Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Woo hoo! I just got email from Joe Trippi at Dean for America It seems like just yesterday everyone I told I was working for Dean said “Who?”

xxx

Roger Rosenblatt Anything can Happen

Einstein is famous for figuring out how to space into time–but the joke was on him, because joke writers already knew how.

Scott McCloud (Understanding Comics) details a million tricks comic artists use to translate a series of still photos into a story with action, suspense, and pacing. And, for those of us with our minds in the gutter, in McCloud’s world that’s just the space between 2 panels, and just the place your mind does its best work.

Stand-up comics live or die by their timing. One of the space-time tricks of written humor is making the reader wait for a riddle’s answer. That’s because the wait, the pause, the time the reader spends trying to guess how it turns out, is as important to making the riddle funny as the quality of the joke itself.

But you know that trick–you’ve seen it a million times. And to figure it out, you don’t have to be Einstein….

Bush cabinet officials are hitting the campaign trail to praise his tax cuts. Out in Wisconsin, the tour ran into trouble–one laid-off software guy with his own Economic Reality Tour. It’s a great (and ongoing) story, so check out www.JobForJohn.com!

The back of my mind is buzzing — am I about to have an accidental conversation with Secretary John Snow in the drive-thru of a Culvers in Wausau, Wisconsin?! Is this happenning completely by luck and because the drive-thru cashier knows me on a first name basis?

“What’s your story?” Snow says.

I tell him I was laid off last week & saw that he was coming & I thought it was important to come here and let him see the reality of what’s going on in today’s economy.

“What industry were you in?”

“Most recently the software industry.”

“That’s a particularly vulnerable part of the economy.”

“Yes, well, I need a new job & it doesn’t look good.”

“Just wait,” he said. “The first tax cuts haven’t really taken effect. So just wait… the second tax cut… well, it’ won’t hit the economy for several months, but I’m sure you’ll get a job.”

“But, but… we’ve already lost over 900,000 jobs just since March first… a job at Wall-Mart just won’t support my family.”

“Just wait, I’m sure you’ll find a job.”

At that moment the car in front of me pulled ahead for their order and John stepped back from my window. The SS agents signalled for me to pull ahead.

“Just wait?!” I’ve got a $350 payment for this minivan, a morgage and two kids! Here’s a guy who drives a few hundred miles to see you, four days after he’s been laid off, and you tell him to “just wait?”

Boy I’d like to see those words on a PR banner behind Snow at the podium: Jobs and Growth: Just Wait.

My neighbor Mr. Jackson just brought me a battered brown paper bag full of corn from his yard.

Even the bag looked just like a bag from my childhood.

The four of us, shooed out of the kitchen into the cooling twilight, with a big lumpy bag of corn to shuck.

The corn silk, withered and brown outside the leaves, silky and pale within the tassel. (The silky part felt sooo good, you wanted to keep it and use it for something, but if you did, and if you remembered you did, when you found it again it was shriveled up and dry.)

Slapping mosquitoes, slapping each other’s mosquitoes,

The slick little beads of the corn.

The occasional corn worm, yucky but interesting. (We’d save them from the pot by hiding them under some bushes. I don’t think even then we thought they’d survive very long, but a philosophical death under a rose bush seemed better than being popped into boiling water.)

My mom added milk to corn water, which makes it foam, and makes the corn sweeter. I still do. And I still love the look and feel and smell of corn silk.

If the intellect is a skinny stick figure standing on the side of a narrow road, the subconscious is a 16-wheel semi-truck barreling down the road at 90 miles per hour. Think of the stick figure waving and signalling, “Slow down slow down,” and the truck keeps on going as if nothing were happening (nothing is happening).

Dave Winer, Davenet essay “On Beauty in Women”.