Style Conversational Week 1479: A Czar is born
The Empress of The Style Invitational salutes her predecessor. Plus a look at this week’s contest and results.
By Pat Myers
Yesterday at 5:45 p.m. EST

The first Style Invitational ran without further explanation — and a challenge that continued to be a poser for almost 30 years — on the front page of the Sunday Style section. No byline, no “Czar.”



Last weekend I had the pleasure of gathering with a group of old friends of Gene Weingarten at the home of Tom “The Butcher” Shroder, Gene’s longtime editor, to celebrate Gene and to commemorate the end of his 31 years at The Post — as an editor, essayist, Pulitzer-winning long-form feature writer, humor columnist … and Style Invitational creator — by presenting him with a custom-made 88-page tribute book, intended only for him.

The book-for-one (though written as if others would read it as well, someday) contains 14 little chapters, each a reminiscence by a different friend/colleague. Many of the contributors worked with Gene at the Miami Herald before he came to D.C. in 1990; several of them had followed him to The Post. I was honored (and intimidated) to be asked to appear among the work of such household names as Joel Achenbach, Marc Fisher, David von Drehle, Caitlin Gibson, Gina Barecca, former Post executive editor Len Downie — and Gene’s BFF Dave Barry, whom Gene hired as a humor columnist at the Herald after reading a piece he’d written for the Philadelphia Inquirer (at the time, Dave’s job was teaching writing skills to businesspeople).

Here’s my contribution:


A Czar Is Born: Gene and The Style Invitational, 1993-2003

On March 7, 1993, regular readers of the Sunday Washington Post were greeted with something of a surprise when they reached Section F.

Over the years, the Sunday Style section had slumped into little more than the vestiges of Style’s pre-1970 incarnation, For and About Women. Anchored by a few ads for the city’s obsolescent department stores, Sunday Style featured the social calendar, a little fashion coverage, and a usually tepid, puffy, overlong main feature that no one wanted to run elsewhere.

But that was before the reins of the section were handed to Gene Weingarten, who gave exactly 0.000 craps about any of those subjects.

That Sunday in March, the 3,500-word feature story dominating Page F1 was headlined “Getting Burned: A Look Back at the Navy’s Mustard-Gas Experiments. It's Enough to Make You Sick.” Next to it was an essay: “Noted With … Disdain,” by Gene Weingarten. The disdain was for the new President Clinton’s choice of wristwear: a Timex Ironman Triathlon, “a plastic digital watch, thick as a brick and handsome as a hernia.”


And at the bottom of the page was a box: “Introducing: The Style Invitational: Week 1.” There was no byline, no “welcome to our new humor feature.” An anonymous “we” put forth the first challenge: “ … Should the team change its name? Being typical pandering journalists, we take no position ourselves. We merely suspect the Redskin name is doomed, and when that occurs, we wish to be ready with an alternative. So give us one. … Entries will be judged on humor, originality and appropriateness to Washington.” And for the victor? “The first-prize winner gets an elegant Timex Ironman Triathlon digital watch, valued at $39.”

The Invite immediately rocketed to astonishing success among readers. The writer identified so far only as “we” announced receiving 3,400 entries to Week 5, a contest to link congressional names into “joint legislation” (e.g., the Traficant-DeLay-Akaka Roadside Port-a-Potty Act). And the anonymity of this “we” — combined with a voice that became more conspicuous and more hilarious as the weeks, months and years progressed — created the most welcome of buzzes. Gene, of course, gloried in it, eventually conferring upon himself an imperial moniker. Five months in: “We have received calls and letters requesting the name of the Czar of the Style Invitational. Regrettably, we cannot disclose this. At The Post, it is a closely guarded secret, like the identity of Deep Throat, which is known only to Bob Woodward and the Czar of The Style Invitational. Thank you.”)

This tease of anonymity inevitably created even more of a mystique, and an even more feverish obsession among its clever, funny, nerdy entrants, who formed a proto-social-media community: keeping meticulous standings, sending out a snail-mail newsletter (Depravda) and meeting in person at monthly brunches. Of course, the Czar declined their invitations to join them, or to have anything else to do with his minions, thus enhancing his allure even further.

ADVERTISING


The Style Invitational’s brand of humor was, certainly in the 1990s, waayyyy edgier than anything else in the paper. Poop jokes. Sexual double-entendres. Snarky gibes at politicians. At political correctness. At religion. At West Virginians. But it was also, consistently, supremely witty, often featuring sophisticated wordplay and erudite references; a contest was as likely to ask for a limerick about Bosnia-Herzegovina as it was for a joke based on noises such as “Kaboom, kablooie, kablamm, duh.” In 2001, Post ombudsman Michael Getler carped that the Invite occasionally “lapses into vulgarity and just plain bad taste,” but also conceded that it could be “very clever and laugh-out-loud funny.” And readers loved it passionately. When the Invite went on hiatus in early 2000, a barrage of complaints and pleas from outraged fans brought it back, sassy as ever.

