MY FUNNY VALENTINE WITH JOHN PHILIPP

It's my pleasure to have award winning humorist, John Philipp, visiting with us Over Coffee. He is one of the authors—some of the funniest writers in America: the people who win humor contests, syndicate columns, appear on comedy stages, create the jokes on TV—of My Funny Valentine. I had a chance to chat with him about his writing and My Funny Valentine. 

Share a bit about John Philipp with us. You’re originally from the east coast, aren't you? Did California’s sunshine blue skies and temperate weather lure you to the west?

 
I was born outside New York. Lived there for 20 years and then Cambridge, Mass for about the same time. Like all red-bloodied American men I was lured to California by Annette Funicello and everyone named Bambi. Also my boss made me go.

Ironically, I met a "Bambi" and married her but she would never let me call her that.

Among other things, you’re a humor columnist. How did that come about? Did you wake up one day and say, hmm, I like making people think and chuckle; I think I’ll start writing humor?

Seriously, I wrote humor because I wasn't good enough to write fiction — and not patient enough to learn how. Humor has a quite payoff. You tell a joke and people laugh or don't. With a short story, first you have to get it accepted. In those days, editors frowned on simultaneous submissions. So you'd send a story in, wait four months, get a form letter rejection, and send it somewhere else. If you persisted, eventually you'd sell it 12 years later. I was never much for delayed gratification.

Who were some of the humor writers that influenced you and how?

I love almost all humor. My first steady humor exposure was to Art Buchwald. We got the NY Herald Tribune at home, and my dad thought Buchwald was hysterical. Perhaps that's one reason I valued humor. This could be a story about a young boy who learns to write humor so his dad will love him but I discovered at age two that my dad did love me so I didn't start writing humor for another quarter century.

I know you’re very good with writing satire and humor and you’ve won awards for it. I also know that writing humor isn't as easy to write, as people would assume. Do you keep a notebook to jot down ideas to develop later?

I do. Articles in the newspaper, something in a cartoon, something someone says in the locker room, I get ideas all day long. Some ideas get developed during the day, usually when I'm in the steam room because that where my muse hangs out (A column about that is coming out shortly — as soon as her lawyer okays it.   

Typically, how long does it take you to put together a humor column?

I have no idea. Most often a short paragraph of a concept gets typed into a file. Maybe a week or a month later I'm going through my pile and I see that and write more. Or, I hear something that fits that topic and I dig out the file and add it.

Other times, like in the steam room, I play with an idea and organize it in my head, go home sit down and an hour later the complete first draft is done.

Not only do you write a humor column for a newspaper, but you also write one for a social media site-Gather. How long have you been doing that?

I've been writing for Gather for four years. Mostly I posted copies of columns I had already written but I did write some just for gather, including some of the "How to Write Humor" articles you included here once.


Yes,  you did a 5 part series on writing humor, in June of 2009. I'll link the the introductory article. At the end of the article are links to all of the articles in the series.

You also write fiction. Is it also comedic? Would you care to tell us a bit about it?

 
Usually my fiction is semi-serious, often with a surprising ending. But I just finished the first draft of a novel involving four generations, Jews in Europe during the war, a 13-year-old girl molested by her uncle, etc. Not much humor there except for her teddy bear, Monsieur Flaubert, who she talks to and I use as a device to get inside a young girl's mind.

True story. I read an article about survivor guilt and decided to write a story about a guy who fakes a heart attack to escape a hostage situation and then a bomb explodes and everyone else dies. He wrestles with, in this case, deserved survivor guilt and eventually gives himself a real heart attack — think "Crime and Punishment."
I started writing the story last week. The man is on his way to the bank. He's mad at his wife who doesn't appreciate his hypochondria and he starts fantasying leaving her and she's on her knees begging him back and pretty soon I had this sad, funny character on his way to an adventure.

So, the story will be humorous. And when it's out of the way, I will go back and write the serious, tragic one.

Available print and e-book
Amazon, Barnes and Noble

 

My Funny Valentine is not your typical Valentine’s Day stories. How did you become a part of this project?

One of the other humorists told me about it. It was fun. It was the "Book of the Day" on the Kindle site yesterday. They've started another one about funny car stories. I'll probably submit to that for the fun of it. It's primarily a marketing vehicle for the writers in it and it gets you an "Author page" on Amazon.

