Tag Archives: humor

August 17, 2015 · 3:13 pm

Playing Snakes and Ladders with M.C. Escher

The problem, as you can basically see, is the complexity of life on Earth and the convoluted way you have to understand the game to win it. I do not trust the ladders. They are not sturdy. They are not strong. And I fear the snakes. Will they not bite with poison? Will they not encircle me and constrict the very marrow out of my old bones? And when you play the game with M. C., he cheats. He plays in the fourth and fifth dimensions.

It is obvious that I don’t play the game well. You can tell, for instance, that I am struggling to get a camera to take a picture of a pencil drawing and get all of it in focus enough to bring out the nuances. It is the tricks of shading and juxtaposition of bizarre elements that got me the “A+” for this assignment in Drawing 303 at Iowa State University. I couldn’t capture some of the most subtle usage because the paper of the drawing has aged since 1978 and the shading is harder to make stand out against the graying and yellowing paper in the background. And it is increasingly hard to pick the thematic core of my message out of the hoogah-boog and chizzly-goober mishmash of my prose.

But it boils down to this, with school starting again, and money for bills running out, and arguments with the wife, and kids who sleep all day and play computer games all night, the whole two-steps-forward and one-step-back dance that I must do is making the game too hard to play. It is too hard to win. And I must simplify. No more hopping from double planes of existence into a room where you will fall up to the floor from the ceiling. And I must take success where I find it.

Heat of up to 105 and drought returning after months of deluge, makes me take pride in simple steps I have taken in the game. My flower wagon is blossoming only one blossom at a time, but there is bloom… there is success… and flowers seek the sun.

So what does my post for today mean? Don’t worry about it. M.C. Escher cheats when he plays the game. His physics break the laws of physics, and his genius turns around corners that are not really there. And maybe I only scored a “1” on my roll today. But it is a good one. And I have a piece in the game. I am a player on the board. And the next turn will come.

M.C. Escher’s faulty physics.

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Filed under artwork, humor, Paffooney

Tagged as artwork, goofiness, humor, life as a game of Snakes and Ladders, M.C. Escher, metaphor

August 16, 2015 · 2:04 pm

Homely Art – Amos Sewell

Still being under the weather and filled with sinus head-pain, I decided to go back to a subject I love so much that the post will simply write itself. You know I love Norman Rockwell and his art, and I fervently believe that kind of mass media oil-painting does not put him in a lesser category than Rembrandt or Michelangelo or Raphael or any other painter with a ninja turtle namesake. He is a genius, and though he is not a realist in so many ways, his work is more truthful than practically any other kind of painting. If you are taken by surprise and didn’t know I had this passionate obsession, maybe you should go back and look at this post; Norman Rockwell

Now that I got that out of my system, here is another Saturday Evening Post artist that is often confused with Rockwell. His name is Amos Sewell.

Sewell was an amateur tennis player who was talented enough to win tournaments. He was an employee of Wells Fargo who was headed towards anything but an art career until he decided to make a leap of faith in 1930. He started as an illustrator for Street and Smith pulp fiction, and soon caught the notice of the big-time magazine markets for his art. He published art for Saturday Evening Post, Country Gentlemen Magazine, and Women’s Day.

Like Rockwell, he was able to find the funny in everyday scenes, like the dance party to the right. That young man at center stage is trying so hard not to step on the feet of the red-headed girl, that you want to laugh, but can’t because it’s obvious how embarrassed he would be, and the charm of the picture leads you to shun the thought of interrupting. The scene is so real the boy would hear you laughing as you looked at the Post cover.

More expert on this kind of art than I am is the Facebook site that I first got turned on to Sewell by. Children in Art History

They can also be found on WordPress. Children in Art History (WordPress)

There is no doubt that Amos Sewell belongs in the same pantheon of artists as Norman Rockwell, Thomas Kinkade, or Paul Detlafsen. They are all artists who achieve in their work exactly what I have always striven for. I want to be able to hold the mirror up to our world the way they did. I want to capture both the fantasy and the reality in the subject of everyday family life. I also want to share this work with you because I cannot stand the idea that such artistic ambrosia could one day be forgotten in archives where no one ever looks at it and feels the message in their heart.

