March 29, 2021 · 7:09 pm

In Defense of Corny Jokes

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It will probably be clear that I am writing this post because I am currently reading 1941 daily strips from Al Capp’s Li’l Abner.

But I am definitely going to talk about corny jokes, not cheesy jokes, because I grew up in Iowa, not Wisconsin.

And, yes, that is example number one.

There is a certain way of telling a joke or tall tale that is unique to the farmyard.   And it does not contain chicken poop, but rather, corn.

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Of course, as you can see by this corn-colored definition of what corny means according to Collins Online Dictionary, the word is supposed to be an insult to corniness in jokery.  That doesn’t sit well with the people of Iowa, where the tall corn grows.  We are also obvious, sentimental, and not at all original.  And we are proud of it.  Corny360_2017-06-19-17-17-44-339

To tell a corny joke right, you have to set a simple scene, and make it clear what happened, and give the audience a simple cue for when to laugh.

For instance, there was the time that Cudgel Murphy had a cat problem with his car, the 1954 Austin Hereford that he has driven since dinosaurs walked the earth.  It seems there was this time in 1988 when he kept having engine trouble.  The engine would sputter and cough and die, and when Cudgel opened it, he would find a half-eaten dead pigeon or other random bird carcass gumming up the works.  He couldn’t for the life of him figure out how dead birds were getting into his car engine.  But his grandson Danny happened to see the neighbor’s big tabby tomcat carrying a pigeon he had killed under the front of Grampy’s car, apparently enjoying a fowl meal in the dark with a nice warm engine to lay the food on.  Sure enough, when they checked the engine later, there was the half-eaten dead bird laying across one end of the fan belt.

So Cudgel set up a vigil, assigning times for himself, Danny, and his younger grandson Mike to watch for signs of that damned cat taking another bird under the hood of the Austin. With only two day’s worth of watching under their belts, Mike came running into the Murphy kitchen with the news.

“Grampy!  I seen that damned cat taking a dead bird under your car!  He’s in there right now!”

So Cudgel rushed out, turned the engine on, and stomped on the gas.

cudgels car

There were some worrisome thumps and bangs under the hood, and then the cat shot out from under the front of the car spewing howls and cat curses all the way up the nearest tree.

Cudgel laughed hard and finally caught his breath to say, “How about that, Mike?  I’ll bet James Bond doesn’t have a car that can shoot angry cats out the front!”

Now, before you chastise me for enjoying cruelty to cats, I hope you will remember that Cudgel Murphy is a fictional character, and I am merely illustrating the idea behind corny jokes.  And, besides, that cat really had it coming to him.

 

 

 

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March 28, 2021 · 7:27 pm

Fairy Tales and Wishing Wells

If you are on a writer’s journey like I am, you have my sympathy. I am not saying it is not worth it. But if it is going painlessly easy for you, you are not doing it right.

If you are doing it right, you are dredging your soul deeply with a huge jagged-edged bucket to find those small gemstones of truth and life and meaning, and then trying to arrange it all into patterns and genres and stories that are artful enough not to just look like a pile of random rocks. If you do it for a lifetime, you may be lucky enough to create a masterpiece or two, a finely-crafted jeweled creation that dazzles the eye and captures the heart of the reader.

I have always been cursed with high intelligence and a vividly over-active imagination. So, in some sense, I was always destined to be some kind of a fantasy writer with dragons, unicorns, wizards, and such crap dancing in my head, and polluting it by farting rainbows too often. Fiction-writing, by its very nature has to tell a lot of lies to get to the truth. It also has to be, in large parts, autobiographical in nature to be any good. You have to write about what you actually know. Because making stuff up without real-world references will only produce crap that you yourself (meaning you, the writer-you) can only see as mud-brown dhrek.

Therefore, my stories have to be the thing that I label as Surrealism. Many experts would call it that too. It is expressed in highly metaphorical imagery, as in a boy moving in with his father and step-family at a nudist park where everybody is naked most of the time, and the boy sees practically everyone as a faun from Greek myths. (A Field Guide to Fauns) ‘Where a boy loses his whole family in a car accident in France and must rebuild himself in the US with family he has never even met before and he does it by putting on clown paint and singing sad songs, and visiting a dream world inhabited by clowns who might actually be angels. (Sing Sad Songs) Or a girl recovering from the grief of her father’s suicide during a once-in-a-lifetime blizzard where she is saved from snow-ghosts by a magical hobo and runaway orphans from a stranded Trailways bus. (Snow Babies) The reality of these stories depends on a willing suspension of disbelief challenged by a myriad of disparate things thrown together into a kaleidoscope narrative.

