Style Conversational Week 1133: Get your hahas out. And also your ahas.
The Style Invitational Empress discusses this week’s new contest and
results
By Pat Myers
Pat Myers
Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003
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July 16, 2015
Before I get to this week’s stuff: There’s a*Loser brunch this very
weekend, * at noon this Sunday at the Moosewood Steak House, which is
the restaurant in the College Park Holiday Inn, which is immediately
outside the Beltway at U.S. 1, next door to Ikea. It might be a buffet.
RSVP here to Elden Carnahan on
the Losers’ website. We’ve had some fun brunches here in the past;
people who live on the Maryland side of the Beltway and points north,
here’s a convenient chance to do something Loserly. All are welcome,
even you.
--
You gotcher VIVO Style Invitational inventory this week: *Verse In,
Verse Out. *
In an otherwise not-so-great piece in The Atlantic this week titled “Why
Do Puns Make People Groan?”
— it’s pegged to the current /equivalent/ of a groan, the snarky putdown
on Twitter, which is now evidently the thing to tweet when someone
tweets a pun — the author does cite an absolutely perfect phrase
describing humor that’s more clever than laugh-out-loud funny, that
prompts “Ah, I see what you did there,” rather than a gut-reaction guffaw:
“They’re more about getting an ‘Aha!’ rather than a ‘Haha!’ ”
That doesn’t, of course, explain why people should groan or otherwise
denigrate puns. I can see why people denigrate /bad/ puns, like the
pathetically lame ones the author writes himself (“The reactions are the
pun-der that comes after the lightning of the joke.” — gawd). Anyway, I
just love the “aha/haha” line, which he pulled from, of all things, the
title ofa psychology paper
whose
subtitle is “A Direct Comparison of Humor to Nonhumorous Insight for
Determining the Neural Correlates of Mirth.”
And while this week’s contest and results don’t center on puns, they do
exemplify the part of Invitedom that skews more aha than haha — as
opposed to, say, Your Mama jokes.
Yeah, so? I /like/ aha! Nothing wrong with having to respond with your
head rather than your belly. It’s good to have both.
And I think you’ll find lots of neural correlates of mirth inthis week’s
spelling-bee-poem results , as well as these
winning and Losing clerihews of Week 134, from October 1995. Wow, note
all the Footnotes to History in the names below — especially figures in
the O.J. Simpson case — who get ’hewed; my predecessor, the Czar, valued
current-events humor as much as the Empress does. Note that the Week 134
contest does not include Week 1133’s rule (added by request to honor the
tradition of the form) that the name must be at the end of the first
line, to rhyme with the second line:
/Fourth Runner-Up:/
*Ross Perot,* jeez,
His ears look like boiled pirogis.
His voice is as shrill as a barking Chihuahua.
It makes me want to turn on “20/20” and listen to Barbara Walters. (Joel
Knanishu, Hyattsville)
/Third Runner-Up/:
*Socrates*
Considered drinking antifreeze
But decided on another poison, which he sucked up like a
Greek-philosopher-Hoover,
Which today, of course, we call the Hemlock Maneuver. (Jennifer Hart,
Arlington)
/Second Runner-Up:/
*Heath Shuler, *the multimillion-dollar quarterback, was a high draft pick,
His greedy holdout made me sick.
ThenGus’s
star arose,
And Megabucks is on the bench, picking splinters and his nose. (Jack
Shreve, Kensington)
/First Runner-Up:/
Anyone who has heard the rock-and-roll singing of action star*Bruce Willis*
Knows what shrill is.
His whole notes howl, his half-notes warp and waver,
But he’s been known to make a lovely Demi semi-quaver. (David Smith,
Greenbelt)
/And the winner of the Newfoundland lobster trap: /
If the presidential race were to be enlivened by the candidacy of
retired Gen. *Colin Powell,*
He would run real hard and never throw in the towel,
But what if his platform is rudely challenged as vague and overly elastic?
Would Colin go spastic? (Jerry Belenker, Silver Spring)
/Honorable Mentions:/
Assistant District Attorney *Marcia Clark*, of variable coif,
Tried her case but couldn’t pull it off.
While defender Johnnie Cochran “played the card” and “talked the talk,”
A silent O.J. “walked the walk.” (Joseph A. Pappano, Washington)
Would I be worried if I were*Paula Barbieri* ?
Very. (Mae Scanlan, Washington)
*Caspar Weinberger *was Ronald Reagan’s secretary of defense.
Did you ever get one of those ideas in your head that doesn’t make any
sense?
For example, when I see Cap on TV, I get this mental picture that I just
can’t ignore, no matter what I do,
I think: Dustin Hoffman at 72. (Greg Arnold, Herndon)
*Christopher Columbus *thought he’d met his acid test:
To find the East Indies he sailed far out into the west.
“I’ve found them!” he cried at last, his confidence unshaken,
He was mistaken. (William Bradford, Washington)
When you’ve a name like *John F. Kennedy Jr.*
The expectations could be enough to ruin ya
Especially if folks expected to hear between yer
Lines the voice of John F. Kennedy Sr. (David Smith, Greenbelt)
It’s a shame that *Packy* got the boot.
Although if he’d asked me I could have told the dumb galoot
That it’s foolish enough to screw the girls and write about it in your
diary,
But to screw the good ol’ boys instead is sheer suiciary. (Mimi Herman,
Baltimore)
*Napoleon Bonaparte,* in his final St. Helena days,
Was beset with cliches.