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Filed under art criticism, homely art, humor

Tagged as Amos Sewell, art criticism, artwork, homely art, humor, Norman Rockwell style, philosophy, Saturday Evening Post

August 15, 2015 · 3:23 pm

Feeling Sick and Marking Time… With Tractors

I was fishing for ideas to keep my every-day-of-2015 posting streak alive even though I am ill and feeling too congested and head-achy to write much. Then, an Iowa friend of mine who still lives in the town where I went to junior high and high school posted pictures of old restored tractors from the Belmond Area Arts Council photos on Facebook. Voila! I can post about tractors!

This little work tractor is just like the one that Uncle Alvin used to teach me how to drive a tractor. He set me to driving it in circles, actually a rather large square, around the farmyard at his place near Sheffield, Iowa. It was easy enough for a ten-year-old to handle that I graduated to using an actual John Deere tractor to use a hay rake on a clover-hay field to feed his Brown Swiss cattle, milk cows who were very dark brown and Uncle Alvin claimed gave chocolate milk. Uncle Alvin was never serious about anything, and when I was ten and pretty stupid in the ways of the world, I thought he was a real hoot.

The John Deere we called a “Johnny Popper” because of the noise it made whenever it was chugging along through the fields. It was a sturdy dang-old tractor and survived my many gear-shifting mistakes. Uncle Alvin said as long as I never found the self-destruct setting, the tractor would be all right.

Uncle Larry always preferred a Farmall tractor. I liked them too, even though they were much harder to drive. I liked them because they were red. St. Louis Cardinals’ fan, don’t ya know. My favorite color is red.

Never did I ever drive an Allis-Chalmers tractor.

I did, however, play with a toy one that looked just like this one when I had to stay at Jenny Retleff’s farm place. Mom was a nurse and dad was an accountant, and sometimes after school neither of them was available to look after us, so we got dropped off at Jenny’s place a number of times. That wonderful old farm widow who looked after us was the mother of one of my Mom’s best friends in high school. Jenny is now gone. So is the farm place. Corn and soybeans grow where once the house and barn stood. Much of the way of life we used to know that was so interspersed with tractors of various sorts is now gone, a victim of modern ways.

Now we look at tractors more as museum pieces and touchstones that help us remember a world that no longer exists. Oh, there are still tractors out there in the fields of Iowa… but not family farm tractors. Not member of the family tractors. Not the simple Farmalls and Johnny Poppers we used to know so well. Thinking about tractors has made me feel a bit better. (Even though it hasn’t made my purple paisley prose more readable.)

Did you notice? I wrote about 400 words more than I had intended to.

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Filed under autobiography, humor, tractors

Tagged as autobiography, farming, humor, Iowa, old days long gone, tractors

August 14, 2015 · 2:19 pm

Playing the Evil Clown Game

One of the biggest dangers of Presidential elections is that one of the fools running for the office has to get elected. So, how do you decide which of the many evil clowns are acceptable to elect? It is critical to know what jokes and pranks they are most likely to pull on the American people if given the opportunity to run the show in the Bigtop.

For instance, Mr. King’s observation here is not a joke. Senator Cruz is infected with corporate vampirism because his corporate masters are the ancient Nosferatu brothers known as Charles and David Koch. For years now, these Libertarian vampire overlords have been sucking money out of the middle class and their thirst for more green blood from this country’s financial jugulars is unquenchable. Cruz is against Obamacare because it puts limits on healthcare-for-profit excesses that prey upon the elderly and the infirm to make their zombie hordes.

But I have spent a lot of time harping on the bad clowns that want to be president. I haven’t given much time or thought to the good clowns, or the less-evil clowns. In the Republican field, one has to look for the Stephen-King clowns that have eaten fewer children. Using “It” as the yardstick, Marco Rubio and John Kasich seem to have cooked fewer kiddies into gingerbread than the majority of the field.

I might also point to Rand Paul, even though he has gingerbread dough on his chin and frosting for hair, except that Wednesday I condemned him as an idiot. Libertarians do get the concept of what freedom could actually mean if watered and nurtured like a flower. But unlike his goofy father Ron, Rand uses weed-killer instead of water.

