Here we go

I suspected it might come to this some day.

Welcome to the Inevitable Substack.

I’m starting this exactly one week after my last column in the paper. They may have put my job in a sack and dropped it in the river, but I’m still writing. I’ll show them! I’ll start a Substack and I’ll have a million friends and then they’ll be sorry! (Hot tears, runs to tree house, spends a sullen hour shooting caps)

You know, they could be right. There could be no place, or at least no great demand, for the American humorous essay anymore. You’ll find examples in the New Yorker, but they rarely product something I think is integral to the “humorous essay,” and that’s “actual laughter.” Not to disparage the authors - although obviously I just did - but I get the sense that they labored on them for a long time, honing and carving and polishing. I understand that S. J. Perelman was like that. I suspect that Fran Lebowitz would go a month without writing anything and then write a paragraph and go back to hanging around cafes and look vaguely disapproving.

All I know is that writing humor for newspapers meant speed and quantity, back when such a thing was prized. Column writing, for that matter, was the sort of thing done daily, regardless of inspiration or desire. That’s the genre I’ve inhabited for a long time. But does anyone want it?

The greats are gone. Most papers shed all the local humor columnist they hired in the wake of the Dave Barry Awakening, when papers realized that having someone write in an amusing fashion was a nice change from the social-issue and political columnists banging pots and pans about this and that. Now management, I suspect, wants “humor” only if it’s folded into an Important Message about who we are or what issues bedevil the land.

A reader may discover that he is once again about to be told what is wrong with him and his ilk for the 37th time this year

I have messages now and then, but they’re not vitally important. We’re just discussing the quotidian peculiarities of the era. It’s not intended to be polarizing at all, but of course someone will always take offense, because they have a mind an inch wide and see everything through a particular prism.

“A jape has been made concerning the Foreign Ministry’s ability to respond in a timely fashion to the Austrian ultimatum. Measures should be taken.”

Sorry about the AI Art, by the way. It’s a handy way of adding some visuals to a site without fearing you’ll be sued by someone who bought up the rights to something you found on archive.org 12 years ago, and has bots roam the net to see who used something without permission.

Anyway. Let’s begin! And thank you for joining me.