"I didn't really try" is a defensive mechanism in a lot of cases - I can deflect criticism if I half-assed it, but if I really put my back into doing something and still didn't quite measure up, then I have no excuse. It's always easier to tell myself that I _could_ have {gone pro, won that award, written for the Onion} but I'm not doing that not because I chose not to rather than not being good enough.
All this is to say that I think this post is brave in its own way. I don't think there's any shame in (say) being a great baseball player in college but just not being MLB material, or indeed coming within reach of hitting the S-tier of comedy writing. For some reason, it seems like the zeitgeist holds these people in contempt.
That said people love to say shit like "it is a defense mechanism", and sometimes that is true.
But a lot of times not trying is just a more effective or more immediately gratifying use of time. As in this example it doesn't sound like Mr. Singal was very close. Might have spent a couple hundred hours trying extra hard, and come up with little more than he did.
A lot more "not trying" happens due to laziness, or due to distraction/hedonism, than happens due to insecurity. The insecurity story sounds nicer though.
I just tend to think that isn't as big of a part of it as people make it out to be. Absolutely sometimes it happens, but mostly I think people don't try due to laziness or lack of self control and insecurity just doesn't come into it much. Sometimes it is key.
But the average college student or whoever not applying themselves to their studies isn't worried about "if I try hard I might just not be good enough". No mostly they would just rather smoke pot and play videogames and don't want to grow up.
And you are acting like warm fuzzies and fig leaves don't drive a lot of how people explain/excuse their own and other's actions. Not every human behavior is some Freudian layered meaning.
Sometimes (a lot of times) humans are just lazy/distractable.
Maybe I should refine my point here - I'm specifically talking to the experience that Singal had as someone who came within reach of doing something, and just kind of dropped off it, but still want to fantasize about what-if (which, I hasten to point out, is not what I think Singal's post was doing).
The pothead who never really tried in the first place is certainly an archetype, but not really one that anyone pays any mind to. As you correctly point out, they're a dime a dozen.
Your rejected "Radiohead" headline reminded me of this classic:
"Cool Dad Raising Daughter On Media That Will Put Her Entirely Out Of Touch With Her Generation"
However, my all-time favorite article, the one that made me cry-laugh and still gets a solid chuckle out of me is :
"17-Year Cicadas Horrified To Learn About 9/11"
I'm Including the rest of the text because it's the rare article that is just as hilarious beyond just the headline:
NEW YORK—Following their synchronized emergence this week after gestating underground since 1996, a colossal swarm of 17-year cicadas were horrified today to learn about the events of September 11, 2001. “Holy shit, are you serious?” said one member of the East Coast brood of winged insects, expressing its continued shock and horror about the coordinated terrorist attacks that claimed the lives of 3,000 people. “They just flew the planes right into the fucking buildings? Man, oh, man. People must have just been completely freaking out. Christ, I know I would have been.” At press time, the 17-year cicadas were beginning to express serious doubts about how two structures supported by reinforced concrete and steel beams could just collapse like that.
“it’s 2023 and it wouldn’t shock me if someone got fired over a never-published Onion headline from 17 years ago” thanks for the nostalgia. Humor is no longer allowed. Exhibit A: what the Onion has become
I still rewatch ONN videos regularly. I loved Joad Cressbeckler and the In the Know panels. We have called our insane cockatiel “tater-minded” for years.
The comedian Jay Mohr wrote a book about his time on SNL called "Gasping for Airtime," and it is worth seeking out precisely because Mohr is not in the top tier of SNL performers. (You might remember Mohr on SNL for his Christopher Walken impression.)
If you think of yourself as a funny person, you could imagine yourself as Mohr, provided that you don't think too much about the years that Mohr spent on the road doing 15 minutes sets at the Chuckle Hut in Fargo, etc. Reading Mohr's book gives some insight into how staggeringly difficult it is to perform at that level.
I actually like that you don't write much about personal stuff (because your journalism is so good and because it's a welcome break from a lot of other writers I like who are constantly writing about themselves), but I appreciate stuff like this when you do it.
I had a similar experience doing standup comedy in the early 2010s. From my own experience and watching others succeed and fail, I learned there was a difference between someone who's good at being the funniest person in whatever room they're in and someone who can be consistently funny onstage in front of a bunch of people who don't know them. I did alright because I'm a good performer and some of my material was legitimately good, but I eventually I realized I wasn't in that second group. Maybe I could have gotten there if I'd made standup comedy a bigger priority in my life than I wanted it to be, or maybe I was just never wired that way.
