January 07, 2005
Steal This Truth As diligent
Steal This Truth
As diligent readers of our humble “weblog” must know, we, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” are always busy caterwauling about the small—though learned—audience we have. Although we have come up with many cockamamie schemes to increase our readership, we have never taken a collective look in the mirror. To put it more plainly, we never asked ourselves a potentially painful question: Do we suck?The answer to this question, dear reader, appears to be, for lack of a better word, yes. After literally seconds of soul-searching, we, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” decided that we needed to hone our skills.
But how to do it? We wondered about this at length, until a correspondent from our Cambridge (MA) office sent us the Winter 2005 catalogue of The Cambridge Center for Adult Education. On page nine of said publication, dear reader, we happened upon a class that seems to have been made for us.
It’s title is “Humorous Writing,” and it will be taught by one Michael Koran. (Because, hey, nothing’s funny like the Koran.) Mr. Koran, who boasts his M.A. from the University of Chicago in the catalogue, offers the following synopsis of his adult education course, to which we have affixed our own humble commentary:
We will read aloud essays from the hilarious newspaper The Onion in order to learn how to write and publish hilarious stories and essays.
Hmmm. We wonder if Mr. Koran will also offer instruction to his students on the hilarious topic of word repetition, in order to make sure that the hilarious essays the class pens are especially hilarious. Also, is “essays” really the mot juste for the columns that appear in The Onion? Why not the less foreboding “monographs”?
We’ll steal every trick humorous writers like Dave Barry have, such as irony, sarcasm, cynicism, exaggeration, goofiness and truth.
Oh, dear. Mr. Koran aims to steal Dave Barry’s truth. That’s just not right. Sure, he can borrow his exaggeration, and perhaps even purloin his goofiness. But truth, that’s just another matter altogether. Unfortunately, as Mr. Koran doesn’t appear to possess any sense of irony, sarcasm, or cynicism, we suppose that the only way Dave Barry can get back at him is to rip off his goofiness.
Naturally, dear reader, with such a fetching course description, we, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” were itching to take the class. Until we took a gander at the price: $154.
Geez. For that kind of cash, we’ll steal Dave Barry’s truth on our own.
