Style Conversational Week 1415: Slaphappy seconds
The Empress of The Style Invitational discusses this week’s retrospective contest
“For sale: Baby shoes, never worn” — a “six-word novel” often attributed to Hemingway but is probably older — was the inspiration for Seth Tucker's bad-novel ending in Week 1411.
“For sale: Baby shoes, never worn” — a “six-word novel” often attributed to Hemingway but is probably older — was the inspiration for Seth Tucker's bad-novel ending in Week 1411. (Wikipedia, Creative Commons)
By 
Pat Myers
Dec. 17, 2020 at 4:20 p.m. EST
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The Empress done you wrong this year? Let her do it again this week with Style Invitational Week 1415, the first of our two second-chance contests, covering the first half of the ones we did since last year’s retrospective. I always enjoy running the do-overs because they show the variety of humor that we foist onto our hapless readers over the course of the year, and so I aim to run ink from lots of different contests, the one-line foal names up to the elaborate song parodies, along with a cartoon caption or other visual joke. (There are likely to be more short-form entries than long ones.)

You can, as always, enter as many different contests as you like, as long as you don’t send me more than 25 entries in all.

You’re free to send non-inking entries from previous weeks — sometimes highly inkworthy humor just gets robbed on an especially fruitful week — but they shouldn’t feel dated; a
fabulous zinger about some ephemeral scandal from last March will likely fall flat now. Conversely, you’re more than welcome to play off the current news when writing new material for old contests — and two of the contests require you to use this week’s papers and websites.

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The first Style Invitational do-over was Week 94, headlined “Weeks 1-93.” Jessica Steinhice — who’s still occasionally in the Invite as Jessica Steinhice Mathews — “suggests that you come up with a great answer to any previous Style Invitational contest, an answer you may have thought of after the contest deadline was over.” Fine, but this was January 1995! The Style Invitational was not on the Internet; it was just on rapidly decaying newsprint every Sunday for the preceding years. How, Mr. Czar of The Style Invitational, did you expect readers to track down or remember 93 previous contests?

Gene Weingarten, who was so tight with the Czar that he has been seen swallowing his saliva, has no idea. Obviously Jessica Steinhice, already a Longtime Loser, clearly had some entries in mind already, but what about the people who didn’t keep clip files and lists of their old submissions? Not the Czar’s problem. He did not coddle. People in Washington like to win, and they’ll do what they need to do: go to the library and look up old copies, whatever. And sure enough, the results included entries for 16 different contests, back to Week 1 (New name for D.C.'s football team: the Prince symbol with a football on top — Kevin Mellema). And while only 12 Losers got ink that week — with such then-Obsessives as Kevin, Joseph Romm, Tom Witte, Elden Carnahan and Chuck Smith getting most of it — at least three people, including winner Gary McKethan, had never gotten ink before in The Style Invitational.

But the Empress has never had the confidence to play hard to get, alas. As I promised in this week’s contest, below are links to the contests you may enter or reenter for Week 1415, along with the results, which you should check to make sure you’re not sending in a joke that already got ink. Please look at the instructions in the contests themselves; the summaries below aren’t necessarily complete. Do NOT send your entries to that week’s entry form! I think I closed all the forms, but in any case, wapo.st/enter-invite-1415 is the only form I’ll see.

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You know what would be great? If you began each entry with “Week [XXXX]” so I could sort the entries electronically. That’s with the word Week, not a counting number, not a bullet, not “Here’s the best one.” I love you guys! (Will that help?) (How about if I refused to look at the entries that didn’t begin with the week number? Hard to get, see?)

If you can’t access the Post pages below for some reason, you can also go to the Master Contest List at the Losers’ own website, NRARS.org, and click on the various icons for PDFs of the print or online version of each week. Both there and here, remember to check the results of the contest you’re entering (or reentering), to make sure you’re not sending in the same joke: So just go to the far right column on the table to click on that week’s results (i.e., the results of Week 1382 are on the same row as the introduction to that contest; just look to the far right).

Another way is to join the Style Invitational Devotees group on Facebook, then, at the top of the page, click “More” and then “Files.” You’ll get an index, newest to oldest, of copies of the contests.

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The contests:

Week 1360, fake trivia about winter (results)

DO NOT ENTER Weeks 1361-1363 (the Year in Preview and last year’s retrospectives)

Week 1364, creative clues for an already filled-in crossword (results)

Week 1365, poems about people who died in 2019 (for this week, continue to write about people who died that year, not in 2020) (results)

Week 1366, Tour de Fours: Think of a new term containing the letters L-I-A-R, next to one another (except for spaces between words) but in any order (results)

Week 1367, pickup lines for people in particular professions (results)

Week 1368, cartoon captions (results)

Week 1369, jokes that involve a typo or something misheard (results)

Week 1370, write something about someone, using only the letters in the person’s name (as often as you like); you may also include a short real or descriptive title, e.g., “Senator Kamala Harris” (results)

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Week 1371, new terms using five or more “tiles” from a given seven-letter ScrabbleGrams “rack” (results)

Week 1372, old-style trash talk about a well-known person with Balliol rhymes. (results)

Week 1373, reviews of everyday products listed on Amazon, including shoelaces and emery boards (results)