A lot of the comics I hung out with back then eventually did the same thing I did: moved on to another creative pursuit like music or fiction writing that turned out to be the thing they ACTUALLY wanted to do. I wonder if there's something to the idea that people with creative impulses are drawn to comedy/humor in general when they're younger because of its instant feedback (you know right away if you're doing it right because people laugh or don't).
As a Gargoyle writer during what seemed, at the time, to be one of its particularly moribund eras (89-91)--my ability to snag a staff position was evidence of the, erm, lax standards of the day--I just wanted to say thanks for reminding me that it survived to see better days (and even have a competitor!)
Also, the "Franz Ferdinand: No Man Can Stop Me" headline makes me giggle to this day.
I wrote for the Johns Hopkins humor magazine the "Black and Blue Jay" back in the day. Oh how am I glad that this was before everything was archived forever on the internet. My article about the campus police orchestrating a coup, deposing the president and instituting a dictatorial military junta to rule to University is the only thing I wish I still had a copy of. The rest is forgettable dreck.
My favorite, maybe because it's so taboo and could never be repeated today is: "Scandal: Special Olympics Rigged. Many so-called winners found to have lost badly"
I think if you had ever wound up at what I understand was a well attended fight club for young lesbians around this time you would have found your muse and rocketed to the top of the Onion.
I said it before, and I'll say it again: Jesse is funnier than most people, on the whole, but his true calling as the straight man to Katie's wise gal.
A nice read. I think you can be very funny on B&R, but as an occasionally funny person myself, yeah, there’s a huge difference between funny-when-the-moment strikes and doing it professionally at a steady pace. SNL (or the Onion) tells you it’s difficult even at pretty high levels to produce consistently funny output.
I remember being semi-outraged at the advent of comics on YT realizing how much of their material was rehashed over years of performances. Maybe not between different HBO specials, but out on tour, for sure. But of course it was. And to tell the same joke over and over in a way people are going to find funny is another skill I completely lack - I don’t like to repeat a funny observation even once, let alone write it down and refine it and trot it out once an hour.
That’s all okay. I’m not cut out to be a fiction writer either, or lots of other things. I let some good opportunities go there too, but probably I wouldn’t have made enough of them anyway. No ragrets.
My earliest memory of my time at UM was not being able to sleep one night, reading the E3W in the dorm room lobby during freshman orientation, and getting a kick from the tagline--“better than sex, twice as often.” Seemed very risqué to me at 17 years old!
Humor is so subjective and impossible to quantify. I find it really interesting how difficult it is to articulate why we find something funny, or what it means to say someone “is” funny. I haven’t checked in on the E3W in the 10 years since I graduated college, but I wonder if I would still find it as entertaining as I did back then, and if I didn’t whether that would be because the kids today are no longer willing to be provocative or offensive in the name of humor, or if I would just be too old and jaded these days to laugh at college humor...
I did a couple of Writing for the Onion classes at Second City in Chicago. It is way, way hard. It’s generally hard to put your writing in front of everyone for their workshopping, but it’s another level of hard when you’re supposed to be making everyone laugh. The process of fine-tuning humor writing can be decidedly unfunny, and it can be excruciatingly painful to sit at a roundtable with 15 people reading off their 10 best headlines of the week and only five or so are funny enough to make the room laugh. Plus dealing with the obnoxious ego of people whose whole shtick is thinking they’re funny when they are patently *not*.
Ironically, the funniest thing that happened during the entire class was that on the first day, the instructor had tummy troubles and spent the first 30 minutes trying to conceal his increasingly wet belches before getting up and running to throw up, after which he came back to class, repeated the cycle, and finally just had to cancel. Poor guy. But it was funny.
You ARE so funny and if you worked for the Onion or some show full-time we wouldn’t get to hear you and Katie’s banter twice a week and I would laugh a lot less often.
"I didn't really try" is a defensive mechanism in a lot of cases - I can deflect criticism if I half-assed it, but if I really put my back into doing something and still didn't quite measure up, then I have no excuse. It's always easier to tell myself that I _could_ have {gone pro, won that award, written for the Onion} but I'm not doing that not because I chose not to rather than not being good enough.
All this is to say that I think this post is brave in its own way. I don't think there's any shame in (say) being a great baseball player in college but just not being MLB material, or indeed coming within reach of hitting the S-tier of comedy writing. For some reason, it seems like the zeitgeist holds these people in contempt.
The post is for sure a bit brave/revealing.
