We can't enjoy a life without a bit of humor

I have been trying to put together a quick "how to advise student humor writing" lesson, and therefore was drawn to this week's Frank Bruni blog featuring some light-hearted sentence examples, though several of his samples seemed more "dark humor" than we might wish. That's consistent with the mood of the world, I guess.

The first example is an example of a writer using hyperbole and personal opinion to comment on a famous couple, with no clear intention of harming the couple's reputation or creating true conflict. I was thinking this might be a nice example of the sort of humor writing that would not cause too much upset in a school community.

Dan Kois wrote in Slate about a soda machine in Ben Affleck’s home that apparently dispenses both Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi. “Why would you create this unholy monstrosity, this horrific hybrid, this affront to nature?” Kois wrote. “Look, I am not naïve. I know that some tragically misguided individuals prefer Diet Pepsi, the devil’s beverage, to Diet Coke, the elixir of life. But who drinks both?”

Of the possibility that Affleck prefers one while his fiancée, Jennifer Lopez, likes the other, Kois observed: “Scientists tell us that, unfortunately, there are no documented cases of successful cross-cola marriages in human history. Happy, buoyant, cosmically satisfied Diet Coke people cannot coexist with miserable, unhealthy Diet Pepsi people.” 

A teaching point here would have to be that this "commentary" is much more about the writer than the celebrities. The vociferous ranting is so clearly over the top that readers quickly realize the purpose of the passage is simply to make them smile.

In The New Yorker, Andrew Marantz wrote: 

“Even Trump’s putative allies will admit, in private, that he was a lazy, feckless leader. They wanted an Augustus; they got a Caligula.” 

This is a sentence that relies on the reader knowing a tiny bit, at least, about two Roman emperors and a high school adviser might want to discuss such references with a student writer. Will such references connect with their main audience -- students -- and is it OK if they don't? Maybe the point will be to get readers to fire up their search engines and learn a little history.

Commenting in The Guardian about the nervousness and cowardliness of Boris Johnson’s aides, Andrew Rawnsley wrote: 

“A shiver is going around members of the cabinet looking for a spine to run down.” 

The sentence above is a form of satire along with clear exaggeration, using the "spine" as a metaphor for courage, but there is also a nice use of "shiver" and "spine" that sounds just right.

Also in The Guardian, Arwa Mahdawi noted that the Supreme Court, in the same week, 

“ruled that states don’t have the right to pass their own gun-control laws but do have the right to pass their own women-control laws. Time to get uteruses reclassified as assault rifles, I guess.” 

This is also satire, based on reaching for an absurd effect to illustrate the writer's observations on some seemingly contradictory rulings by the now radical court. 

And in The San Francisco Chronicle, Kevin Fisher-Paulson wrote: 

“Parenting really is a heartache business. At the end of the day, there is no end of the day.”

I was thinking this clever syntax might inspire a student writer to explore subbing in another noun for "parenting," like "high school" or "teaching" or "coaching." The "heartache business" might not always work, but could in some cases. 

A writer might rewrite to something like, "Teaching is tough. At the end of the day, there is no end of the day."  

That is a great example of a provocative claim that just begs for support examples, and I would imagine some writers might opt for taking observations and anecdotes heard in class to illogical, exaggerated conclusion. 

A classroom "trick" is to come up with some common starting point and then help individual students explore wherever they want to move in their reactions to that starting point. 

I plan to use some form of this final "no end of the day" starter with my first in-person summer writing workshop group next week in Des Moines. I'll let you know how it goes.