Style Conversational Week 1215: Quipped from the headlines
How many of the topical jokes from Week 21 do you get now?
Remember the juicy family feud involving Herbert Haft of Dart Drug, Trak
Auto, etc.? Then you’d get one of the inking entries from Week 21. (The
Washington Post)
By Pat Myers
Pat Myers
Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003
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February 16, 2017
A few weeks ago, Longtime Loser Ken Gallant (who’s now hiding in Oslo
for six months until we can figure out what’s going on) suggested a
contest based on the “How ____ WAS it?” jokes on “The Tonight Show,”
with Johnny Carson starting, “It was so (hot, cold, whatever) ...”;
straight man Ed McMahon leading the audience in “HOW HOT WAS IT?”; and
Carson supplying the punchline.
I knew that we’d done this contest before (without the space-eating
middle line). But I was surprised to find it only all the way back in
Week 21, August 1993, when The Style Invitational was settling into the
edgy groove that it’s continued to ride for almost 24 years — while
managing not to turn that groove into a rut.
How to you keep an old joke young? At the Invite, we’ve always played on
the latest news, even though the news might be so short-lived that it
won’t go on to merit a footnote, or even a pinky-toe-note, in history.
In fact, the just-for-the-moment quality of some humor may well be what
makes it so funny — at that moment. (Twitter, in which some wags have
become adept quipping on news events — complete with graphics —
literally within seconds, is the perfect platform for the genre.)
So here are the results of Week 21, the contest we reprise this week in
Week 1215 . For the benefit of those who don’t
have a sharp recollection of what people were talking about in the
summer of 1993, I’ll number them, and then follow them with explanatory
or just musey footnotes. This contest was done by the Empress’s
predecessor, the Czar .
1. Fifth Runner-Up: Donald Trump is so annoying that Amnesty
International wants him beaten and locked up. (Tom Gearty, Washington)
2. Fourth Runner-Up: D.C. streets are so badly maintained they have more
potholes than Jerry Garcia’s sofa. (Robin D. Grove, Washington)
3. Third Runner-Up: The Mississippi River has been so aggressive, it is
now being called the Msissippi. (Pai Rosenthal, Sterling)
4. Second Runner-Up: Joe McGinniss is so original he deserves to win the
Style Invitational, Ted Kennedy thought to himself. (Tom Jedele, Laurel)
5. First Runner-Up: Bill Clinton has gained so much weight that I-495
has been renamed the Sansabeltway. (Paul Sabourin, Greenbelt)
6. And the winner of the Mortimer Snerd Ventriloquist’s Dummy:
Jack Kent Cooke is so litigious that I’m not going to finish this
thought. (Chuck Smith, Woodbridge)
Honorable Mentions:
7. The White House staff is so young that the most common question on
Air Force One is, “Are we there yet?” (Chuck Smith, Woodbridge)
8. The White House staff is so young they have to write home when they
go to Camp David. (Paul B. Jacoby, Washington)
9. The White House staff is so inexperienced that it has never “been”
with another staff. (Meg Sullivan, Potomac)
10. Spike Lee is so desperate for a crossover hit that he is filming
“Dennis the Menace II Society.” (Chuck Smith, Woodbridge)
Saddam Hussein is so evil he will have to pass an ethics test to get
into Hell. (Leonard Osterman, Potomac)
11. Mayor Kelly is so sensitive to sexual harassment that she refuses to
accept mail addressed to “The Hon. Sharon Pratt Kelly” because she is no
one’s “hon.” (Carol V. Strachan, Silver Spring)
Washington streets have so many potholes, it’s like driving over a
giant, deserted Whack-a-Mole game. (Paul Kondis, Alexandria)
12. Don King has so much static in his hair, he electrocutes anyone who
give him a noogie. (Audrey Kovalak, Springfield)
The White House is so full of Arkansans they are cutting crescent moons
in the restroom doors. (Forrest L. Miller, Rockville)
13. Ross Perot is so paranoid his theories are laughed at by Oliver
Stone. (Paul Sabourin, Greenbelt)
14. Gov. Schaefer is so petty that he had “43” painted on his limo.
(Greg Griswold, Falls Church)
15. The Haft family is so dysfunctional that Herbert sold the family
tree to Crown Books for pulp. (Christopher P. Nicholson, Arlington)
16. Dan Quayle is so dumb. (Chris Rooney, Reston)
17. And Last: The Style Invitational is so popular that the next Supreme
Court justice will be chosen on the basis of “humor and originality.”