That said people love to say shit like "it is a defense mechanism", and sometimes that is true.
But a lot of times not trying is just a more effective or more immediately gratifying use of time. As in this example it doesn't sound like Mr. Singal was very close. Might have spent a couple hundred hours trying extra hard, and come up with little more than he did.
A lot more "not trying" happens due to laziness, or due to distraction/hedonism, than happens due to insecurity. The insecurity story sounds nicer though.
Por que no los dos?
I just tend to think that isn't as big of a part of it as people make it out to be. Absolutely sometimes it happens, but mostly I think people don't try due to laziness or lack of self control and insecurity just doesn't come into it much. Sometimes it is key.
But the average college student or whoever not applying themselves to their studies isn't worried about "if I try hard I might just not be good enough". No mostly they would just rather smoke pot and play videogames and don't want to grow up.
You’re treating these psychological phenomena as though they are 1) conscious and 2) mutually exclusive. Neither need be the case.
And you are acting like warm fuzzies and fig leaves don't drive a lot of how people explain/excuse their own and other's actions. Not every human behavior is some Freudian layered meaning.
Sometimes (a lot of times) humans are just lazy/distractable.
Maybe I should refine my point here - I'm specifically talking to the experience that Singal had as someone who came within reach of doing something, and just kind of dropped off it, but still want to fantasize about what-if (which, I hasten to point out, is not what I think Singal's post was doing).
The pothead who never really tried in the first place is certainly an archetype, but not really one that anyone pays any mind to. As you correctly point out, they're a dime a dozen.
Your rejected "Radiohead" headline reminded me of this classic:
"Cool Dad Raising Daughter On Media That Will Put Her Entirely Out Of Touch With Her Generation"
However, my all-time favorite article, the one that made me cry-laugh and still gets a solid chuckle out of me is :
"17-Year Cicadas Horrified To Learn About 9/11"
I'm Including the rest of the text because it's the rare article that is just as hilarious beyond just the headline:
NEW YORK—Following their synchronized emergence this week after gestating underground since 1996, a colossal swarm of 17-year cicadas were horrified today to learn about the events of September 11, 2001. “Holy shit, are you serious?” said one member of the East Coast brood of winged insects, expressing its continued shock and horror about the coordinated terrorist attacks that claimed the lives of 3,000 people. “They just flew the planes right into the fucking buildings? Man, oh, man. People must have just been completely freaking out. Christ, I know I would have been.” At press time, the 17-year cicadas were beginning to express serious doubts about how two structures supported by reinforced concrete and steel beams could just collapse like that.
Damn, that headline nailed an exact description of my dad.
“it’s 2023 and it wouldn’t shock me if someone got fired over a never-published Onion headline from 17 years ago” thanks for the nostalgia. Humor is no longer allowed. Exhibit A: what the Onion has become
It was so good in the 1995-2010 range. The ONN videos just still absolutely kill.
I still rewatch ONN videos regularly. I loved Joad Cressbeckler and the In the Know panels. We have called our insane cockatiel “tater-minded” for years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_OIXfkXEj0
A favorite, as well as the Autistic Reporter bits, and pretty much all the panel shows. Today Now! is great too.
The comedian Jay Mohr wrote a book about his time on SNL called "Gasping for Airtime," and it is worth seeking out precisely because Mohr is not in the top tier of SNL performers. (You might remember Mohr on SNL for his Christopher Walken impression.)
If you think of yourself as a funny person, you could imagine yourself as Mohr, provided that you don't think too much about the years that Mohr spent on the road doing 15 minutes sets at the Chuckle Hut in Fargo, etc. Reading Mohr's book gives some insight into how staggeringly difficult it is to perform at that level.
I actually like that you don't write much about personal stuff (because your journalism is so good and because it's a welcome break from a lot of other writers I like who are constantly writing about themselves), but I appreciate stuff like this when you do it.
I had a similar experience doing standup comedy in the early 2010s. From my own experience and watching others succeed and fail, I learned there was a difference between someone who's good at being the funniest person in whatever room they're in and someone who can be consistently funny onstage in front of a bunch of people who don't know them. I did alright because I'm a good performer and some of my material was legitimately good, but I eventually I realized I wasn't in that second group. Maybe I could have gotten there if I'd made standup comedy a bigger priority in my life than I wanted it to be, or maybe I was just never wired that way.
A lot of the comics I hung out with back then eventually did the same thing I did: moved on to another creative pursuit like music or fiction writing that turned out to be the thing they ACTUALLY wanted to do. I wonder if there's something to the idea that people with creative impulses are drawn to comedy/humor in general when they're younger because of its instant feedback (you know right away if you're doing it right because people laugh or don't).