I have been thinking deeply about the nature of my own writing experience as I spent most of a year working to promote my books through an online author-review exchange called Pubby during a pandemic unlike anything seen in a century.

The author-review exchange thing has been a very mixed blessing. More than half of the reviews I have gotten on my work are done by authors seeking to earn points for their own books to be reviewed by cheating. They don’t actually try to read the books. Instead, they look at other existing reviews and try to cobble together some lies that don’t show any original thinking and merely parrot what other reviewers have said.

And while some reviews come from reviewers like me who work hard at reading and understanding the book and giving honest reactions that delight me by pointing out the things they actually connected with and understood in my books, other reviewers react with unexplained horror at something they found offensive to their own world view in my books, painting them in harsh terms, in one case even calling the book child-pornography and ridiculing the authors of the good reviews as someone who didn’t understand what they were reading.

But even the bad reviews are a blessing, in that they prove that someone has actually read my books. I cannot explain why that is so important, but it is.

So, hopefully you see now why I am talking about fairy tales. A writer’s journey is hard. It burns your very soul. And you are not very likely to see any rewards but the intangible ones. If you are a fellow writer on your own writer’s journey, well, I sympathize. And I can only wish you well.

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Filed under autobiography, book review, goofy thoughts, humor, novel writing, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life, writing

March 28, 2021 · 5:24 pm

Wally Wood

wally-wood-portrait

A self-portrait by Wallace Wood.

I am a bit of a cartoonist for a reason.  I started drawing cartoons at the age of five.  I read everything in the Sunday funny pages, not just for the jokes.  I poured over the drawings and copied some.  I drew Dagwood Bumstead and Blondie.  I drew Lil’ Abner and Charlie Brown and Pogo.  Cartoonists were heroes to me.

But my parents wanted to protect me from the evils of comic books.  Superheroes were off limits most of the time.  Things that are associated with evil were out of the question.  So Daredevil was beyond reach.  And Mad Magazine was full of socialist ideas and led kids down the dark path of satire.  So the truth is, I didn’t discover Wally Wood until I was in college.  His corrupting influence didn’t take hold of me until I was older and full of hormones.  Ah, youth and the propensity for sin!  Wally taught me that cartoons could be real.

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Wally Wood was one of the original artists working for EC comics who formed Mad Magazine with it’s spoofs and irreverent humor.  Wood worked together with the Great Will Eisner on the Spirit.  He went on to work for Marvel on the comic book Daredevil where he innovated the red suit and double-D logo, as well as doing the primary story-telling that brought that comic book from the bottom of the Marvel stack to almost the very top.  His work on Daredevil resonates even until today where there is now a big controversy that the popular show on Netflix does not list Wood among the creators of Daredevil in their credits.  I must remember to complain about that later.

Daredevil_cover_-_number_7

But the thing that drew me to Wood more than anything was the realistic style that he brought to the unreal realm of cartoons.  The man could draw!  He did marvelous detail work and was a leader in the development of dynamic composition in an artistic industry that tolerated and even often encouraged really poor-quality drawing.  He took the comic book from the age of the glorified stick figure to an age of cinematic scope and know-how.  Here it is revealed in his classic break-down of innovative comic-book panels;

wally-wood-panels-Poster-PR

But it is also important to realize that the more power you put into art, the more it can blow up and hurt people.  Wood had a dark side that went a bit darker as he went along.  He had an issue with the kind of false front comics had to throw up in front after the anti-comics crusade of psychologist Fredric Wertham’s book Seduction of Innocents.  He is probably the artist behind the cartoon poster The Disneyland Memorial Orgy.  He started his own cartoon studio that produced increasingly erotic and pornographic comics like Sally Forth, Cannon, and Gangbang.  He became increasingly ill, lost the sight in one eye, suffered severe headaches, and eventually committed suicide in 1981.  With great power comes great responsibility, and we are not all superheroes in the end.  But I will always admire and emulate the work of this great artist… and selfishly wish he could’ve lived to create more of the wonderful art he gave us.

