Style Conversational Week 1202: Bet your bottom dollar, or at least
write a song
The Style Invitational Empress discusses this week’s new contest and
results
He's not always making zany Style Invitational cartoons: Bob Staake's
iconic New Yorker covers commemorating the beginning of Obama's term,
and Trump's. (Covers by Bob Staake for The New Yorker)
By Pat Myers
Pat Myers
Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003
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November 17, 2016
I can’t lie — I’m still a mess. This past week did nothing to allay my
fears; see this wrap-up
in
the New Yorker, and that’s before the Trump adviser told Megyn Kelly
that
hey, we did the Japanese-American internment camps, you do what you have
to do.
Well, we’ll do what we have to do, and that’s write some zingy songs for
Style Invitational Week 1202 . When this
contest occurred to me a few days back, I was, if not optimistic, at
least a little bit hopeful that somehow the American Way would prevail.
Okay, I still am. What’s the alternative?
This contest follows only by a few months our Week 1177 contest for
songs about the campaign season. As I said in the results,
“most of the lyrics had one of two themes: 1. He’s horrible. 2. They’re
both horrible.” So we /are /covering at least somewhat different
territory this time around. Still, if you think your parody is still
applicable and was robbed of ink last time (I can’t possibly run all the
good parodies a given week), you’re welcome to submit it again, perhaps
updated or otherwise reworked. Note that I’m giving you two weeks to
enter; I’ll try to read entries as they filter in, so I’m not expecting
a logistical problem — feel free to submit them one at a time. Once
again, I’m suspending my usual distaste for co-written entries; keep it
to two names, though. Video clips are a lot of fun, and I like linking
to them, but they’re not a factor in what gets ink. Make sure that your
settings will let readers see the clip by clicking on the link I give.
(The clip doesn’t have to be searchable.) YouTube has made loading
videos vastly easier than it used to be — you can sing straight into
your computer or phone, even, and ta-da.
If you’re not a regular contributor to Invite parody contests, take a
few minutes to read these guidelines that I wrote up in the
Conversational for Week 1113.
In a nutshell, a song contest whose results are meant to be read, rather
than performed, demands two particular qualities that the Weird Al opus
need not have:
— As opposed to sung songs, in which they’re extremely useful to make
the song catchy, repeated lines and choruses become tedious on the page.
If you repeat a verse, you’d need to change something so that it
continues to enhance the wit of the song. And a strong, clever ending,
not an anticlimax, works much better as humor.
— “Sound rhymes” that rely on the same vowel sound, rather than true
rhymes, are much less forgivable as witty lyrics to be read. Even if the
original song’s rhyme scheme “rhymes” “heart” and “dark,” your parody
can’t. And of course you can’t shoehorn words into your song that end up
accented on the wrong sylLAbles. *My big rule: Hand a copy of your song
to someone else, sit back, and see if that person can sing it without
becoming confused. * If that person can’t, I probably can’t either.
I noted that, as always, I try to fill the limited space of the print
version of the Invitational — and that will include the winner and three
runners-up — with eight or 10 parodies that readers are more likely to
be able to sing along with. So that means they’re set to songs that (I’m
optimistic) are widely known: Given that the results of this contest
will be running the week before Christmas, holiday tunes could fill the
bill, right? But also: children’s songs, patriotic songs, well-known
tunes from musicals and movies, classic rock and pop from the past 40
years, and songs that are inescapable on today’s pop radio. I do like to
provide a mix on the print page as well as a much broader mix online,
where I can provide links to songs that might be new to many readers, so
don’t throw out the idea of parodying a lesser-known song; it’s just not
going to get into the print edition — whose circulation of somewhere
under 1 million inevitably reaches a smaller and smaller fraction of
theHUGE
Washington Post readership. I always enjoy discovering new songs — from
all eras — when I judge parody contests.
One more thing: In recent years, I’ve especially enjoyed parodies that
you can really sing as a full song, not just a few lines — say,
verse-bridge-ending, or even verse-verse-bridge-ending. Don’t worry that
I’ll toss it simply because of its length. BUT BUT BUT those verses all
have to be interesting and mechanically sound, preferably finishing in a
clever way. And I like to intersperse short songs with the long ones.
