After my article about industrial products that needed one more iteration to get things right -- like WD-39 or SixUp, the um, cola -- appeared in McSweeney's, I wrote a sequel of sorts involving book titles. (Long after I wrote the piece, which appears on RejectPile.com), I found someone else had come up with a similar idea on McSweeney's but with different, and fewer, jokes, years before I became a regular reader of that site.) 


You can check out the article here. But here are some additional titles that ddn't make the cut but that I liked anyway:

• 99 Years of Solitude
  
• Valley of the Doll
• Six Years in Tibet
  
• 1983
• The Six Habits of Mildly Effective People
• Where the Wild Thing Is
• The Second Man
• And Then There Was None
  

Here are some offered by my friend William Vodrey:

• Moby-Richard
  
• The Pretty Good Gatsby
• As I Lay Mildly Constipated
• The Satanic Limericks
  

To all my follower(s), let me know if you have suggestions of your own.

What do you give a British royal princess? I thought a nickname might be a good idea -- since she has everything else and her name, HRH Charlotte Elizabeth Diana of Cambridge, is rather a long one.

The origin of this article actually came from another piece I had written, that had been rejected, that looked at royals and fast fast food joints. It's not just Burger King, Dairy Queen, and White Castle -- there are about a dozen restaurants with a royal connection despite the fact that one does not usually associate burgers and fast food with royalty.

Meanwhile, while my piece looked at nicknames that should not be conferred onto the princess, an alert friend, William Vodrey, found this: Titles You Would Not Want If You Were a King or Queen.

Their suggestions were pretty funny; but it's interesting, once again, to see different takes on a similar premise. What makes me feel a bit better is that that's from a message board, written by members of th Straight Dope, which has been going for almost five years now. Not that it's a competition, but I had far less time to turn this around.

Sometimes the way to improve a piece isn't by adding jokes to it but by deleting them. Even jokes I really like sometimes don't belong. I wrote an article last week that had more than two dozen jokes in it but it wasn't that good. Two people who read it didn't think the piece was funny enough. So I went back in, cut out a lot, and brought it to about 15 jokes. I submitted it, and the editor of the outlet cut a couple more, and now it's a much better piece.

I  mention this because I read an article in the New York Times that profiled David Javerbaum, a former "Daily Show" writer and the author of "An Act of God," a Broadway show based on a series of tweets.

You can hate him all you want because of that but he said something that makes sense to me:

“I have no problem whatsoever with cutting jokes of mine,” he said. “Being at ‘The Daily Show’ for 11 years, having my jokes killed by the thousands, and killing other people’s jokes by the thousands, after a while you realize it’s fine, there’s another one out there.”


I read that at a time (last week) when I had trouble with another piece I was working on. After reading those lines about needing to kill jokes, I killed a bunch of jokes that I liked but weren't working for me. After the cuts, the piece read much better. I haven't heard back if the editor of a different publication will run the piece but subtracting jokes improved the piece.

I'm writing about it to remember to keep that lesson in mind. 

“We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

-        Thomas Jefferson

“This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or exercise their revolutionary right to overthrow it.”

-        Abraham Lincoln

“We gain strength and courage and confidence by each experience in which we really stop to look fear in the face…we must do that which we think we cannot.”

-        Eleanor Roosevelt

“Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future.”

-        John F. Kennedy

“Each generation goes further than the generation preceding it because it stands on the shoulder of that generation. You will have opportunities beyond anything we’ve ever known.”

-        Ronald Reagan

“Those haters out there, they don’t understand that it invigorates me, it wants me to get out there and defend the innocent. It makes me want to work so hard for justice in this country. So, hey the more they’re pouring on, the more I’m going to bug the crap out of them by being out there with a voice, with the message, hopefully running for office in the future, too.”

-        Sarah Palin

#  #  #

These days, online humor articles are all about the concept. 

That's especially true for McSweeney's Internet Tendency's list column. 

I wrote an article called "Things That Needed One More Iteration Before They Were Ready to Go to Market. It's available here.

After my friend, Noako, read the article on McSweeney's, she came up with a few musical- and TV-show-oriented items that needed just one more iteration:

• U1
• Jackson 4
• The Three Tops
• The B-51s
• Maroon 4
• 9cc
• .37 Special
• 9,999 Maniacs
• "Working Nine to Four"
• 1 Live Crew
• Ben Folds Four
• Two Dog Night
• Thompson Siblings
• Two Days Ago
• Ruby Monday
• Dave Clark 4
• Two Dogs Night
• UB39
• "Hawaii 4-0" theme song
• The Five Million-Dollar Man
• The Two Stooges
• Spice Girl
• Beach Boy
  
  

Here are some contributed by another friend, Peggy. These are great, so I hope you enjoy!