(Al Toner, Arlington)
And Least: The Style Invitational is so funny I forgot to laugh. (Tony
Buckley, Washington)
FOOTNOTES:
1. By 1993, Trump had long cemented his reputation for being annoying
just by being a loudmouth tycoon who bragged about himself and played
the ladies. (Line I found in a 1992 Charles Krauthammer column about
Ross Perot and the allure of celebrity businessmen: “Yet as late as the
1988, presidential campaign people were talking up Donald Trump!”)
2. The potholes, alas, persist — a constant in the Washington area’s
winter climate of frequent freeze/thaw cycles. But now that recreational
marijuana use has been legal in D.C. since 2015, this joke could take a
different angle.
3. Whoa, /here’s / an instance of humor that’s painfully dated. In fact,
I’m kind of shocked that a joke equating “Ms.” with “aggressive” was
considered runner-up material by 1993. Maybe 1973.
4. In 1993, Joe McGinniss wrote a book called “The Last Brother: The
Rise and Fall of Teddy Kennedy.” Wikipedia sums up the response: “The
volume was widely panned for its skimpy sourcing, lack of attribution,
wild suppositions, lack of footnotes, possible plagiarism and prurient
outlook. In The New York Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt called it
‘half-baked’ and added, ‘The book isn’t bad; it’s awful.’ ‘It is, by a
wide margin, the worst book I have reviewed in nearly three decades;
quite simply, there is not an honest page in it,’ wrote Jonathan Yardley
in The Washington Post. Yardley called it ‘a genuinely, unrelievedly
rotten book, one without a single redeeming virtue, an embarrassment
that should bring nothing except shame to everyone associated with it.’”
5. The last Sansabelt pants, a brand of dress trousers that had an
elastic strap sewn inside the waistband, were made in the early ’90s.
Also: Paul Sabourin, who got several inks in that first Invite year, is
better known as half of the comic duo Paul and Storm
, and part of the fabulous
clever a cappella group Da Vinci’s Notebook
.
6. First the prize: The Czar probably /bought / that ventriloquist’s
dummy it as a prize. Gone are the days of an Invite prize budget. Then
the reference to Jack Kent Cooke, the extremely litigious owner of the
Washington Redskins, who preceded Dan Snyder, the extremely litigious
owner of the Washington Redskins. (The winning entry was once again by
Chuck Smith, who’d already become a local celebrity because of his
dominance in the early Invite. Chuck went on to become the first Loser
to reach 500 inks and tiptoe inside the Style Invitational Hall of Fame.)
7, 8, 9. Bill Clinton had come into office earlier that year, and his
staff — young, Arkansan or both — was a huge contrast to the Reagan-Bush
years. George Stephanopoulos, one of his senior advisers, was 31 and
looked 21.
10. Director Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” was nominated for a
screenplay Oscar in 1989, but many critics argued that it would have
been in Best Picture contention had it not been for Hollywood’s
white-centered views. (“Driving Miss Daisy” won that year.)
11. Sharon Pratt Kelly (formerly Dixon) was D.C. mayor from 1991 to 1995.
12. Flamboyant boxing promoter Don King
.
You could buy a Don King novelty wig.
13. Billionaire Ross Perot, who’d done remarkably well in his
presidential campaign the previous year, went on “60 Minutes” to allege
a nefarious plot among rival Republicans to ruin his daughter’s wedding.
Director Oliver Stone is associated with dubious conspiracy theories,
notably in his 1991 movie “JFK.”
