Style Conversational Week 1114: Laughing Maters
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The Style Invitational Empress ruminates all over this week’s contest
By Pat MyersMarch 5, 2015
Think of all the different ways the contestants of The Style Invitational have offered up memorably witty humor in the past 1114 weeks or so. The neologisms, of course, in so many formats. The song parodies. The cartoon captions. The plays on headlines. The horse names. The crossword clues. The limericks. The obit poems. The joint legislation. Writing something that uses only the words in some other writing. Comparing two items from a list we give. Such a variety of ways to put your clever on.

But for pure laughs, not surprisingly, the best Invite contest category is what I lump together as “jokes”: I’m including wry observations about, say, how to “improve” air travel, (“Serve the meals already in barf bags” — John Kupiec) as well as a contests specifically asking for jokes that could be used as funny airport announcements. (“At this time, we’d like all passengers who paid full price for their ticket to

stand up so you can be mocked” — Seth Brown). And of course, the classic form of standup-style one-liners. We even ran a contest for Rodney Dangerfield-style “no respect” jokes, with Rodney himself weighing in on the finalists. (The winner: “In bed, I don’t get no respect. My wife’s favorite position is back-to-back.” — Chuck Smith)


And certainly, the (Someone’s) Mama results of Week 1110 — like the original Your Mamas from Week 932 — will be Instant Invite Classics of the one-liner genre. Like those from the first contest, many of them use the brash-talking, terse standup rhythm but incorporate a variety of topical, historical and literary references. And — in another hallmark of Invite humor — a number of them give the reader the extra joy that comes from a second or two of figuring-out. (Kevin Dopart’s Descartes’ Mama might be the prime example this week.)

I decided not to link to explanatory articles for fear of being heavy-handed — if you don’t get the reference, just Google the name. The contest was inspired by Tom Scocca and Joe MacLeod’s funny “Pope’s Momma” jokes on Gawker; I’m grateful to Tom’s brother Dave for suggesting it.

Some of the jokes, I admit, would also work perfectly fine as a Your Mama joke; they’d also be funny without the famous son or daughter. Ted Weitzman, known in ancient Loserdom under the pseudonym Paul Styrene (we now ban pseudonyms), could have just as easily directed his “anal-retentive” joke to anyone’s Ma as to Felix Unger’s. That didn’t factor into my judging at all; I just went for the funny. Also, some of the jokes, including two of the winners, weren’t phrased as insults to the Mama, as the classsic YM jokes are; I didn’t care.


I’m going to be featuring Week 1114 entries over the next week as graphics on the Style Invitational Ink of the Day page on Facebook — they’re perfect for that format. I hope people share them!

It’s the first Inkin’ Memorial — indeed, the first blot of ink “above the fold” — for Dave Silberstein of College Park, Md., who’s yet one more in the Invite’s long roster of astronomers and other spacey people. This is Dave’s 10th ink since he first landed on the Invite surface in Week 957. Former Loser of the Year Robert Schechter (official Loser anagram: Sober Retch Retch) grabs second place and Ink No. 149 with the best of several amusing Brian Williams’s Mama achievements. Mark Raffman’s earnest Hemingway spoof gets him yet another Loser Mug or Grossery Bag — and hey, he seems to have blotted up his 200th ink this week, all since Week 979; and Ben Aronin gets No. 61, and his 11th above the fold.

I got an unsolicited e-mail last night from my former copy desk colleague Courtney Rukan, who unlike me is still a fully functioning editor at The Post; she’s now a bigwig on what’s now called the “multiplatform desk.” Courtney had just finished reading this week’s results, and she wrote to tell me that they were “side-splittingly funny. Every last one!” So I asked if she’d share which were her particular faves:

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“The Yo-Yo Ma joke is genius and the two Truman jokes made me giggle,” Courtney responded. “Here are the others that made me laugh out loud, particularly the naan pun and Stevie Winwood playing in traffic (the visuals on the two of those are vivid as well). As for Muhammad Mama, that is the best possible way to end, and I laughed so hard that I choked on my apple. (However, I will not say whether I saw 72 virgins during my near-death experience.) [Colleague] Martha Murdock pointed out that Muhammad was orphaned at an early age, which adds another layer of delight to the satire.”

I’m happy to report that Courtney is game to be the latest person to weigh in weekly with her faves, as Lynn Medford (“Haw!”) and David Malitz (“With Malitz Toward ...”) used to do. What would be a good name for her weekly opinion? Her last name rhymes with “two-can.”

(A few not-for-your-mother unprintable entries at the bottom of this column.)

Look on the funny side: Be an Optimist for Week 1114
Hardboiled ink-stained wretch that I am, I admit that I said “Ewwww” when I got my first e-mail newsletter titled The Optimist, The Washington Post’s entry into the field that also includes the Huffington Post’s Good News and the site Good News Network. But I also admit that I sometimes can’t bring myself to read one more article today on the horrors of or another war or attack or disease or misuse of “whom.” And clearly, I’m not alone: Post subscribers were eager to click on the various links in the weekly newsletter, Optimist editor Dave Beard told Ivoh.org. “It may help that it appeared after a summer of unrelenting news from places like Ferguson, Gaza, and Ukraine.”


And even some members of the Style Invitational Devotees, mostly a pretty jaded bunch, talked of how “I love my little good news email!” and “I looked through the titles for today. They’re great stories. I suspended cynicism enough to go ‘awww’ several times.”

As soon as I published this week’s contest this morning, Loser Matt Monitto noted that it’s very similar to Week 902, the one that got him his first blot of ink. And so it is; I’d forgotten about that contest from four years ago, though it had some classic results. That contest was to find a sentence in a Post story that week and spin it into something upbeat. The winner:
Original: Maine’s governor told critics Friday to “kiss my butt” over his decision not to attend the state NAACP’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebrations.
Spun: Maine’s governor found it in his heart to turn the other cheek . . . (Dixon Wragg, Santa Rosa, Calif.)

And Matt’s debut (he now has 64 inks):
O: School board in N.C. . . . abolishes integration policy
S: School board in N.C. takes a step closer to America’s roots


This time you have much more source material — basically everything. It can even be fictional (it specifies that the event could be in the future), though I’d predict that actual historical or current events would be funnier to spin.

I’ve been surprised many times before, though.

Should have kept mum: Unprintable Mama jokes from Week 1110
Oedipus’s mama so hot, she was the original MILF. (Chris Doyle)

Captain Ahab’s mama’s so loose, she’s known as Moby Vagina. (G. Smith)

And not dirty, just too cheap a shot, but hahaha:

Oedipus’s mama so hot, she was the original MILF. (Chris Doyle)

Edward Jenner’s mama spread so fast, smallpox had to invent a vaccine against her. (Ben Aronin) (I didn’t think I could get away with “spread.”)

And not dirty, and really funny but too much of a cheap shot for the Invite:

Bristol Palin’s mama is so stupid, she’s Sarah Palin. (Robert Schechter)

The snow’s coming down harder and harder here at Mount Vermin near the Potomac, and this column already crashed once, causing me to lose my thank-you note to Pepco allowing me to finish it without incident. Don’t forget to sign up to attend the Loser brunch on March 22 — see NRARS.org, and click on “Our Social Engorgements.”