In the late ‘90s I subscribed to the paper version of the Onion and left copies in our recording studio’s waiting room. Man, people loved it.
At a party in NYC years ago I had the pleasure of meeting the author of “Why do these homosexuals keep sucking my cock?”
Okay. Coming in late, but that was always one of my favorites, along with "T-Ball Stand At Special Olympics Pitches Perfect Game."
Times have changed.
As a Gargoyle writer during what seemed, at the time, to be one of its particularly moribund eras (89-91)--my ability to snag a staff position was evidence of the, erm, lax standards of the day--I just wanted to say thanks for reminding me that it survived to see better days (and even have a competitor!)
Also, the "Franz Ferdinand: No Man Can Stop Me" headline makes me giggle to this day.
I wrote for the Johns Hopkins humor magazine the "Black and Blue Jay" back in the day. Oh how am I glad that this was before everything was archived forever on the internet. My article about the campus police orchestrating a coup, deposing the president and instituting a dictatorial military junta to rule to University is the only thing I wish I still had a copy of. The rest is forgettable dreck.
My favorite headline from that book is the extremely large font "WA-" ( for the outbreak of WWII).
Ottoman Empire almost declares war on self as a subhead on the WWI headline is great.
The actual best ever onion headline was " 'America Stronger Than Ever' Say Quadragon Officials"
I have to say I think “Trophy Wife Mounted” takes the cake.
My favorite, maybe because it's so taboo and could never be repeated today is: "Scandal: Special Olympics Rigged. Many so-called winners found to have lost badly"
"Singal’s Thingals" - However you and your horse girlfriend refer to your anatomy is your business.
^Example of why I, too, do not write professional comedy
I think if you had ever wound up at what I understand was a well attended fight club for young lesbians around this time you would have found your muse and rocketed to the top of the Onion.
Those two are way funnier together.
I said it before, and I'll say it again: Jesse is funnier than most people, on the whole, but his true calling as the straight man to Katie's wise gal.
A nice read. I think you can be very funny on B&R, but as an occasionally funny person myself, yeah, there’s a huge difference between funny-when-the-moment strikes and doing it professionally at a steady pace. SNL (or the Onion) tells you it’s difficult even at pretty high levels to produce consistently funny output.
I remember being semi-outraged at the advent of comics on YT realizing how much of their material was rehashed over years of performances. Maybe not between different HBO specials, but out on tour, for sure. But of course it was. And to tell the same joke over and over in a way people are going to find funny is another skill I completely lack - I don’t like to repeat a funny observation even once, let alone write it down and refine it and trot it out once an hour.
That’s all okay. I’m not cut out to be a fiction writer either, or lots of other things. I let some good opportunities go there too, but probably I wouldn’t have made enough of them anyway. No ragrets.
My earliest memory of my time at UM was not being able to sleep one night, reading the E3W in the dorm room lobby during freshman orientation, and getting a kick from the tagline--“better than sex, twice as often.” Seemed very risqué to me at 17 years old!
Humor is so subjective and impossible to quantify. I find it really interesting how difficult it is to articulate why we find something funny, or what it means to say someone “is” funny. I haven’t checked in on the E3W in the 10 years since I graduated college, but I wonder if I would still find it as entertaining as I did back then, and if I didn’t whether that would be because the kids today are no longer willing to be provocative or offensive in the name of humor, or if I would just be too old and jaded these days to laugh at college humor...
I did a couple of Writing for the Onion classes at Second City in Chicago. It is way, way hard. It’s generally hard to put your writing in front of everyone for their workshopping, but it’s another level of hard when you’re supposed to be making everyone laugh. The process of fine-tuning humor writing can be decidedly unfunny, and it can be excruciatingly painful to sit at a roundtable with 15 people reading off their 10 best headlines of the week and only five or so are funny enough to make the room laugh. Plus dealing with the obnoxious ego of people whose whole shtick is thinking they’re funny when they are patently *not*.
Ironically, the funniest thing that happened during the entire class was that on the first day, the instructor had tummy troubles and spent the first 30 minutes trying to conceal his increasingly wet belches before getting up and running to throw up, after which he came back to class, repeated the cycle, and finally just had to cancel. Poor guy. But it was funny.
You ARE so funny and if you worked for the Onion or some show full-time we wouldn’t get to hear you and Katie’s banter twice a week and I would laugh a lot less often.