What is the title of your contribution to this book?

Don't Surprise Your Valentine. Surprising your sweetheart with a non-traditional valentine's gift is the leading cause in the United States of mid-February ER visits.

Any lessons you've learned, as a writer, you’d like to share with us?

Read voraciously, especially the type of writing you want to do. Some of it will stick on you and it improves your "ear." You read something you write and you can tell whether that rings true or not.

Write as much as you can, as often as you can, you don't have to do anything with that writing if you don't want to. But you will get better. Someone recently said that mastery of anything is doing it 10,000 times. Get started.

Be part of a writing group — you are blind to your mistakes and will often miss your own brilliance. I have found that learning how to critique others is the best training for learning how to write better myself.  

John, thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to chat with us. 

~*~*~*~

John Philipp is a weekly humor columnist for four Marin County, California newspapers and has won numerous humor and memoir writing awards. His humor columns are posted at Gather. His wisdom (with Phil Frank's cartoons) is posted at Thought~Bytes http://thoughtbytes.gather.com/ 

You can also find John on Facebook, where he offers Daily Ponder and Thought Bytes.

Negotiating with God (Humor)

~John Philipp~

It is a new year and time to get down to business. Normally at the beginning of each year I review the previous 12 months to see what I might improve upon. This year, I decided to review my entire life and I discovered a disquieting fact.

Looking back, I’m sure I made more than one deal with God, especially during my hypochondriac phase that lasted several decades and, while not cured, is currently in semi-retirement. Generally the deal took the form of “I’ll do X if You’ll let me live to be this old.”

Now I am this old and I find I'm not ready to go. Not quite yet. I still have things to do. The leaves need to be raked, I promised I’d fix the leaky faucet and I still haven’t learned conversational Lithuanian.

My last serious negotiation with God was conducted either at my confirmation or perhaps in my name by my parents when I was baptized — also known as contracting by proxy. But those negotiations were made in the context of how I understood God and the world. Things are different now, the world is different now and it’s time to update those contracts.

My first questions were: Do I need an agent to negotiate with God? Will my literary agent take this on? Could it be a whole new “genre” for him? I mentioned this to my agent. He told me that unless God has his own section at Borders, he doesn’t have the time.

Making a contract with God isn’t the same as making a contract with the devil. When you contract with the devil you are contracting for your afterlife. When you contract with God, you are contracting for this life — how long it lasts and the quality thereof.

Contracts with the devil are always suspect. The devil appears to you as a nice, regular guy with a hell of a deal (pardon the play on words) like “sign here and you will become a best-selling author” or “you will become rich” or “you will never suffer the heartbreak of psoriasis.”

There is always a catch when you deal with the devil. Once you have achieved your dream, he takes your immortal soul and, in hindsight, ten years on the New York Times best-seller list seems a high price to pay for an eternity of hellfire, which I have on good authority is a lot worse than psoriasis.

With God, you ask for a favor. In exchange, you promise to do something such as go to church every Sunday — even if the playoffs are on, always take out the garbage or stop hitting your sister on the head. If you renege on your promise to God, you won’t burn for eternity but you might get a “time out” in purgatory. At minimum, you will not get a cloud in heaven with a great view.

The contracts I made with God were specific: let me live until this age, or make sure this pain in my stomach isn’t cancer or tell Mary Sue to like me and I’ll never swear again, or I will always do my homework before turning on the television or I will stop doing that thing my mother says will cost me my eyesight.

Most of those promises had a life expectancy of a New Year’s resolution made with a lampshade on my head.

Given my checkered performance, it seems logical that when God has a chance to catch up on his paperwork, he might simply lift my life-extension guarantee and tell Saint Peter to expect a new guest.

So I prayed that God would give me a list to remind me of what I had promised to do and what we might work out as a settlement — one that requires I hang around here for a while to fulfill. I’m waiting for an answer.

If you break a contract with God, you’ll get no sympathy from your friends and relatives. Whereas, if you can figure out a way to break a contract with the devil, everyone is impressed with how clever you were to outwit Satan on his own court.

Your choice.

However you decide, good luck and have a Happy and Prosperous New Year.

~*~*~*~

John Philipp is a weekly humor columnist for four Marin County, California newspapers and has won numerous humor and memoir writing awards.