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March 27, 2021 · 6:10 pm

Artwork You Haven’t Seen in a While

Yesterday, I went to the NASCAR race track at Petty Place in Fort Worth. There I was one of several thousand to sit in our cars in long lines and receive a dose of the Pfizer vaccine. And today I feel really punked out (not referring to the music, of course, because today I can’t sing.) So, I reached back in time for this Saturday Art Day post. All of these pictures have not been posted in a long time.

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March 26, 2021 · 2:44 pm

Vaccination Day

Yep, today I have an appointment to get a vaccination against Covid 19. Sure, I have to drive all the way to Fort Worth during rush hour to get there. And, yes, I have had bad reactions to flu vaccines in the past. But I am going to do this because it is worth all the risk to get a 90+% guarantee that I might be able to survive this pandemic.

Making your way in the world today is complex and daunting, especially when your poor health leaves you in pain every single day. You reach a point where you get depressed and wonder if it wouldn’t be better to just be done with it once and for all. I am certainly not going to die unfulfilled. I feel like I have contributed more than I have consumed. The world is slightly better for the fact that I have lived in it. But I am addicted to living my life, even with its complications. I need more of it if I can get it.

And this vaccine is not like the dead-virus vaccines that caused me pain in the past. It is new technology, a synthesized vaccine achieved by timely harvesting and decoding of the virus before it burst onto the world scene. It is the same sort of eleventh-hour solution that we will need to rely on in eight short years to rescue us from extinction by human-caused climate change. Momentous events are in the offing because they have to be. We are an inventive species, and we will either invent our way out of multiple existential crises or we will wipe ourselves out much faster than the dinosaurs were closed out.

But that’s all serious stuff. And this is supposed to be Funny Friday. So, Mickey, how do you rectify that mismatch?

Well, the Wizard in my Paffooney for the the day, Eli Tragedy, is basically a buffoon. His magical spells are mostly a matter of either dumb luck or extremely unfortunate blunders that magically turn out to benefit rather than destroy. Much in the same way that Big Pharma corporate wizards poofed up the vaccines.

And Mickey, as old Eli’s apprentice, can steal his master’s magic hat long enough to miscast his spells to the point that the world is awash in gallon after gallon of laughing-juice. And despite the troubles Mickey will be in, lessons will be learned.

So, here’s to vaccination! Today is my opportunity. May the cure not kill me, and let’s give life another chance.

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March 25, 2021 · 6:54 pm

Mangled Metaphors and Purple Paisley Prose

Color boy

I have rather regularly been revising and editing old writing.  One thing I have discovered is that I am capable of the most gawd-awful convoluted sentences filled with mangled metaphors and ideas that can only be followed while doing mental back-flips or managing miracles of interpretation.    That last sentence is a perfect example of purple paisley prose.  Paisley, in case you didn’t know this, is a printed pattern on clothing or other cloth that makes an intricate design out of the basic twisted teardrop shape borrowed from Persian art.   The basic motif, the teardrop shape, is a leaf or vegetable design often referred to as the Persian pickle.  I write like that.  You can pick out the Persian pickles in this very paragraph.  Alliterations, mangled metaphors, rhyming words, sound patterns, the occasional literary allusion, personification, bungles, jungles, and junk.  “How can you actually write like that?” you ask.  Easy.  I think like that.

To make a point about mangled metaphors, let me visit a couple of recent scenes in novels I have been working on;

From The Bicycle Wheel Genius; page 189

Mike Murphy and Frosty Anderson sat at the kitchen table eating a batch of Orben’s pancakes, the twentieth try at pancakes, and nearly edible.  Mike could eat anything with maple syrup on it… well, maybe not dog poop, but these were slightly better than dog poop.

From The Magical Miss Morgan; page 7

Blue looked at Mike and grinned.  It was an impish and fully disarming grin.  It made Mike do whatever Blue said, even being willing to eat a lump of dog poop if she asked him to, though she would never ask him to.

So, here’s the thing.  Why is there a repetition of the dog-poop-eating metaphor?  In one case it is Mike Murphy expressing in metaphorical terms his love of maple syrup.  In the other, it is Mike Murphy expressing his love of Blueberry Bates’ dimpled grin.  He is a somewhat unique character, but why would anybody associate love with eating dog poop?  I don’t know.  I just wrote the dang things.

