vituperation

December 20, 2003

I love humor.

So many things make me laugh: sneaking a good fart in on my wife, scaring a cat so that it leaps into the air all twisting and turning, scaring the spud so that she screams freakishly loud, watching the antics of the people around me.

I love humor in all its forms. Hopefully that shows here, in what I write. If it doesn’t, there’s obviously something wrong with you.

But what I really love is subtle humor. Things like changing names of people so that they make sense, but humorously. Take Victor Fairplay yesterday, for example. Both parts of that name tie to the opposite parts of his real name. Or I’ll sneak a piece of a song into what I write, sort of an inside joke. Little subtle things like that bring a smile to my face.

I also enjoy irony, and more often than not it can bring that same foolish grin to my face. Like yesterday.

Friday is well known as my junky food day, and I usually stop by the grocery store on the way home from work for something to eat later in the evening. Yesterday, I did just that, but I made an additional purchase that made me smile (and cackle internally).

Ice cream and uncolored peanut m&ms aren’t funny at all. It’s what I bought along with them that made it funny:

Junk food and a fitness magazine together. Ironic humor, sure, but that’s not the kicker. It’s what was in the magazine that was so funny, coupled with the junk food —

-

-

-

-

-

(scroll. I didn’t want you to see it before you’d read the above stuff.)

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

It’s being in the magazine for having lost a bunch of weight, and buying it with junk food.

Stuff like that slays me. Am I lame?

But then there’s the sublime humor, the kind where you can take someone’s off-the-cuff comment and turn it into a running joke for over year.

And get it into a magazine read by almost 4,000,000 people.

Now that’s some funny:

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

Many thanks to reader TJ for doing such a grand job on the writeup.