Rubio is a Spanish-speaking Latino from Florida who actually knows what it is like to grow up brown in white America. He gets it that Hispanics are considered second-class citizens and are to be talked down to as ignorant children that only need to be firmly told what is good for them, and expected to accept the poison pills without complaining about the taste. He does get that immigrants have needs, and he is willing to help a little with one hand while he builds a wall against Mexico with the other hand.

Kasich actually said some very un-Republican things about illegal immigrants, suggesting they work harder than most people and get less help or benefits than anybody else. He is for amnesty for hard-working immigrants who are already here, and intends to only wall off the ones who aren’t here yet. He knows that undocumented workers have bolstered the economy of his home State of Ohio, and he he doesn’t want to get rid of them in Ohio, California, Texas, or anywhere else where they help the profit margin. He will make them legal and then just pay them far less than they are worth, the way corporate America has been doing to middle-class white folks since the 1980’s.

If you should choose Alfred E. Newman’s twin brother Scott Walker as your playing piece in this life-or-death Elect a Clown for President game, you should know that I will oppose you to my dying breath. He has destroyed education in Wisconsin, and he not only destroys teachers’ unions, there is some evidence that he actually eats teachers for breakfast.

I would like to warn you that I truly believe the only way to win this Evil Clown Game is not to play it with Republicans. But I know there are enough people in the evil-people/stupid-people coalition to elect a Republican as the next President. It is my prayer that we are at least smart enough to elect one of the not-so-evil clowns like Rubio or Kasich. Our planet will be the loser if we elect another flight-suit-wearing rodeo clown like we did a few years back.

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Filed under clowns, humor, politics

Tagged as clowns, evil clowns, humor, politics, Presidential candidates, Republicans

August 13, 2015 · 5:04 pm

A Low-Fat Essay With One Third Fewer Calories

Yesterday I posted a political satire in which I accused Rand Paul and Chris Christie of being the reincarnation of Laurel and Hardy. I may have also suggested that Republican Presidential candidates are mostly possessed by the spirits of old comedy teams who share the bully and the idiot style of comedy made famous by Stan and Ollie. That post had about 380 calories from empty carbohydrates and the saturated fat was off the charts. If I am to provide a healthy diet of low-quality purple paisley prose to those who ready my pretentiously faux-literary blog, then I need to alternate in some high-fiber, low calorie fare. After all, this is a place where people come to sample my ideas and my so-called humor. Any and all fat that they get from here goes straight to their head. It can clog the arteries of the thinking organ. So, let me offer something light and fibrous today.

Yesterday I finished the first-pass edit of my novel Snow Babies. I also got it sent to my editor at PDMI, Jessie Cornwell. Her edits caused serious pain and minor bleeding, but that is merely an indicator that she is very professional and does the job well. And on occasion, she makes me laugh. She identified and corrected my creepy fascination with the word “penis” and cut it out of my novel. I am sure you can imagine how painful something like that can be. But I deserved it. A writer has to be aware that there are quirks in his thinking that interfere with communicating ideas to the reader. And the nutritional value of the ideas and thinking in a book are not only what makes it worth reading, but worth writing in the first place.

It is a little odd to be working on a novel about a blizzard in Iowa in deep December when it is August in Texas and we are undergoing 100-degree plus weather during the yearly heat wave and drought. It is hard to imagine deadly cold and Christmas-wish thinking when you have to sit naked by the air conditioner and you still sweat out gallons. (Notice I did not use the word “penis” even once in this paragraph, Jessie.) (Oops! Okay, don’t count the parenthetic expression, please.)

But I love these characters.

Valerie Clarke, the main character, is an eleven-year-old girl trying to make her way in a cold world after the death of her father. She finds and latches onto a mysterious old hobo who goes by the name Catbird. The man wears a coat which is a crazy quilt of colorful patches. He carries around a dog-eared copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and quotes from it as if it is his Bible. She gives him a place to stay, with her and her grieving mother in the nick of time before the blizzard hits her little Iowa town. Valerie is based in part on my own daughter.