I like to take a convoluted plot and complicate it with complex sentences and numerous running gags, with a seasoned-sauce of mangled metaphors poured on top like gravy.  I will use sentences like this either to make you laugh, or give you a headache.  I’m almost sure it is one of those.  So if you have gotten this far in this post without a headache, then I guess it must be funny.

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March 24, 2021 · 2:18 pm

A Meditation

Officer Eric Talley lost his life trying to protect the public from a supermarket killer.

He had seven children.

I can do nothing but cry about it.

Life is poetry.

It is all about finding the perfect words to express the meaning of the universe…

Every day….

Because every day has a deeper meaning.

Can I pray to it all… constantly?

Cleaning up the environment, reversing pollution of air and water, and saving our planet takes everybody working together in a sustained and difficult effort.

But it only takes a few to mess everything up.

Most dogs will love you and obey you unconditionally.

But, if you routinely curse and beat and abuse that dog, eventually… It will growl when it sees you, and bite you when you come near.

Why does anyone ever choose to be that kind of dog-owner, that kind of person?

It is not in my nature to be the wrong kind of dog-owner. Or the person who throws trash in the creek. But I cannot change the nature of other men. Is the situation hopeless?

I surely do Hope not!

Can I pray to it all… constantly?

Life is poetry.

It is all about finding the perfect words to express the meaning of the universe…

Every day….

Because every day has a deeper meaning.

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March 23, 2021 · 4:46 pm

AeroQuest 4… Canto 133

Canto 133 – Pink Space Cadillacs

The Super Rooster’s docking bay was filled with all the air/rafts, grav speeders, and small vehicles that Shen Ming had been able to muster from the city of Kiro and surrounding areas on the planet.  They were not exactly the most up-to-date technology in space, but they would do.

Four of the grav speeders were designed by an old interstellar vehicle company called Space Cadillacs.  Two of those were gray and white, while the other two were pink and white.

Shu Kwai was busy lifting boxes of equipment with his telekinesis and placing them into the cargo spaces of the speeders. 

Hassan Parker was busy watching and “supervising.”

Gyro looked at the pink Cadillacs with considerable curiosity.  “These things have a cockpit open to space.  How do we ride in something like that?”

“In our space suits, Smurf,” said Billy.  “The ones you altered to fit us.”

“Oh, sure.  I hope we don’t get swallowed by blossoms again.”

“That was actually a spaceship’s air lock, Gyro.”

“Oh, yeah.  But it was certainly icky.”

“Ha, where did you get a word like icky?”

“Some of you guys are real nerds, Billy.  You use lots of weird words like that.  And the Galactic English was put directly in my brain by Sara’s telepathy.”

“These pink Cadillacko thingies, Billy…  I kinda like the look of them.  Do we get to drive them?”

“Well, I might.  You would just crash one, Gyro.  You can’t drive to save your life.  Remember that grav-bike on Pan Galactica Five during the War?”

“It’s not fair to bring that up.  We crashed because it took too long to figure out what you were saying to me.”

“Yeah, it’s much easier to talk to you now.  It’s like you were born speaking Galactic English.”

“And that stupid bike thingy wouldn’t fly when I gave it a command.”

“That’s because you have to turn it on and use the proper controls in the proper way.”

“Nebulonin kanjeriey are so much easier to use.  You just tell them what you want to do or where you want to go and they fly there.”

“Those are the space-bird things that Nebulons use to get from the space-whale cruisers to the planet, right?”

“Or anywhere else you want to go.  They are much smarter than your Cadillackos.”

“It’s pronounced Cadillacs, Gyro.  And your space-birds are alive, aren’t they?”

“Very much so.  Born on gas planets, they fly in space, or they fly in atmosphere.  They carry their own oxygen-nitrogen fields with them.  Hassan could ride one through space totally naked and be fine, protected from the vacuum of space.”

“Yeah.  I don’t understand Classical Worlders either.  Why would anybody prefer to be naked all the time?”

“You remember we almost had to live like that back at Dr. Crushcracker’s school?  It was a boarding school for Classical Worlds kids.  They wanted you to go to school naked.”

“My worst nightmare.  I’m glad your dad got us out of there.  It was just too weird.”