Shortly after the results of Week 1177 ran this past summer, Loser
parodists and former co-workers Barbara Sarshik and Duncan Stevens
joined me one afternoon for a milkshake at a downtown Potbelly. Duncan
brought some printouts, and the three of us sat at an outside table and
gleefully sang some of Barbara’s parodies (and maybe some of Duncan’s) —
even the one to “Springtime for Hitler” from “The Producers,” “Should I
Choose Hitler or Hillary?” (No, that one didn’t get into the print paper.)
For guidance and inspiration, here are some links to recent parody results:
Week 1154,
songs about animals
Week 1113,
songs for special occasions
Week 1074,
songs about a play, set to a tune from another show
Week 929,
songs about a TV show, à la the “Beverly Hillbillies” theme
*LITTER-ALL TRANSLATIONS*: THE ‘PLAIN ENGLISH’ OF WEEK 1198*
/(*Non-inking headline idea from Howard Walderman)/
Well, we did run into a little problem with some of the entries in Week
1198 , our contest to choose a line from The
Post or another paper and (loosely) “translate” the bureaucratic,
euphemistic or insincere sentence into what it really means. It’s best
demonstrated by this otherwise inkworthy entry by Mark Raffman:
/Paul Ryan:/ “To me, it’s all about the moral authority to put [our
program] in place after the election.”
/Translation: / “To me, it’s all about avoiding the taint of Donald
Trump after the election.”
It doesn’t seem that Paul Ryan has been grabbed by any taint in the past
week.
But there was more ink to be had for Mark (who filed from Vietnam!), as
for plenty of other Losers skilled in seeing through governmental and
corporate fluff and fog. Dave Prevar noted the age-old administration
practice of announcing news in the form of an anonymous quote; Francis
Canavan saw how the denial that a company was for sale was combined with
a list of rosy business figures, concluding probably safely that the
quote amounted to a big For Sale sign. And of course there are the
postgame comments and the big-sale ads and the happiest thing you could
say about a crashed spacecraft.
Kevin Dopart, the Invite’s top finisher for seven straight years until
finally being eclipsed in Year 21, finds himself back “above the fold”
after an uncharacteristic couple of months’ drought (though he’s gotten
plenty of magnets). This week, in fact, Kevin gets two of the four spots
in the Losers’ Circle: his 24th win and his 78th runner-up (he’s opting
for the Grossery Bag rather than yet another Inkin’ Memorial bobblehead).
Danielle Nowlin’s Camusian angst turned to autumn shopping lists snags
her her 34th ink above the fold, and 246 blots in all, and Neal Starkman
of the SeaTac Loser Bureau gets his 10th, making for an impressive ratio
to his 61 total inks.
*What Doug Dug: * Ace copy editor Doug Norwood agreed with my choices on
the winners this week (that’s a good editor, Doug) and also especially
liked Marni Penning Coleman’s entry about the eagerness to touch
untouched Antarctica, Warren Tanabe’s deft wordplay about the NFL’s
violence policies, Hildy Zampella’s dig at the forever-diggable
Metrorail system.
*Speaking TOO plainly — the unprintable:* Given that the Taste Police
let Hildy Zampella call Bob Dylan a “douche,” I seem to have flagged
just one entry as Convo Only for taste. It’s from Jeff Contompasis:
“But even as smoking rates have fallen, oral cancer rates have remained
about the same and researchers in recent studies have linked the
increase to HPV.”
/Plain English: /“Mouth infections are going up as more guys are going
down.”
Jeff also sent in an entry that wasn’t a taste problem but was a bit too
Loser-insidey for the Invite itself, referring to one of our most
memorable prizes:
“In the world of prestigious prizes, the honor is yours whether you like
it or not.”
Plain English: “Smile and accept this Smorked Beef Rectum.”
*SEE YOU SOONER THAN YOU’D THINK*
Next week, I’ll be dropping by a day early: The Invitational and
Conversational will publish Wednesday, Nov. 23, since that’s when the
Arts & Style print section will be going to press. Wednesday is usually
my magnet-mailing day, so people who got ink this week will probably
have to wait another day or two. So I won’t wish you a happy
Thanksgiving just yet.
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