), one of the hardest things about doing what I do is that nobody else I know of is really trying it--there are loads of fundamentally serious novels with flashes of comedy, but very few fundamentally comic novels with flashes of seriousness. I suspect that's because if you have the chops to be funny, why not make a boatload of money writing things that are a lot less time-consuming and financially risky than a novel? I'd write sitcoms too, if I could--but I can't, so I write prose instead. That's apparently pretty unique, and while it does give me a lot of room to manuever, it also makes it less likely I'll find editors who can really help. Any novel that's the least bit pointed or ironic is christened "a satirical romp" or "a comic tour-de-force," but when you put them up against The Daily Show, which makes you laugh more? And that's the test of a humorous piece of writing--does it make you laugh?



I've had decades of practice reading, writing and editing humor, and know exactly what I'm trying to do (whether it's possible to do, or whether I am talented enough to pull it off, are separate questions). No editor has put in that time; you can't become a snake-charmer by working as a lion-tamer. Overinvolved editors do as much damage to a humorous project as help it. The Barry books have gotten better as books as I've written more of them (whether they've gotten funnier is up to each individual reader), but that's been me practicing structure and learning how to balance plot, character, and jokes. My editor suggests, but mostly he tells me where he laughed, where he was confused, where the story dragged--he lets me drive, and that's worked well.



Everybody's got a sense of humor, so everybody has an opinion on a funny piece of writing. With humor, there are no preexisting boundaries to the editorial process, and that's a real danger--not for the editor, but for me. If I was writing books about the care and feeding of butterflies, there would be a point at which both the author and the editor could agree, "Well, x is simple scientific fact, so that's staying in." There is no fact in humor, so I have to be very protective of my material, no matter how much goodwill is behind an editorial suggestion.



If you have critique, finish the book first, and send it to me. I'd love to see it and will be grateful for any improvements that I can make as a result. But don't be surprised if there's much more going on with any one decision (or even joke!) than you suspect--the whole trick with humor is to make every decision feel effortless, but it's not, and once you dig down into the mechanism, you always find that it's like the back of a watch. With something as fundamentally ineffable as humor, one tinkers at one's own risk--and I include myself in that."

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