His humor columns are posted at http://johnphilipphumor.gather.com/

The Razor's Edge

John Philipp loves my coffee so much, here at Over Coffee, he's willing to come and drink my coffee and make us laugh this morning. Grab a cuppa and something to munch and have a *set* and enjoy his *philosophizing*.

Razors were once touted as an example of American business innovation. Shaving was hard and dangerous. As a result, a lot of men wore beards. Then the safety razor was invented and practically given away(gasp!). It was only later that people understood the Machiavellian motive behind this bold marketing move. You got it, now whatcha gonna do with it? Buy our blades of course.

• NOTE: The term "safety" in safety razor is used to indicate that because most of the business end of the blade is nestled inside the razor, you can't slit your throat accidentally as you could with a straight razor. You can still nick yourself until you look like the "before" picture in a Clearasil ad but it's unlikely you'll bleed out.

The safety razor was introduced at a time when the American economy was unsaturated, which means that people had more money than there were products they wanted to buy. (From time to time I invent terms to make a point. This is one of those times.)

This was also a period when a man named King Gillette owned the Gillette Company outright. As the company grew it went public and hired professional managers.

When managers who are not owners run companies, several things happen. One, the managers develop a nasty rash because they know they can be fired on the whim of the board. Two, because a chronic rash wreaks havoc with a manager's social life, he avoids the rash by doing everything he can to make profits improve every quarter.

Television caused the American economy to become saturated. Some economists think it was billboard advertising but they forget that you have to drive by a billboard for it to have any impact. A television set just sits in your living room, daring you to turn it.

Steady revenue and profit growth is no problem in an unsaturated economy. When the economy becomes saturated — when there are more things to buy than money to buy them with — American business managers are forced to adopt new strategies.

One thing managers do is improve the product. Often this is accomplished by altering customer perception, such as changing the color of the product and adding the word "Improved" to the packaging. When that wears off another cosmetic change adds the words "New & Improved."

The second tactic businesses use to maintain growth is to hound its customers by increasing advertising. An ad will show sad people with the "old" product and happy people with the "new" product. The consumer, always wanting to be in the happy group, rushes out to buy the new product.

Back to the razor story: Gillette made a fortune selling blades. One day some still-wet-behind-the-ears MBA who didn't know any better asked why the company couldn't make a profit on its razors as well. Foreheads slaps all around the boardroom.

With the concept of a razor that actually makes a profit firmly in mind, Gillette's corporate research department rose to the challenge and created a new razor. How to get consumers to buy a new razor? Simple. Create a new and improved razor blade, say one in a cartridge that requires a new razor to hold it. No one is sure to this day why a cartridge blade is any better than the old blade, but there it was on television every day, being used by happy people, and the American consumer just had to have one.

This set the stage for a decade of continual cartridge improvement, adding an additional blade each time. Of course, each new cartridge needed a new razor. Corporate profits were off the charts to which companies responded by buying bigger charts.

But the managers got greedy. They forgot that too many improvements could come back and bite them in the butt. While each extra blade added marginally more cutting surface, it also created a place for cut hairs to congregate, clogged the blades and thereby diminished the effective cutting surface. The net out is that the new five-bladed razors are worse than the old safety razors.

When they add the sixth blade I believe beards will come back in style.

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John Philipp is a weekly humor columnist for four Marin County, California newspapers and has won numerous humor and memoir writing awards. His humor columns are posted at http://johnphilipphumor.gather.com/humor.gather.com/.His wisdom (with Phil Prank's cartoons) is posted at Thought~Bytes http://thoughtbytes.gather.com/

Dear Mr. Manly ...

After the stress and fun of the holiday and the horrors of Black Friday, I thought a bit of laughter would be in order. I can't think of a better person to tickle the funny bone and create laughter, than John Philipp.

Everyone has problems. It's part of the human condition. Life is not designed to be fair (why is another column). So, we do our best to cope with life and yet, as with many other endeavors, we run into a double standard.

Women are inundated with advice to help them resolve their problems, even problems they didn't know they had. Entire wings of bookstores are dedicated to female "help" books that cover all possible past, present and future problems a woman might have. There are support groups for everything from recent breakups to body size and every newspaper has an advice column, occasionally written by a man but always with a female bias and byline.