Week 1374, trash-talking rhyming “rap battles” between two historical figures. (results)

Week 1375, Mess With Our Heads: Choose a headline in The Post or another online or print publication — this week, they must be dated Dec. 17-28 — then reinterpret it by writing a “bank head,” or subtitle, that changes the meaning or comments wryly on it (results)

Week 1376, add a character to a Shakespeare play (or one scene) and explain what happens or quote a little dialogue. (results)

Week 1377, games and other activities to do while quarantining at home. (results)

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Week 1378, songs about Life in the Age of Corona, set to a well-known tune. Videos are also welcome (post them on YouTube, preferably hidden for now, and send me the link) but please also submit the lyrics. Videos may use original tunes, since readers won’t have to know them. (results)

Week 1379, jokes whose punchline is a pun on a song title. (results)

Week 1380, drop letters from a word to reveal a related word. (results)

Week 1381, fake trivia about spring (results)

Week 1382, “breed” the names of two Kentucky Derby winners to name a foal reflecting both names (results)

Week 1383, Questionable Journalism: Choose any sentence from a print or online publication dated Dec. 17-28, 2020 (not the dates given in the directions!), and follow it with a question it could humorously answer. (results)

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Week 1384, stupid questions, especially in 2020 (results)

Week 1385, change a place name slightly and describe the new place (results)

Week 1386, “breed” any two inking names from Week 1382 and name the “grandfoal” (results)

Week 1387, drop a letter or block of letters from the middle of a movie title and name the new movie (results)

Loserdom: The Documentary!
Either I had either never heard this or I entirely forgot it — both astonishing alternatives — until Every Year A Loser Dave Zarrow posted the artifact below in the Style Invitational Devotees group just this week. It’s a recording of a nine-minute feature about The Style Invitational, specifically the Loser Community, aired by D.C. public radio station WAMU-FM on Dec. 8, 1996. Reporter Annie Wu goes to a noisy Loser holiday brunch — Dave says it was at a party room in Jennifer Hart’s apartment house — and interviews Dave (“I am America’s funniest office products dealer”), Jennifer, Chuck Smith, Elden Carnahan and others, and features the Dueling Loser band leading the song parodies. Interspersed with the crowd scene is a separate interview with the anonymous Czar, who, as always, gives good quote.

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Dave turned the audio recording into a video with slide show (people’s faces, Loser T-shirts, etc.). It is a riot. (You may have to turn up your volume.)

And now, 24 years later, we have the 2020 update — in the form of You’re Invited, a half-hour podcast in which Mike Gips interviews and clowns around with various Style Invitational figures; the seven episodes so far include Gene Weingarten, Chuck Smith, Duncan Stevens, Jeff Contompasis, Elden Carnahan, Chris Doyle and me. Get them all at bit.ly/invite-podcast.


Coming to a bad end*: The results of Week 1411
*Non-inking headline suggested by both Jonathan Jensen and Jon Ketzner

I’m generally wary of asking for “bad” examples of something — wouldn’t you rather read good? But there’s a long tradition of spoofing laughably bad writing, and so why not glom onto it? I may not be so creative, but — especially in my tiara — I’m positively glommorous.

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We didn’t flat out copy the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for bad first sentences to a novel, though the Invite did do that back in 2002; instead, Week 1411 asked for one or two bad final sentences. And it’s clear that a number of Invite readers are well steeped in the contents of high school literary magazines: I got to read lots of takes on “it was all a dream” endings, riding off into the sunset (“Hey, you’re supposed to be heading east!”). Not to mention the preposterous metaphors, redundancies, overexplanations, etc., that make bad writing so delicious if you don’t have to read more than two sentences at a time.

It’s kind of a big week for Invite Rookie Hannah Seidel. Hannah scores her first win, and 13th ink in all, since she started Inviting in Week 1383, for her regretful-prisoner-fails-Mom prose:

“The last thing I saw before the prison bars clanged shut was my mother’s face, weeping for her lost child, though after the prison bars clanged shut I could still see her face, just with big stripes of bars through it, and I felt tears run down my own cheeks too, leaving trails like bars down my face.”

Nashville, start the songwriting. Lifetime: Options?

But her Invite win outshines an only slightly less exciting development for Hannah. Approximately two hours after I sent this week’s Invitational to the copy desk on Wednesday afternoon, I noticed this Facebook post from Hannah from Monday:

“Turns out the best Hanukkah present I’ve ever gotten was a (temporary) ring made out of tinfoil.” Mazel tov on your engagement, Hannah — your gift of a disembodied clown head on a plank will be in the mail soon.

What Doug Doug: In addition to Hannah’s Clowning Achievement, Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood singled out Jon Ketzner’s account of the Amelia Earhardt story; Dave Airozo’s timely epiphany by Mariah Carey that she wants something more than You, like maybe a sable coat or a convertible; Art Grinath’s deftly clumsy use of adverbs (“I love you,” she said lovingly); Eric Nelkin’s special offer to deliver the Real Answer; and, not surprisingly to an editor, Mark Raffman’s Clueless Author Pulls Rank on Editor.

Happy Last Day of Hanukkah, all — give me lots to read.