A bus gets stranded in the rural farming community and the bus contains four boys who are not only passengers, but runaway orphans escaping from the Illinois foster care system. The youngest boy is crippled.

So, I am for the moment only posting something light that you really don’t have to work too hard to consume. The main idea is simply that I have finished another step in the process of publishing my long-delayed novel. And hopefully this post isn’t needlessly fattening, like many of my posts are.

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Filed under humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney

Tagged as humor, novel characters, novel writing, Paffoonies, PDMI Publishing, Snow Babies, working with editors

August 12, 2015 · 2:05 pm

Laurel and Hardy Politics

Now, you probably know that I would not ever actually watch the GOP Presidential debates. I am not a sadomasochist looking to seriously torture my own brain, especially the logic and ethical centers of my brain. But you cannot help but get some highlights (or more properly, low-lights) from the news. And the most telling thing that struck me about the bits and pieces of the clown-alley massacre that is called a Republican debate, is that the comedy team of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy are re-incarnated and running for president. Compare these two images.

I mean, you see it, don’t you? Rand Paul is Stan Laurel. He has the same eyes. The same rubbery mouth and chin. Chris Christie is Oliver Hardy. Notice the double chin. The porcine eyes and pig-like smugness. They have the same political facial tics and brain spasms.

Rand Paul is a Libertarian at heart. That means he has no earthly idea how things work. He would just dismantle government if he had his druthers, and he firmly believes that government should keep its hands off everything. No foreign policy. No protections from the predatory practices of free-market businesses. “Leave it alone and it’ll come home,” is his philosophy. And when he gets in trouble for his mistakes, he scratches the top of his head with one hand while he holds his hat in the other and cries.

Chris Christie is a political bully. His bluster and bombast attacks lazy folks like public school teachers. How dare they think they can unionize in his State and demand better wages for the hard job they are doing trying to live up to the high testing standards that he has imposed? He is angry practically all the time. When his revenge policies get called out by the news media, he blames others for the problem and throws a tantrum.

But, wait a minute. I have seen that pattern in other places too. The bully and the idiot! That could be Abbott and Costello too! Well, of course, Paul and Christie look more like Stan and Ollie. But the debate had more than its share of “Who’s on First?” routines in it. Maybe Bud and Lou are reincarnated too in Ted Cruz and Rick Perry. Ted is bully enough to filibuster and shut down the government when he doesn’t get everything he wants. And Rick Perry cannot remember three things at the same time. And they are both from Texas. That definitely smacks of comedy duo.

In the singular argument that made the news reports between Rand Paul and Chris Christie, they had a spat over government surveillance that had to be a comedy routine. Rand Laurel cried that he didn’t want government wiretaps to snoop into the business of everyday Americans, though somehow he still wants to collect private data from “terrorists”. How does he do that, precisely? Passing a law to make all terrorists wear a bell around their neck so we know who to spy on?

And Ollie Christie came back at him that he could not be considered a patriot if he didn’t allow government spying on everybody to root out the bad apples. Rand Laurel rebounded with an insult that pointed out that Ollie Christie committed the unforgivable Republican error of hugging Obama during the Hurricane Sandy debacle. And Ollie Christie tossed a last word back at him with the bombastic equivalent of, “This is another fine mess you’ve gotten us into!”

I have to think about this all very carefully. I may have been too hasty in my judgments. Perhaps the GOP Clown College debates are something I would get numerous yuks and giggles out of. I may have to consider actually watching the next mess.

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Filed under humor, politics, satire

Tagged as Abbott and Costello, clowns, comedy duos, goofiness, humor, Laurel and Hardy, politics, Republican politics, satire

August 10, 2015 · 2:13 pm

Timeline – Finale

So how do I end this little trilogy of timeline terror? I have to fit in the remaining novel projects that are related or at least partially done. And the unrelated ones too. I have way more in the Mickian bag of tricks than I will ever have the magic-using years to actually use. The thing about wizards is that, by the time they have accumulated all the knowledge, wisdom, and arcana that it takes to do the wizardry, they are already old and near to death. How much time is left for the actual magic? I have been living this weekend in fear of imminent stroke. But I believe the random brain pain has actually turned out to be sinus problems. So here are the projects that finish the timeline and are the projects least likely to get written and published.

