The Humor Muse

I marvel at the folks who do it for years too. I've done it now for 79 weeks and one of the things that works for me is giving myself permission to be serious once in a while. I remember agonizing over the first non-humourous one, thinking: "Okay, my inbox is going to be flooded with 'Unsubscribes'." But it wasn't and I felt a terrific sense of relief.

I think one of the keys for any humourist who writes often is the ability to find nuggets of amusement in the small things: simple, day-to-day interactions, frustrations, joys, realizations. We need to be able to mine bits of humour from lumps of life.

I don't think the Berrys and Bombecks ever thought, "Oh geez, I have to be funny for 4,387 weeks!"

They just focused on finding something funny to write about that day. The weeks just started adding up.

Realize that Dave Berry is also very blunt about how he gets most of his stuff. From his readers. People mail him the craziest things. I loved his article about the dead whale that washed up on the beach. He was sent a video. The highway department was called in to get rid of it. They blew it up with explosives. Whale parts all over the place.

But yeah... humor in daily things. Things we don't even look at.

George Carlin talking about weird things in the English language. Drive in a parkway, park in a driveway?

What if we did something a bit different one day. Again, George Carlin mentions backing through a drive in bank. I did that once. My passenger wanted to use the ATM. he was on the wrong side. So we backed up to it. The ATM was in the lane right up against the windows to the tellers. I got some strange looks as we backed past them.

Ray M