How to Handle a Failed Joke

For whatever reason I was never a huge SCTV fan. I recognize it was great, but it just never lodged in my brain the way Monty Python, Saturday Night Live, The Kids in the Hall, Bob and Ray, and Mitchell and Webb did.

There’s only one SCTV sketch I can remember clearly. I’ve embedded it below. I’m about to spoil it, so you might want to watch it if you have 10 minutes. If you don’t, or you’ve seen it, or you just don’t care, read on.

Anyway, it’s about O. Henry. In it he wrote a short story with one of his characteristic surprise endings, in this case the hero is in a bar, planning to kill himself. He decides not to, then a lion walks into the bar and kills him. O. Henry’s friends all make fun of him and his terrible ending. In his despair, he goes to a bar, gets drunk, considers killing himself, decides not to, and a lion walks in and kills him. His last words are “A lion! They do come into bars, I was right!”

Since I’ve become a fiction writer, I often come up with something based on what I’m sure is a common occurrence that everyone can relate to, but then self-doubt creeps in. I wonder if I’m the only one who’s had that experience. I remember O. Henry and want to say out loud, “A lion! They do come into bars, I was right!”

For Missy’s sake, I usually don’t.

Usually.

True love is not blurting out lines from sketches your spouse hasn’t seen every time they pop into your mind.

Thankfully, true love is also putting up with it when your spouse does occasionally blurt out the punchlines to sketches you’ve never seen.

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How to Find Out the Name of a Person You've Known a Long Time

At first glance the word “titles” in the first panel looked like “titties” to me. It jumped right off the page, for some reason. I prefer not to think to hard about the psychology of it, but this is a phenomenon I could have used for marketing purposes – I could have loaded my comics with words that looked like dirty words. Sure, readers would be disappointed to find it was about a trip to Virginia, but by then they’d have read the whole thing.

A long time ago Missy and I were both involved with a live show in the Seattle that involved prep work, and watching previous shows on video. As such, we had a videotape that pretty much lived on the TV stand labeled with the show’s name, “Twisted Flicks.”

One day my mother came to visit, and as we sat in the living room talking I noticed that her eyes kept darting over to the videotape. The label on the spine was hand-written, and in all caps.

“TWISTED FLICKS.”

For the first time, I noticed that the L and the I were slightly too close together.

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How to Give Your Opinion

Some things are so terrible that they must exist.

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How to Encourage a Friend to get a Prostate Exam

A doctor did once tell me that if nothing else kills a man, eventually prostate cancer will. I understand what he was trying to say, but logically that’s true of anything that can kill you. If nothing else kills you, something finally will. Even if you live for eons, virtually immortal, eventually the one thing that can kill you will happen. It may be by accident, a deliberate act of an enemy, or self-inflicted after countless centuries of boredom and ennui. One way or the other, the one thing that can kill you will kill you. It’s destiny.

Just a cheery thought to liven up your day.

The idea of punishing a doctor by making him give you prostate exams reminded me of this clip from an old Magnum PI. I only ever saw this episode once, when I was a child, but I remembered it perfectly. This is what my brain retains instead of people’s names.

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How to Share a Great Discovery

This comic is based directly on something my father did.

Shortly after I got engaged to Missy, Dad noted that she had an Irish sounding last name. His wife was of Irish decent. Dad smiled and asked, “Do you find that Irish women are really argumentative?”

His wife started yelling at him, “Don’t you start that again. We Irish women are not argumentative!” She went on quite a while. Dad just smiled the entire time.

They were married for many years. Notice I didn’t say “happily married,” just “married.”

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How to Tell the Difference Between a Metaphor, a Simile, and an Analogy

I wrote this comic in an attempt to teach myself the difference between a simile, a metaphor, and an analogy. It worked, as long as I read it again to remind myself on a regular basis. So, really, it didn’t work.

In one of my books I wrote, “I have no use for similes or metaphors. Similes are a smokescreen. Metaphors are like camouflage paint, designed to make one thing look like something else.”

It made my editor laugh out loud. I suspect she’s the only one.

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How to Join a Team

The bottom balloon of panel three sums up both American political parties’ attitudes about the other party.

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How to Succeed on Your Own Terms

My understanding is that the Myers-Briggs personality test has been thoroughly discredited. Even though the test may not work as originally intended, I think administering it still has merit as a way to measure either gullibility, or the subject’s willingness to go along with something they think is pointless in hopes of not rocking the boat. Either way, that’s valuable information to highly paid business consultants, the very people who often still use the test.

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How to Handle Being "Thrown Under the Bus"

People still say “I didn’t come here to make friends” on reality shows. Heck, on Ink Master someone says it almost every week. They have a right to be a jerk, but at least they could be original about it.

That’s my main problem with reality TV. One of the chief reasons the genre took off was that writers, actors, and set designers cost money. Even a modest hour-long TV show costs something like a million dollars per episode too produce. Ideally, reality TV doesn’t need writers, actors, or set designers. Pointing a camera at people doing something interesting is cheap.

But in time reality got boring,  so they started trying to “improve” on reality, which required the “real people” to think up interesting situations then “sell” those situations on camera; activities that are usually called “writing,” and “acting.” And a lot of the shows feature people renovating and decorating houses, AKA “designing the set.”

So now, when you watch a reality show, you usually get formulaic, unimaginative fiction, performed by amateurs.

If you think I’m being overly harsh, go watch HGTV. Odds are, you’ll see two people overacting to a “problem” they solve five seconds after the commercial break, then proudly unveiling their innovative kitchen design, featuring subway tiles and white shaker cabinets.

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How to Turn to Your Friends for Advice

I’ve always suspected that if a woman went back to a guy’s place and found a round bed with mirrors on the ceiling, she would consider it an instant deal breaker.

Conversely, I think if a man when back to a woman’s place and found a round bed and ceiling mirrors, he’d be cool with it. To be fair, most guys could find a bare concrete floor and a stolen park bench as the only furniture and they’d be cool with it.

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