Connected to Catch a Falling Star is its sequel, Stardusters and Space Lizards. This is a novel I have most recently been trying to finish. I am in the home stretch at 40,000 words. It is the story of the failed Earth invaders continuing their journey to another planet, an even worse place than Earth. Galtorr Prime is the planet of the humanoid lizard people. Their world is on the very brink of extinction by global warming, toxic politics, and war. The remnants of the Telleron aliens who tried to invade Earth and their Earther-human friends not only have to make a colony for themselves here, but have to save the planet itself as well. It is a cautionary-type science fiction tale in the same comedy-young-adult-novel genre as Catch a Falling Star. It also happens in the early 1990’s (intended to mean the time on Earth which is not relevant in any case).

The next novel is Monstro, a ghost story in which the Norwall Pirates have to take on the Lonely Ones, the spirit-echoes of the crazy people of the past in a haunted farm house that awakens to feed on the living. The story is more than half written, but is looking at a near total rewrite to make it conform better with comedy young adult fiction. It is set in the mid 1990’s, around 1995.

None of my Hometown Novels will go beyond the 20th Century. Monstro is ostensibly the last of the novels.

I am a science fiction writer as well, though. The first book I ever published, Aeroquest, is set more than three thousand years in the future, at a time when the Orion Spur of the Sagittarius Spiral Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy (where Earth has its street address) is largely colonized and thoroughly inhabited. As the novel now stands (a sorry mishmash that no decent publisher would’ve ever printed) it is in need of a total re-write and make-over. It is a novel that I humorously say is about teachers in space… though I do realize that “humorously” has to be qualified as a big bald-faced lie.

So this is run-down in time order of all the stuff I want to do as an author. How much gets done in reality is anyone’s best guess. Who knows? I may live another twenty years and finish at least one novel every year.

Timeline – Part 2

You may remember that yesterday I was giving a run-down of my various Home Town Novel projects according to the order they supposedly happen in real time (measured in years). Here is what I went over yesterday;

Superchicken, set in 1974, the first Home Town Novel that I completed.

The Baby Werewolf (also possibly titled The Wolf in the Attic), set in the Fall of 1974, not yet completed.

The Forever Boy, set in Spring 1975, not yet written in manuscript form.

Sweet Pickles, set in the Fall of 1974 and Spring of 1975, half written, but possibly too graphic to publish.

Under Blue Glass, set in 1977 and not yet written in manuscript form.

When the Captain Came Calling, is set in 1983-84, the manuscript is currently at 25,000 words and being worked on.

And the novel I am editing for publication this week, Snow Babies, set in the Winter of 1984. Snow Babies is the story of how the small town survives the raging blizzard and faces the prospect of freezing to death. Valerie Clarke, in the picture above, is the central character in a large cast trying to avoid being the one the snow spirits have come to claim.

The second generation of Norwall Pirates, the boys’ club of dreamers, goofballs, and liars, have come to be led by a girl, Mary Philips and Valerie is the second girl ever to join the club.

The next novel has undergone two transformations. It started as a book called Little Boy Crooner. It is about an orphan from France who comes to live with ne’er-do-well Iowegian relatives. Homesick and deeply troubled, the boy has discovered a natural talent for karaoke, and has a voice that people come from miles away to hear. Then, the clowns of the Dreamlands began invading this story and had to be renamed. It is now called Sing Sad Songs… with Clowns. I may, however change the name to just Sing Sad Songs.

Sing Sad Songs and the next novel in the series, Fools and Their Toys, happen at the same time in 1985-86. They not only share a setting and many of the same characters, but they share a villain and many of the same plot-shaping events. They are, however, very different stories.

Fools and Their Toys is the story of autistic Murray Dawes. Because he has never really been able to communicate before, his turning point comes when a new member of the family, an adopted little brother, makes for him a ventriloquist’s dummy in the form of a zebra. He calls it Zearlop and uses it to unleash the hidden intelligence that was there through all those years when other people thought he was retarded. Unfortunately, just as Murray is blossoming, a serial killer comes along, targeting young boys. More unfortunately still, some from the area believe Murray may be the killer.