As copy desk chief in Style, I’d become close friends with Gene since his arrival at The Post in 1990; he was working as an editor in the daily section. For some reason he was looking for anagrams for “The Washington Post” and I came up with “Wet Hogs in Hot Pants” and that seemed to make me his kind of colleague. And so when he started up the Invite, he’d typically bounce contest ideas off me, ask my opinions on various entries, etc., though Gene did all the judging himself, every week.

Gene might have asked my opinions, but Gene has a firm philosophy of humor, and it’s just a weeny bit in jest. It is that a joke is intrinsically hysterically funny, mildly funny, or unfunny — and that the best judge, and quite possibly the only true judge, of that funniness is Gene N. Weingarten. Sure, other people can find a joke funnier or less funny than Gene does; happens all the time. But those people are wrong.

That approach served the Czar supremely as sometimes thousands of Style Invitational entries flowed in each week, first by snail mail, then fax, then email, for 535 weeks, stretching almost 11 years and encompassing a host of humor genres: inventing words and phrases; writing cartoon captions; writing various forms of light verse, such as limericks, double dactyls and even forms the Czar coined himself; and some daringly off-the-wall stuff like “What does God look like?” or running just a big square of empty space, no instructions, just “First prize gets …” And just after Sept. 11, 2001, a contest whose only directions were “Make us laugh.”


The Czar and Empress do a selfie in 2015. Pre-pandemic, we'd get together over lunch a few times a year to work the NTY Split Decisions puzzle. (Pat Myers/TWP)
Gene finally brought the Czar’s reign to an end near the end of 2003. He’d been writing a weekly column for the Post Magazine for more than three years, and now he’d be leaving Style entirely to become a full-time writer there as well. But he didn’t let the Invite die: That December the Czar was rudely deposed in print — a black crayon was scribbled across his final words — by an anonymous Empress, who picked up the ball and is still running with it, 18 years and 900-plus columns later: The Invite will celebrate its 30th anniversary in March 2023.


The “coup,” of course, was Gene’s idea. I’d filled in as his designated “Auxiliary Czar” when Gene took a few weeks off in 1995 and a few months off in 2001; he and I were the only people who’d ever judged the contest. So while it made sense that I’d take it over, I was wildly intimidated, knowing that I couldn’t match Gene’s creativity and writing talent. Nobody could. I literally could not have done it — I would have failed horribly, and immediately — without Gene’s continued, enormously generous support behind the scenes those first few months, and to this day. I’ll say (as I did just a couple of weeks ago), “I need you to write a poem about someone who died in 2021, for an example for our obit poem contest,” and boom, there’s a double dactyl about Tommy Lasorda’s famed foul mouth:

Higgledy Piggledy
Tommy Lasorda was
Quite the field manager —
Smart, and with pluck.
Angry and colorful,
Vocabularically:
$%&, %#!* and
#$!& and &!@$!
And to this day, I’ll regularly send Gene a shortlist of several dozen entries and he’ll tell me his favorites.

Which, of course, he deems the only correct choices.


And which I sometimes end up ignoring.

So I can only attribute the survival of our 30-year best-friendship — by far the longest and closest I’ve had with anyone but my husband — to our shared love for the food of the Indian subcontinent. And maybe the discovery of wet hogs in hot pants.

Pat Myers has been the Empress of The Style Invitational since 2003 and has fussed over commas and such for all of Gene’s books.

The march of fives: This week’s WordleVite contest

Just this morning I saw an interoffice email inviting staffers to attend a “games brainstorm session” to come up with some neat puzzles and games that The Post might offer to readers. I wonder how many of the attendees had already compared their Wordle scores and were now looking for two more six-letter Spelling Bee words to reach Queen Bee.


I can’t account for the meteoric and sweeping success of this simple word puzzle, which the New York Times bought from creator Josh Wardle three months after it debuted — and already had 10 million users. It appeals to me — here’s the NYT link to it, with simple directions — because there’s just one quick game every 24 hours; you can’t get sucked into it. There’s a lot of luck involved to think of a few five-letter words whose letters and their positions will quickly help reveal the word of the day, but there’s skill and even strategy involved as well. (I still haven’t failed to get it within the allotted six tries, but it’s inevitable.)

Anyway, much as we did with a neologism contest inspired by the NYT Spelling Bee game, The Style Invitational is not ashamed to nod to the Gray Lady with this week’s Wordle-adjacent contest, Week 1479. The Invite isn’t a puzzle; it’s a humor contest whose primary aim is to provide readers with funny, clever material. But as always, I hope that the Loser Community — including, I hope, many people who’ve found us this week through Wordle-of-mouth — will have lots of fun producing that material in exchange for some cheap trinket or, more likely, nothing but a feeling of being slighted.