Men not only have no male self-esteem section in the bookstore, they have no books. Men have no support groups unless you count sports bars, which only help a man by causing him to forget his problems temporarily. Most important, men have no one to write to for advice.

As a result, men are perpetual faux-pas machines, blindly stumbling through life, hopping from embarrassment to embarrassment. Women are no help here. They just comment "There he goes again," reinforcing the stereotype of the incompetent male.

The fact of the matter is that there are win-win solutions to most male problems, or at least solutions where the man walks away less damaged than he would be normally.

Today we offer a new advice column, hosted by, Mr. Oliver Manly, and targeted at today's muddling male.

Dear Mr. Oliver Manly: My wife always invites relatives over when there are really good sports games scheduled. Then
she gets upset when I turn on ESPN. I feel I'm in a lose-lose situation: I don't like her relatives and I don't want to miss my games. One year she even hid the remote. I need advice. I'd hate to move out.

Blacked Out in Baltimore

Dear Blacked Out:

Women don't understand the importance of regular sports viewing to today's modern male. Find a sympathetic doctor and get a "sports prescription." Have him include words like "increased testosterone" and "sustained foreplay ability" on the scrip.

If that doesn't work, wear a Bluetooth earplug. Your grandfather listened to sports. You can too.

Dear MOM: Now that we have three kids my wife wants to redecorate our game room so it can double as a guest room. The problem is she wants to replace my Wall-O-Beer —constructed of cans representing every different brand of beer I ever drank — with a large oil painting of some farmer's field and two sconces (whatever they are).

I'm willing to walk away from the foosball table but the Wall-O-Beer is my life's work.

— Dry in Des Moines

Dear Dry:

If beer is your life's work you need to get another life. Seriously, keep the Wall-O-Beer and cover it with tapestry draw curtains. As a sales clincher, let her "chance" upon you sitting in the dark in front of the Wall sniffling (there are audio tapes available for this purpose).

P.S. Take a photo off the Wall ASAP. Sometimes mementoes that lie in the way of decorative progress have accidents.

Dear MOM: I'd like you to settle a dispute. My wife complains when I leave the toilet seat in the up position and insists this is a social fo-pa [sic]. First, I don't see what her pa has to do with it and second I'm pretty sure tinkling with the seat down is unhygienic.

--Up or Down In Upper Detroit

Dear Up or Down:

Your wife is trying to be diplomatic in her explanation of the problem, which centers not on proper protocol but on feminine physiology. If this isn't clear, let her draw you a picture.

Women use a more ladylike posture in the powder room. When stumbling into a dark bathroom in the middle of the night, an upset commode can lead to social and physical embarrassment. If that's not clear, here's the straight skinny at your level: No one likes to sleep with a wet behind.

Social Maturity Hint: Once one is old enough to get married it is customary to stop using words like "tinkle."

Mr. Manly is open for your questions.

—###—

John Philipp is a weekly humor columnist for four Marin County, California newspapers and has won numerous humor and memoir writing awards. His humor columns are posted at http://johnphilipphumor.gather.com/humor.gather.com/.His wisdom (with Phil Prank's cartoons) is posted at Thought~Bytes http://thoughtbytes.gather.com/

How To Write Humor--Using Humor Devices Part III

-John Philipp

In a previous article, we discussed Stealing From The Barry Best (July 3rd) But you don't have to steal the joke itself, you can steal the device, the method used by the writer to achieve a desired effect.

When you read humor you should not only enjoy the joke but observe the devices an author uses to achieve his effect.

Here are some examples of humor devices you may be able to use in some article somewhere. (All examples are by Dave Barry unless otherwise noted)

• Make up Absurd Holidays: Dave Barry uses this device all the time to exaggerate a point e.g. "Of course, congress will be unavailable as they will be celebrating National Peat Bog Awareness Month."

• Describe a bad trait of a character, then use a word such as "yet" to indicate you are going to balance this with a good aspect and, instead, describe another bad trait e.g. "(He is) an abrasive mayor who really gets on some people's nerves, yet at the same time strikes other people as a jerk."

• Describe an experience with an absurd analogy e.g. "As an emotional experience, it ranks right behind having a gallstone operation, without anesthetic, performed in a blizzard on the top of a 100-foot tower erected at the North Pole." Jon Carroll

• Use a real name to thinly disguise another real name e.g. "…a large organization that, out of respect for its privacy, I will refer to as "The Episcopal Church" (not its real name). Even though The Episcopal Church pretty much runs Utah, it's trying to keep a low profile during the Olympics."