14. This one took me about 10 minutes to figure out. Maryland Gov.
William Donald Schaefer, formerly mayor of Baltimore, was always a
colorful figure, but in his later years started to become obsessed with
personal slights, going so far as to personally call and yell at some
private citizen who’d criticized him in the press. (Hmm.) But the 43 on
the limo? I finally realized that it refers to stock car legend Richard
Petty, who had No. 43 on his car. I just asked the Czar if he got that.
He had no idea. I have no idea how he would have in 1993, either. Mystery!
15. The Haft family feud is one of Washington’s great gossip stories,
featuring weird-white-pompadoured drugstore mogul Herbert Haft
, his bookstore mogul son
Robert, and his angry wife Gloria, among other relatives. The Style
section got lots of mileage from the Hafts.
16.Dan Quayle.
17. Early-years fine print in the Invite instructions. Since 2003,
winning entries have been chosen entirely on the basis of cash payments.
*Warning about Week 1215:* In his introduction to the Week 21 results,
the Czar complained of the slew of old jokes he’d received: “ ‘Ross
Perot is so unusual, it’s said that when he was born they threw away the
baby and raised the placenta.’ A splendid joke, when it was first
applied to Tiny Tim in 1968. And: ‘George Burns is so old that when he
was born the Dead Sea was just sick.’ This was originally said about
George Bernard Shaw, who died in 1950. Fair warning: In the future, if
you serve us chestnuts, we will roast you.”
That was before we had Google. There’s really no excuse for sending in a
well-worn joke now.
*SOCIAL NUTWORK*: THE RESULTS OF WEEK 1211*
/*Non-inking headline by Beverley Sharp/
It might have been the tweet about “overrated” Meryl Streep that
inspired me to come up with the Week 1211
contest for disparaging tweets of laudable
people. And maybe the ones about the “failing NYT.” Whatever. I didn’t
have to spell it out; the 200-some Losers who sent in about 1,000 tweets
clearly got the point.
I knew that I’d get lots of good material from the Loser Community, even
from entrants who weren’t all that familiar with Twitter. My only
concern was whether the results would read like the same joke told 30
times over. To that end, I did a little more tweaking than usual to the
inking entries so that “SAD!” or “overrated” didn’t appear again and
again. (While @realDonaldTrump is indeed the president’s personal
Twitter handle , I didn’t necessarily use the real ones, like
@KellyannePolls.)
By the way, there’s a @StyleInvite
account on Twitter, where I share the Invite and the Ink of the Day;
on@patmyersTWP, I’ll retweet the
Invite material, and will share the occasional political irony. But I
greatly prefer Facebook, on which I post incessantly, both on my own
page and in the Style Invitational
Devotees group.
I don’t think anyone in this week’s Losers’ Circle is a Twitter habitue,
but they’re all certainly household names in Invitedom. It’s Gary
Crockett’s 11th first-prize win; Jesse Frankovich picks up his 11th ink
“above the fold,” and as the father of at least one youngun’, he might
even share his Fishin’ for Floaters prize. And Kevin Dopart and Duncan
Stevens, well, there they go again. On the other hand, we have a healthy
four First Offenders this week: Welcome to Loserland, Sean Doherty Jamie
Johnson, Alison Candela and Eric LeVasseur — send more!
*What Doug dug:* The faves this week from ace copy editor Doug Norwood
were Hugh Thirlway’s loaves-and-fishes dis and Jeff Hazle’s thumb-bite
at Shakespeare.
*Not going there: *I was surprised that I didn’t get any resistance
about running Lynne Larkin’s “p*” tweet about Edward VIII. But I wasn’t
about to use this one by Tom Witte dissing the Man From Galilee: “Won’t
fight back, weak, stumbling – did you see him try to carry that cross? I
could carry it with one hand. Pathetic.”
*LAST CALL AT THE ALEHOUSE: LOSER BRUNCH FEB. 19*
It’s this Sunday at noon at the Heavy Seas Alehouse in the Rosslyn
section of Arlington. Pub-type food and of course beer. We’re not
expecting a big crowd, so this might be an easier time to sit and chat
than at last month’s Loser Post-Holiday Party. I’ll be there. RSVP to
Elden Carnahan at NRARS.org; click on “Our Social Engorgements.”