• 7 O'Clock Coffee
• 10:59 News
• Colt 44
• 20-Gun Salute
• "Adam-11"
• MI-4
• James Bond, 006
• Control Agents 85 and 98
• 13 karat gold
• 100 Dalmations
• Baskin Robins' 30 Flavors
• "49 Ways to Leave Your Lover"
• Vicks43
• 10W-39
• 999 Island Dressing
• Singlemint Gum
• Spirit of '75

With the advent of email, we saw long-form jokes that were circulated among friends. I remember getting jokes via email that were several paragraphs long. We seemed to have a lot of time on our hands, back in the '90s.

Those jokes don't cut it in the age of Twitter.

But over the past few years, there's a new narrative device: Lists.  Sometimes, instead of referring to the dated "blogosphere," I refer to the "Listophere" because some many things are written up as lists. It certainly makes sense to tell jokes via lists.

Here are top five things I've learned (so far) about telling jokes as lists.

1. It's all about the concept. And then you need to have a great headline. For sites like McSweeney's Internet Tendency's lists, it's important to set up the joke/concept in the headline, clearly and concisely. By the way, having a clear concept isn't the only hurdle, but if you don't have that, you're lost. A good place to get ideas for what works as headlines would be to check out native ads, which often raise the stakes for readers: "You won't believe what's in your food", "(Fill-in number) signs your (addiction, whatever that is, like clickbait) addiction is out of control"; or "This (fill-in-the-blank) will leave you speechless."
2. It's also about the visuals. You can have a terrific concept but if you don't have the visuals to accompany the joke, you won't get on Buzzfeed or other sites. Make sure you edit the artwork to be a consistent size and format. Adding graphics to your piece definitely changes the pacing of the joke, and as a writer, can take time to get used to. In fact, it can just take time. Even when I had a good sense of the graphics to accompany a fairly simple list with a complicated title (BuzzFeed's Community: 
   "20 Days That Either Served, Shouldn’t Have Served Or Should Never Serve As A Major Plot Point In A Hollywood Movie") posting and finalizing the graphics took an hour longer than planned. 
3. The length of the captions for lists depends on the site. Some sites, like Buzzfeed, generally limit the accompanying text to one sentence. Other sites like TopTenz often have a couple of paragraphs accompanying the graphic. If you're targeting a specific site, follow its style in terms of tone, approach and length. If you're writing for your own blog, consider which works best for you.
4. The number of items in your list depends on the site. Not surprisingly, sites like TopTenz want lists with 10 items. McSweeney's, BuzzFeed and others have no strict limit to the number of items in the list. But odd numbers like 5 or 7, or even numbers like 10, 15 or 20, work well when you're developing a numbered list. (Please note: not every list has to be numbered.)
5. The most important items in your list are the first and the last item. The first ensures readers get the joke. The last one should be the funny but with some unexpected twist or surprise to give the piece a sense of closure.

This list isn't intended to be comprehensive or funny. I've written a couple of (what I think are) funny lists, and expect one to appear shortly in McSweeney's. (The article has been accepted; I just don't know when it will appear.) I decided that since funny lists-with-graphics is a "thing," I would try it. I don't necessarily think graphically, which is why I tried 
"20 Days That Either Served, Shouldn’t Have Served Or Should Never Serve As A Major Plot Point In A Hollywood Movie" on BuzzFeed. 

I know, I know -- the headline is neither as clear or succinct as I would like it. Basically, it's a movie lover's list of movies based on days or holiday observances -- some of which are great movies, some of which are terrible movies (and shouldn't have been made) and some of the days don't lend themselves to being made into movies, ever, and I hope Hollywood never tries to turn Tax Day into a movie.  (Perhaps it would be a good slasher movie, if Grover Norquist or Rand Paul got to it. ) Or tries again to turn Earth Day into one. (As for the equal-opportunity joke against Democrats, Al Gore already turned Earth Day into a documentary, which was stiff, a bit dry, and not followed by a sequel.)

Let me know if you have other suggestions for making joke lists work.