• Use a descriptor to describe an item and then misuse the same descriptor in a humorous way e.g."…to watch the men's 90-meter ski jump, which gets its name from the fact that a sane person would have to drink a 90-meter-high glass of gin before he would even consider attempting this sport."

• Play "blame the editor e.g."…who have since become the most famous Canadians in world history, surpassing even (EDITOR: Please insert names of some famous Canadians here)."

Another favorite device of Dave Barry's, for those of you who like word puzzles, is to jumble letters in a proper name of person or place e.g. "The letters in 'Marie-Reine Le Gougne' can be rearranged to spell "An eerie groin legume."

• Make a purposeful error, then correct it e.g. "How a Bill Becomes a Law-First the bill secretes a substance that it uses to form a cocoon, and then it … No, sorry. That's how a caterpillar becomes a butterfly. The way a bill becomes a law is: . . ."

• Split words into syllables to make up a funny definition e.g. the word aerobics comes from two Greek words: aero, meaning "ability to," and bics, meaning "withstand tremendous boredom."

• Use the phrase "which, for want of a better term I will call (the obvious)" e.g. "From time to time I receive letters from a certain group of individuals that I will describe, for want of a better term, as 'women'."

Footnotes can also be used as a humor device:
For example, the device I call 'none of your business with a titillating footnote' e.g. "which is truly one of the most fascinating episodes in American history, although it is quite frankly none of your business (1). (Below Barry footnotes: "1) Especially the part about the dwarf goat.")

Then there is always the condescending footnote: "If there's one thing Americans love, it's satire." The footnote reads: "For an example of satire, reread this sentence."

I'll end with one of my Dave Barry favorites. You figure out the device. "There are two major schools of thought on how to pack for traveling. These are known technically as "my school" and "my wife's school."

Now you need some humorous articles on which to try out your new humor observation skills.
****

John Philipp is a weekly humor columnist for four Marin County, California newspapers and has won numerous humor and memoir writing awards. His humor columns are posted at http://johnphilipphumor.gather.com/.His wisdom (with Phil Frank's cartoons) is posted at Thought~Bytes http://thoughtbytes.gather.com/

Writing Humor, Part II - The Art of Exaggeration: Steal from the Barry Best

John Philipp

If you want to write comedy, you have to learn to steal. I don't mean plagiarize; I mean steal, a long-standing, revered (or at least tolerated) technique among comedians.

Of course, you don't lift whole sections of a humorist's work and call it your own. Don't even use their punch lines without giving them credit. But you can analyze their writing and steal devices. If you are going to steal, do as Milton Berle did: steal from the very best.

One of the very best is Dave Barry, one of only two humorists to ever win the coveted Pulitzer Prize (the other was Art Buchwald).

What are Dave's secrets? One is that he's a master of using exaggeration to heighten humor. Consider this passage about the plight of the American male when faced with the 4307 dials and settings on the modern washing machine. (See, I'm using exaggeration as well.)

• "We worry that if we get just one variable wrong, we will find ourselves facing a wrathful spouse, who is holding up a garment that was once a valued brassiere of normal dimensions, but is now suitable only as a sun hat for a small, two-headed squirrel."
  

What makes exaggeration most effective is when you apply it to a real situation - in this case, the known fact that an improper temperature setting can cause some garments to shrink. Then you pick the funniest garment as an example and shrink it to an exaggerated, absurd level.

Dave once told me that after he writes his column he spends days going over every sentence and every word looking for the funniest option. Squirrel was the winner in this case. He asked, "Which is funnier: hamster or gerbil?" I answered, "Gerbil." Dave said, "No, weasel is even funnier. You have to keep stretching.

"The key is to not hold back, the bigger the exaggeration, the funnier the line. Mr. Barry, some examples if you please:

• "Eugene is located in western Oregon, approximately 278 billion miles from anything."



• "I have been a gigantic Rolling Stones fan since approximately the Spanish-American War."



• "If you were to open up a baby's head - and I am not for a moment suggesting that you should - you would find nothing but an enormous drool gland."