Imagine some wag saying, “Face it, Nappie, you’re through”
At last you’ve met your Waterloo. (William Bradford, Washington)
Detective *Mark Fuhrman*
Displayed sentiments which one would normally expect from a 1930s German
. . . (Paul Briggs, Chestertown)
Verily, the parking of*Stephanopoulos,*
Doth parallel the laws of Darwin articulated after years of study in the
Galapagos:
When naturally selected, thou has a right to ignore the cars thou hittest,
It’s survival of the fittest. (Phyllis Fung, Bruce Feiler, Andy Cowan,
Washington)
*Colin Powell*
Is an entrant’s dream because his last name rhymes with bowel,
And his first name
Is a homonym for the same. (Joseph Romm, Washington)
/And last:/
Chuck Smith
and
poop
Go together like sandwich and soup ... (Tom Witte, Gaithersburg)
---
Pretty clever /and /funny, I say.
If the “aha” of poetry contest winners comes from recognizing the craft
— the skill and ingenuity involved in forming a perfectly scanning
sonnet or limerick or song parody — then the clerihews will provide less
of that, since we say that they /don’t /scan well. So there has to be
more “haha” to compensate. How to do that? Part of the fun of clerihews
is that that they scan so terribly — they’re at heart a spoof of serious
poems — but that joke goes only so far; the content has to be funny as
well. Also, note the clever ways that the poems rhyme: While they all do
rhyme, some of the rhymes come from comical stretches, like David
Smith’s “John F. Kennedy Jr.”/ “enough to ruin ya” and, most
hilariously, Joel Knanishu’s “chihuahua”/“Barbara Walters.”
It’s not a clerihew, but Ogden Nash’s breakout hit “Springtime Comes to
Murray Hill” comes to mind as the epitome of spoofing lofty poetry with
creative rhymes and deliberate meter-flouting. If you’ve never heard
Nash read his own poetry, listen to him do this one
in his full-blown Long
Island Lockjaw accent:
*Spring Comes to Murray Hill (1930) *
I sit in an office at 244 Madison Avenue
And say to myself You have a responsible job havenue?
Why then do you fritter away your time on this doggerel?
If you have a sore throat you can cure it by using a good goggeral,
If you have a sore foot you can get it fixed by a chiropodist,
And you can get your original sin removed by St. John the Bopodist,
Why then should this flocculent lassitude be incurable?
Kansas City, Kansas, proves that even Kansas City needn’t always be
Missourible.
Up up my soul! This inaction is abominable.
Perhaps it is the result of disturbances abdominable.
The pilgrims settled Massachusetts in 1620 when they landed on a stone
hummock.
Maybe if they were here now they would settle my stomach.
Oh, if I only had the wings of a bird
Instead of being confined on Madison Avenue I could soar in a jiffy to
Second or Third.
*DITSY SPELLS*: THE RESULTS OF WEEK 1129*
/*A non-inking alternative headline by Brendan Beary/
At least a couple hundred of us know some 50 more words than we did four
weeks ago; the only ones on the Week 1129 list of spelling bee words
that I’d ever used were “pyrrhuloxia” (the
bird on the same page as the cardinal in the field guide) and “minhag”
(what determines your choice to stand or sit during a certain prayer in
the Jewish service). I’m pretty sure that every word on the list was
used in some entry or other. As usual, some people didn’t follow the
explicit directions in the contest — “the poems have to make sense with
the words’ true meanings; you can’t just pretend they mean something
else” — but most people made at least some connection with the actual
definition. As in the similar Limerixicon contest (coming next month!),
in which you have to write a limerick that features a word from a given
sliver of the dictionary, some of the entries defined the word
accurately in verse form, but didn’t make much (or any) of a joke while
doing so, and so didn’t get ink.
All of this week’s inking poems did, of course, topped by four
Loserbards who’ve blotted up industrial-size inkwells in Invitational
poetry contests over the years.
I delete the ID information from the week’s entries before I judge them
en masse, but I had guessed that the week’s Inkin’ Memorial winner was
by Chris Doyle. Chris, of course, is the No. 1 Loser in History, with a
particular specialty in highly structured poetry like double dactyls.
But we have lots of good double-dactyl writers. The reason I guessed it
was Chris is that the 71-year-old retired actuary/ ballroom dancer/
soccer player/ world traveler was most likely familiar with Iggy Azalea.
In previous years he’s given us parodies not just of Frank Sinatra and
Patsy Cline songs, but also of Ke$ha’s “Tik Tok.” Hey, this marks
Chris’s FIFTIETH win! (Second in the win department: Brendan Beary with 34.)
Our Glasgow Bureau, Stephen Gold, wins the books (mercifully easy to
ship) with his adorable “ ‘die’ in ‘diet’” verse using “cibarial.”
Stephen began Inviting seven years ago in the Limerixicon, and has
dropped by with his poems and song parodies to score 47 inks since then
— nine of them “above the fold.”
I would have been shocked had the brilliantly funny “Under D.C.” parody
/not /been by Nan Reiner, who among our Loserbards takes particular glee
in writing about local issues; before she retired, Nan was for many
years a prosecutor for the D.C. government. Nice touch of Nan — who’s
back in Florida tending to her ailing mother — to dress up in a lei to
make her selfie video
performing the “Little
Mermaid” spoof for the word “hooroosh.”
And then there’s the consistently delightful Melissa Balmain, whose
husband is hoping like mad that people won’t think her “hippocrepiform”
poem was about him. Of course it wasn’t — it was a “Dear John” letter,
and Melissa’s husband is named Bill.
*Laugh Out of Courtney: * The fave this week of copy chief Courtney
Rukan was Nan’s parody (“I am a total sucker for Sebastian – and knocks
on Metro”), followed by Chris’s I-G-G-Y. She also singled out Mae
Scanlan’s terrific limerick for “collutorium” — of all our Loserbards’
poetry, Mae’s reminds me most of Ogden Nash — as well as Chris’s
“tartarean/ grammarian” couplet.
See you next week!