Leadership of the Pirates is passed from Mary to Valerie. And in 1988 I have set my current contest novel The Magical Miss Morgan. Valerie passes the leadership of the Pirates to her highly imaginative and extremely annoying cousin Timothy Kellogg. Tim is a the second most important character in the story of the teacher, Miss Morgan, who loves to teach. Miss Morgan is the sister of original Pirate wizard, Milt Morgan. Because of her brother, she inherits responsibility for a local war between good and evil fairies, while at the same time trying to save her job from evil principals, parents, and school board members and teach a lesson or two worth remembering forever. This full manuscript novel is currently being judged for the contest, and will be submitted for publication after.

Tim Kellogg is one of two main characters in the next novel, The Bicycle-Wheel Genius. Orben Wallace, the inventor, is the title character who may have accidentally created a time machine. The novel is set in the years from 1988 to 1990, and it is about how the genius’ old inventions come back to haunt him as he tries to solve the problem of having invented a time machine, having worked on mysterious government projects, and having helped to fight off an alien invasion. This novel is also complete and merely awaiting the proper time to get published.

Catch a Falling Star is the published novel that started this blog and my dream of making it as a novelist. It is set in 1990 and tells the story of when the Telleron alien empire of frog-like fin-headed aliens fail to invade Norwall, Iowa because they hadn’t reckoned on meeting the Pirates.See Catch a Falling Star on Amazon here.

I guess I leave it here for today. It seems there is enough more to fill another blog… Part 3.

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Filed under aliens, characters, clowns, humor, Iowa, novel plans, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, publishing, Snow Babies, writing humor

Tagged as bad novel writing, humor, Paffoonies

August 8, 2015 · 3:13 pm

Timeline

Editing my novel Snow Babies has led me to realize that I need to align the events and character progressions in all the related Home-Town Novels. So here is a feeble attempt to make sense of the wealth of crap that this whole project has generated.

The first novel in the series is called Superchicken.

This story is about a boy who comes to live in the small town of Norwall, Iowa and struggles to make friends and fit in with a close-knit and inter-related group of sixth, seventh, and eighth graders. It contains the origin story of the Norwall Pirates, a boys’ gang and liars’ club who cause most of the chaos in the story. It is intended to be an Iowa-River version of Tom Sawyer, a picaresque novel where the main character uses his natural instincts to try and gain the recognition of the world that he exists and has worth as a person.

The second novel is not completed yet. It is a story called The Baby Werewolf. It is about the Norwall Pirates pursuing an encounter with a very unusual child shut away in the attic of an aging house by the harried adults in his life.

All of these stories are humor novels written for a Young Adult genre audience. This one, however, also introduces elements of the horror genre.

Three more unwritten novels exist between this set of Norwall stories and the next set which introduce a whole new group of Pirates. Of the original Pirate stories there is an encounter with immortal beings who are somehow more than human and include a villain who is secretly an un-dead Chinese wizard looking to kill and consume another immortal who has taken refuge in Norwall. This novel does not yet have a name. The working title is The Forever Boy. Another novel involving the Pirates is called Sweet Pickles. It takes up the story of a girl nicknamed Pickles who is desperate to be loved and joins the junior high football team to impress boys. The novel includes the sexual awakening of more than one member of the Pirates, and though it is half-written, it may never see publication. I am not a pornographic writer, but the issues of this book have become so explicit, that it would have to be gutted and rewritten completely to be acceptable to my chosen genre. A more likely story is Under Blue Glass, the story of the Pirates handling their teens and high school and the excitingly horrible prospects of leaving home.

The next set of Pirate novels cover the 1980’s. The Captain Came Calling is about the reformation of the Pirates with Mary Philips, the story-teller’s little sister, taking on the daunting task of leading the Pirates through a new decade. South Pacific island magic brings the cursed Captain Noah Dettbarn to a farm town about as far away in all of North America as you can get from any ocean. The captain is cursed with invisibility and has to get to the bottom of a terrible family secret to cure it. Meanwhile, another terrible secret is destroying the family of Valerie Clarke, the main character of the novel.