• "It is a well-documented fact that guys will not ask for directions. This is a biological thing. This is why it takes several million sperm cells ... to locate a female egg, despite the fact that the egg is, relative to them, the size of Wisconsin."



• "She has enough leftovers to make turkey sandwiches for everybody in Belgium."



• Re: an explicit lingerie outfit: it was "so sheer you could read an appliance warranty through it in an unlit closet."
  

And, you can exaggerate in the other direction, as in, "Gravity is a contributing factor in nearly 73 percent of all accidents involving falling objects."

Another way to use exaggeration is though metaphors and analogies. Again, we can look to Mr. Barry for a graduate course in using these devices. Here are some examples that also incorporate exaggeration for a double-whammy:

• "Our primary living-room sofa looks like a buffalo that has been dead for some time."



• (The singer) "sounded like a water buffalo giving birth over a public address system."



• "Aging faster than a day-old bagel in a hot dumpster."

• A teenaged boy is "basically a walking hormone storm."
  

And, when you find a good exaggerated metaphor, extend it even further:

• "Even as I write these words, there is a spider right outside my house that could serve, all by itself, as our NATO forces. This spider has erected a web that covers most of our property and contains wrapped-up food bundles the size of missing neighborhood dogs."
  

The last point is that when you write comedy you take out all qualifiers. Delete, probably, some people, sometimes and maybe — all those words that weaken the exaggerated position you are taking. These words would be appropriate if you were trying to be realistic. You're not. You're trying to be funny.

(If you want samples to learn from, while Dave stopped writing columns last year, his newspaper, the Miami Herald, reprints his classics every week at Dave Barry Classic Columns )

—###—

John Philipp is a weekly humor columnist for four Marin County, California newspapers and has won numerous humor and memoir writing awards. His humor columns are posted at http://johnphilipphumor.gather.com/.His wisdom (with Phil Frank's cartoons) is posted at Thought~Bytes http://thoughtbytes.gather.com/

HOW TO WRITE A HUMOR COLUMN

John Philipp will be sharing a five part series of articles on writing humor.

John tends to teach by example, as you will see.

However he does touch on several good points: how to find humor, developing a concept, and how to stretch the facts.

I have to admit that I don't invent most of my column topics. I'm lazy; I use the newspaper. A recent front-page story in the San Francisco Chronicle stated, "Consumers cruising the aisles of supermarkets this week will find a new green tea beverage with an astounding claim: Drink it and burn calories. Coca-Cola and Nestlé say consuming three cans a day of their new product, Enviga, will burn 60 to 100 calories." With provocative journalism like this, why bother to invent anything myself?

OK. Armed with the concept that the more you drink the skinnier you get, let your imagination out of its cage, point it at the idea in question and let it run rampant, which is a journalistic term meaning, "Damn the facts! Full Speed ahead!"

All you need to write a humor column is a newspaper, a brain that works slightly better than a sloth's and a couple of tried and trite techniques.

One trick to turn the funny screws on anything is to stretch it to its ultimate limit. So, let's extrapolate — which is different than exfoliate, only in that skin is not involved. In this case, if you can burn 100 calories for every three cans of Enviga you drink, what would happen if you drank more? According to nutritionists (never mind which ones), it takes 3600 calories to make a pound; so drinking 108 cans will burn off another ugly pound of you. Or, in the case of a 180-pound man, drinking 19,440 cans will make him disappear. Those are the boundaries of your column about consumers doing what they do best: consuming. In this case, somewhere between 3 and 19,440 cans of Enviga.

Now, apply your imagination to that scenario. Yes, that very same skill your third-grade teacher told you not to use when doing fractions. Imagine how much 19,440 cans of caffeine-laden soda will speed up our 180-pound man. Maybe the Enviga scenario is a man's ultimate defense against the onslaughts of his wife's PMS. It provides him with everything he needs: the ability to duck quickly and then disappear.

This theory has a few practical downsides, but fortunately for you — the budding columnist humor isn't about downsides. Or practicality.

Another technique you can use is the "side-shuffle." Start with Enviga and imagine how that might be extended to other products. If a soft drink will burn calories, what if I apply that technology to other food groups like fruits, vegetables, nuts, pizza or beer? Why a whole testosterone-infused room of Super Bowl watchers eating Enviga-laced pizza washed down with Envigabeer would disappear before the opening kickoff. The ultimate weapon for football widows.