To be honest, Week 1479 and Wordle don’t have that much in common — really, it’s just two elements: 1. A progression of five-letter words. 2. The “green” squares that establish that a certain letter appears in the final word, in the proper position. And four weeks from now, I’ll probably run the winning entry as a Wordlish graphic — and everyone else’s as a stack of plain words (or maybe even one line).


When I was hashing out this contest with Melissa Balmain, who suggested it along with several examples, the question was how to keep some connection with the principles of Wordle while still allowing lots of humor and creativity. The first option was to simply ask for a string of five-letter words, no other restrictions. But that seemed too unWordly — especially were they to run in a Wordle-type grid.

Conversely, I could have demanded that the “yellow” letters — the right letters but in the wrong spot — had to continue to appear in subsequent words. And I could have insisted that the “gray” letters, those ruled out as not appearing in the final word at all, couldn’t continue to be used.

Ultimately I went with just enough to keep the process connected with the game of Wordle: It comes down to the green letters, the ones in the right position. As long as they don’t move out of place before the final word, you’re good. You can’t omit that letter and put it back in, though.


More clarifications:

You may use a letter more than once in any word, including the final word. That rule makes real Wordle harder to solve, and affects our contest a bit as well. Let’s say the final word is PIPES, and your first word is PLOTZ. You can’t then follow PLOTZ with YIPES, because your correct P has to stay where it is. The second P is its own letter.

You can check for your own green letters with the tool at mywordle.strivemath.com; you just type in your progression. Don’t worry about the grays and yellows. (Thanks to Loser Jeff Contompasis for finding this.)

You may add punctuation at the end of a word. That’s very unWordle, but I think we’re going to need it. Try to avoid apostrophes within words, but I’m not going to disqualify them.

You may reuse a “gray” letter that doesn’t appear in the final word. In real Wordle, this would be a waste because you couldn’t learn anything from it — and so it’s sort of out of character with a real Wordle progression — but it’s not against the rules.

Unlike in Wordle, you may use proper nouns in your word series, as in the Putin example. You could even make up a word, if it would contribute to a funny entry.

“Yellow” letters — ones that will appear in the final word, but in different places — really aren’t part of this contest. If you have a yellow letter in the first word, you may omit it in the second word (just as you might strategically in Wordle).

A BIG NOTE ON THE FORMATTING: DO NOT MAKE YOUR WORD PROGRESSION INTO A GRID! As I said above, the entries will run either as stacked words or in a single line. Please assume the latter, since I’d have to put in coding to stack them anyway: SO ALL YOU DO IS WRITE YOUR WORDS LIKE A SENTENCE, on one line, then continue — on the same line — with the description of your phrase. Don’t bother with boldface, underlines, etc.; to show the Wordality; they won’t transmit on this entry form.

Your description can be either terse or not-so-terse. Melissa’s examples were very brief, but if you have a phrase that you can make a joke about, use in a sentence, etc., have at it. Remember: We have readers.

Jest for the Hail of it*: The songs and cheers of Week 1475
*Non-inking headline by Jon Gearhart

The newly named Washington Commanders, previously the Washington Football Team and before that the Washington Racist Slurs, brought forth dozens of spirited fight songs and cheers in the results of Week 1475, none of which you’ll ever see in flashing graphics on the Jumbotron. ” It’s that happy-for-the-Invite combination of an universally loathed, extortionate billionaire team owner — now embroiled in all sorts of legal trouble over allegations of the sleaziest kind of workplace sexual harassment — an embarrassing team name that the owner fought tooth and nail to keep until his business sponsors refused to work with him anymore; and a team that — no coincidence here — hasn’t been in the Super Bowl since 1992.

Formerly the hottest ticket in football — families would pass their season tickets down through generations — the team now often plays at home to louder noise from fans of the other team, as Mark Raffman mentions in his inking entry today.

On the other hand, I also opened the contest for songs and cheers for other institutions, which produced a fruitful variety of parodies, far more good ones than I have room for this week. As I often do, I’ll post some ink-robbery victims in the Style Invitational Devotees Facebook group over the next week or so; you can search for #parodies.

Thanks to some Losers who are musically talented and/or technically savvy, this week’s online results include three entertaining videos, all of which supply the lyrics in subtitles. It’s the first ink above the fold for rookie Marty Gold — who plays clarinet in the Army Band but here just sings — and his video parody of “Maria” (“Commanders, we’ve rebranded as the commanders …”), which scored second place and the lovely turkey socks.

Baltimorean Jonathan Jensen once again served up a fine video effort, featuring himself three times over as he offers his solution for Washington fans: Look north. Craig Dykstra offers lots of animation in a parody of “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” to express disgust with the team for which he’s been a longtime season ticket holder.

But really, Craig’s funnier effort was a one-minute video that I didn’t think I should run, because of a slur, even though it was said in jest. It’s about the team name (and other regrettable aspects), in which Craig affects a Jimmy Durante voice to footage of a “Flintstones” cartoon. It’s very funny. I just wish he hadn’t used that last line.