Waking Some Slumbering Writing Muscles

In what seems like a lifetime ago – maybe because it was – I was a humor writing machine. 

At the moment the U.S. Supreme Court announced the decision in Bush v. Gore, my friend and co-author Kevin Guilfoile and I had eighteen days to write and produced a manuscript that would become My First Presidentiary: A Scrapbook of George W. Bush.

It was a first book for both of us, and while our politics ran the other direction, the book was only going to be published if George W. was President, so I suppose it was a consolation prize. The conceit was that George W. needed a kind of school workbook in which he would do lessons to become better versed on what it meant to be President of the United States.

The publisher wanted it out before the inauguration, which meant churning out material as quickly as possible. Honestly, it wasn’t a problem. Kevin and I had both been writing consistently for Modern Humorist (the above-the-title sponsor of the book) and other places, and it was simply a matter of engaging those writing muscles and getting the material out.[1]

Later, when editing McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and writing additional humor books and overseeing a humorous publishing imprint, I had so much occasion to work those particular writing muscles, all of my other writing muscles pretty much atrophied into nothing.

I could open a submission to McSweeney’s, make an instant judgment to its quality, and then if I wanted to publish it, rip through the copy, touching it up to a higher sheen in a matter of minutes.

I was the writing equivalent of one of those dudes that goes to the gym, but only exercises his arms, so he’s got the torso of the Hulk and the legs of the guy who gets sand kicked in his face on the beach. 

Ultimately, I decided I couldn’t do it anymore. I didn’t want to dedicate my writing life to this one thing, no matter that it was the only thing I’d had any real publishing success at. So I handed off McSweeney’s to a successor (who has proven better at the gig), and for years, only very occasionally dipped back into short, humorous writing. 

Those writing muscles that had once been so impressive started to atrophy. For sure, those years had imprinted on my other writing, but the ability to churn out a short piece of conceptual humor, once a task I could do quickly on demand, faded until I barely even had the urge to do it.

Until I started teaching a first-year experience in humor writing, that is. Preparing for and teaching this course has re-energized the writing muscles I thought I’d lost. Being required to introduce and guide students in this genre has ignited my desire to do it myself, to the point where ideas and conceits and how to turn those conceits into jokes are returning to my brain unbidden. 

One became so strong last week I had to just go ahead and write it to get it out of my head so I could move on to other things. 

Just look at this guy! He’s still got it!

Reactivating my humor writing muscles has given me a fresh perspective on the challenges my students face as they work on analyzing and then producing this kind of writing. 

They have primarily engaged with the kinds of writing experiences I criticize in Why They Can’t Write,highly prescribed assignments designed to please a school assessment. They have very well-developed writing muscles in that specific area, but are finding it challenging when asked to move to this new and less familiar domain. They have been doing one set of exercises for a long time, and not a particularly interesting one at that. Even worse, these exercises have been done not for the sake of their own self-improvement, but for someone else.

But that’s okay. We shall survive. The whole purpose of the course is to explore. This is why it is called a first-year “experience.” Wherever students are, that’s where we’ll start. We will have experiences and learning will happen. The good news is that they are passionate consumers of humorous material and have strong ideas about what is and is not funny (to them). With that base in place, it is merely a matter of putting these previously untested writing muscles to work.

Still, I can’t help but wonder what it would be like if they’d been allowed more freedom to develop other parts of their writing practices in school, if they’d been encouraged to see how writing in one domain can transfer into another. 

For me, I’m hoping that I can keep up this part of my practice going forward. There’s something very satisfying about having an idea, executing it, and seeing it put in front of an audience in a matter of days. 

I sometimes wonder if I’d stuck with writing humor if I coulda become a contender, vying for highly coveted comedy writing gigs. Some of my Modern Humorist contemporaries have done some amazing things indeed.

But it wasn’t to be and I have no regrets. I’m awfully glad that I had that period to develop these writing muscles that may be a little stiff and not quite as strong as they once were, but never seem to go away.