A question people ask me is, "How do you find time to conduct the extensive background research required for a newspaper column?" Those people are confusing humorism with journalism. A professional humorist might occasionally check a fact on the Internet (especially if the topic has anything to do with pornography), while professional journalists have been known to spend all day and night in a bar to wheedle the true story out of another professional journalist. Each lists the other as a confidential source on their expense account.

I do use Google to check the spelling of proper names. You type the name the way you think it's spelled, like "Gerring," and Google will spit back, "Do you mean Goering?" which, of course, is the proper spelling. This use of the Internet assumes a) I don't already have a funny misspelling of the name and b) that I care.

A final note: Nothing gives a newspaper column the ring of authenticity like an interview with an acknowledged expert. I use an Acme All-Purpose Right-hand Puppet, add a few funny voices I do and type whatever I say with my left hand. Then I Google-up a funny name.

My final advice: write at home. Once I have in mind the pieces of a column, I mull them over while I pace through the rooms of my house. Pacing helps my thinking process and allows me to deduct 87 percent of my house for tax purposes. That and my Chronicle subscription.

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John Philipp is a weekly humor columnist for four Marin County, California newspapers and has won numerous humor and memoir writing awards. His humor columns are posted at http://johnphilipphumor.gather.com/.His wisdom (with Phil Frank's cartoons) is posted at Thought~Bytes http://thoughtbytes.gather.com/

I Am Not A Natural Writer

It is my pleasure to introduce to you, award winning humorist, John Philipp. John writes for several California newspapers and aside from those columns, he also has a thought provoking series called Thought~Bytes.

I asked him if he’d be willing to share some humor writing tips with us Over Coffee. Humor is something used in many genres and takes quite a bit of skill to pull off effectively.

John has graciously agreed to share a series of articles on writing humor. So for the next month, starting Friday, June 19th I will be featuring his articles here on Over Coffee.

John shares some thoughts on writing humor:

I am not a natural writer. I am a natural talker or so I thought until I transcribed a conversation I'd had with someone.

OK, I'm not a natural talker or a natural writer. (I am a natural eater and, while important to waist management, which has little relevance here.) I do consider myself a natural humorist. Taking that as strength, my choices were: do standup or write a humor column. I chose to learn how to write.

I wrote a few columns on topics I thought were funny and discovered I had some faults and was missing some skills. For example, I was not grounded in grammar. I felt one should write a sentence the way it sounds best. Turns out this is not true for a large percentage of readers, especially those in the newspaper business. If I wanted to write my own way I should have opted to do standup, but then there's the queasy stomach thing.

There are two relatively easy fixes to poor grammar — and neither of them is to study a grammar book. Sitting down, reading, and practicing the proper timing and placement of commas in sentences is, I am convinced, one of the top ten punishments in the Lower Kingdom.

I got better at grammar by lurking and reading writing critique websites where people edit and correct each other's writing. That experience also made me a more observant reader, grammarwise.

The second solution to better grammar is a semi-magical person called a copywriter. It is their job to correct your grammar, double check facts, correct proper name spelling and steward the use of capitals. Everything published needs a copy editor, if only because every publisher has a set of standards they follow (such as the AP Stylebook) and I guarantee you that you could spend your whole life studying and still never know when you should use a numeric character versus write out the word.

Spelling was another fault, one that surprised me. Either I've been leading a myopic life or spelling of some common words has changed since I was in grammar school (irony noted). Perhaps changing the spelling of words occurs at the same time when the government takes or gives us hours on the clock. Fortunately, there's an easy, electronic fix for bad spelling.

I found plenty of other faults that with practice and a damn good checklist I have pruned down to an acceptable level of occurrence.

The topic of missing skills was harder to overcome...

June 19th: How to Write a Humor Column.
June 26th: Writing Humor—Random Association Part I
July 3rd: Writing Humor—The Art of Exaggeration Part II
July 10th: Writing Humor—Part III

July 17th: How To sprinkle Your Articles (Writing) With Humor

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John Philipp is a weekly humor columnist for four Marin County, California newspapers and has won numerous humor and memoir writing awards. His humor columns are posted at http://johnphilipphumor.gather.com/.
His wisdom (with Phil Frank's cartoons) is posted at Thought~Bytes http://thoughtbytes.gather.com/