Snow Babies is actually the second novel of this group, although it is the second novel being published. I will talk more about it as the process goes along and it actually reaches a state of publication.

After that comes a group of unwritten novels that are nebulously plotted out. I am thinking I probably need to declare halftime on this post at 600 words and do the second half of this timeline tomorrow.

Humor Without Insults

I am not one who can stand to watch Republican debates. I know the clown car is full to busting, but I can’s stand the idea that one of those narrow-minded, fact-free, duplicitous Bozos could end up being the next president. (Or fascist dictator, when you consider what “fascist” actually means, and what former President Carter has said about the U.S. not being a democracy any more.) If one of those clowns wins it, the true power will once again reside with the unseen ring master, like it was with the rodeo-clown George W. Bush and his secret puppet-master, Dick Cheney. And I pay enough attention to know that Donald Trump was so insulting to women during the debate, that Democrats can pick Beelzebub to run as their candidate and women still won’t vote Republican.

I watched the final Jon Stewart Daily Show instead. Stewart is more liberal than I am and uses a lot more bad words than I ever could, but his humor and politics are far gentler and kinder than anything coming out of the mouths of name-calling conservatives. They uniformly say terrible and untrue things about President Obama and Hilary Clinton. They don’t hold back from calling even their own Senate leader a liar (a la Senator “Slappy Happy” Ted Cruz.and Senator Mitch McConnell). The Donald is a master of the crude and inappropriate slam. Look at the unfounded claims he made against Mexicans and the cowardly way he impugned the honor of Senator John McCain. Jon Stewart mocks them by taking their own actual statements and putting them beside the verifiable facts to show the absurdity of their political beliefs and goals without casting insults. Yes, I love his turtle voice for aping Mitch McConnell, but there is a gentleness to his wit that shows affection for his subjects rather than laying waste to their psyches with crude insults and unfounded accusations.

I had to learn the kind of humor I’m extolling here as a classroom teacher. You cannot believe how fragile the little animals can be when you resort to calling them names. A growing, developing, vulnerable psyche cannot take the random bash and cruel cut the way an adult can (though even an adult shouldn’t have to). You have to learn to be funny by the surprising imagery you use, the comparisons with funny things, and the flat out absurd. And self-deprecating humor is the only kind of insult you can actually get away with. (I even learned that when a student grows to love and respect you too much, even insulting yourself to make a point is out the window.)

Humor definitely has its uses in the classroom. This classroom poster was used both to teach students how to write a quatrain of twin couplets, and also to teach them that classroom discipline was a matter of teaching them how not to be like cockroaches. I am not directly calling them cockroaches. Instead I am telling them that if they choose to use the thoughtless and rather dumb behaviors that are against classroom procedure, they are choosing to be like roaches. Of course, there is always the classroom clown like Steve-O Whoopsadoodle (not his real name, but a name he called himself) who glories in being like cockroaches. You also have to learn to laugh at them politely and give them their few minutes of fools’ fame.

So, to sum it all up, humor is a very useful thing in running the world and teaching things to others. It is why I always go for the joke in my writing. The place I am at doesn’t always have to be the happiest place on Earth, but it is a lot funnier and happier without the cruel and biting insult. (Sorry about earlier, George, you old rodeo clown). And if we can just be a little nicer to each other when we make fun, it might turn out to actually be fun. (You are welcome to find all the gaffs and mistakes I made in the old drawing above. I was still learning my craft in 1980. But please don’t call me names over it. I have had all the blue I can handle for one week. I used up the last of it in this last Paffooney.)

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Filed under humor, Paffooney, writing humor

Tagged as artwork, humor, insults and humor, old drawings, Paffoonies, teaching, writing humor

Tag Archives: humor

Playing Snakes and Ladders with M.C. Escher

Homely Art – Amos Sewell

Feeling Sick and Marking Time… With Tractors

Playing the Evil Clown Game

A Low-Fat Essay With One Third Fewer Calories

Laurel and Hardy Politics

Timeline – Finale

Timeline – Part 2

Timeline

Humor Without Insults

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