“Yeah, well… we had to leave there because of our skin color.  We were hated for it.”

“Really?  Because of my brown skin?”

“Not really.  Because of my family’s blue skin.  We were hostile aliens to them.  They wanted to treat us as no better than the faceless ones.”

“I’m sorry about that.  It’s just stupid to think you and Jor and your Mom are not like the rest of us just because your skin is blue.”

“Well, and you and I are different too because of our Psion heads.  That’s what the Zaranians wanted to hang us for.”

“Yeah.  Thank the gods for Shan’s Prophecy and the Zaranian who saved us with it.”

“Anyway… Billy?  Would you teach me to drive one of those cool Cadillackos if I could make it have an energy-field and an atmosphere just like a space-bird?”

“You can do that?”

“I can now that Ged-sensei has trained us to get everything we possibly can out of our Psion powers.  It should be easy to make a field-generator that mimics the field-gland of a Nebulonin kanjeriey… um, space-bird.”

“In that case, I can teach you drive anything.  Especially a pink Cadillac.  I’ll have you driving it even better and with more style than Elvis the Cruel.”

“That famous pirate pilot?”

“Yeah, that’s him.”

“Thank ya, thank ya very much!”

“Oh, stop it!  You didn’t do that right.” As the driver’s training plan ended, Shu Kwai nearly dropped a crate on Hassan’s head, not because he couldn’t control it, but because the boy who was supervising was simply insufferable.

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March 22, 2021 · 7:00 pm

From the Darkness Comes the Light

It is a rule, I think,

From the Start of Everything.

Darkness always must come first

Before the Stars can Sing.

No matter how Black

The bad thing really feels,

It cannot go from bad to Worse

Without Goodness on its heels.

And from our many foibles

And Monumental Blunders,

We must learn valid lessons

To discover Any Wonders.

But Dark the road ahead now seems,

And the Light We See is far away.

But steadily we trek towards the dawn,

And Bright Lights of another Day.

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***** I really had in mind another long and laborious complaining post today. But somehow it only morphed into doggerel verse. Sorry about that. Bad poets can’t help but inflict the stupid thoughts in their poet-guts on the unsuspecting sometimes. While I’m at it, I haven’t yet shared with you the FREE BOOK PROMOTION for March. This book, celebrating its first birthday, is free from this moment until midnight tomorrow night, 3/23/21.

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March 21, 2021 · 7:17 pm

Comedy is My New Religion

I have been a Methodist, a Jehovah’s Witness, an Atheist, an Agnostic, and a fool who read the I-Ching, Book of Changes, thinking he is smart enough to understand more than a word or two.

At least one of those religions rejected me before I rejected it.

So, it’s not as if I am shopping for a new religion.

What is a religion anyway?

If I understand anything at all about religion, it would have to be this; A religion is merely a prescription for how you should live your life prescribed by a doctor who can’t prove any more of it than you can, but thinks he can because he’s recognized a magical spark inside himself, a tiny piece of the imperceptible Devine, and thinks he is then qualified to tell you what it should mean to you when you recogmize it in yourself.

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And if I know anything at all about Comedy, other than the instinctive knowledge of how to laugh, it is also only because I have recognized a Devine spark in it and now have to be humble enough to admit that I don’t have anywhere near enough malpractice insurance to get away with prescribing it to you as a cure for the ailments of your own little life-force in the vast, star-filled universe provided by a laughing Deity.

But it does provide the answers and the cures we seek for the unhappy twistings in our souls.

Comedy, as practiced by the greats, doesn’t provide a cure for death, as other religions do, or claim to. But it does deal with the malady of mortality by helping us be less serious, and laughing in the face of ultimate disaster.

And have you ever noticed that those who might be Jesus in this religion of the chuckle, those who sacrifice their life totally to try and take away our troubles by making us laugh, those like Charlie Chaplin, Emmitt Kelly, Groucho Marx, Robin Williams… are really fundamentally sad people who suffered greatly in life to bring us the forgiveness of our sins in the form of mirth?

So, Comedy is my new religion. I will practice it as piously and as reverently as anyone can practice such an inherently impious and irreverent thing. I have not led a perfectly happy life. But I have found healing for my happiness in the laughter of others, and so I seek to create more of it. And laugh some myself as well.

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